(From The Bergen Record, June 1, 2010)
By LESLIE BRODY
Governor Christie threw out the school reform blueprint endorsed by the state’s biggest teachers union last week and filed a new bid Tuesday for a high-stakes federal grant known as “Race to the Top.”
Christie said his education commissioner had compromised too much in order to win the union’s blessing for a contest that could bring $400 million to the state. Christie said the new proposal reinstated key elements of earlier plans, such as merit pay for individual teachers, putting job performance over seniority when laying off staff, making it easier to fire poor teachers, and giving bonuses to successful faculty who relocate to failing schools.
The eleventh-hour change came as a shock to officials at the New Jersey Education Association, who said they learned on Tuesday afternoon – the contest deadline – that the governor had changed the application and taken off their signatures of support.
Union leaders and education commissioner Bret Schundler had spent weeks hammering out compromises on the plan, and on Thursday both parties expressed satisfaction that they had come up with a collaborative blueprint. Union buy-in wins points in the stiff competition.
NJEA President Barbara Keshishian reacted “with a mixture of deep disappointment, utter frustration and total outrage” to the news that the application had been rewritten, she said in a release. “The biggest losers in this entire fiasco are the state’s 1.4 million students.”
Christie told reporters Tuesday that he was not involved in the past weeks’ discussions between the union and commissioner Schundler, and that when he learned the details of the compromise on Friday, he told Schundler to spend the holiday weekend restoring principles such as individual merit pay. The union-endorsed plan had focused on school-wide bonuses for schools that made strong gains, and it kept seniority-based job protections.
Christie said he retained faith in his education commissioner and wanted “creative tension” within his staff.
“This is my administration, I’m responsible for it and I make the decisions and I’m happy to hear recommendations anytime that my cabinet officials want to make” them, he said. “But they need to understand, those are recommendations. I take them with real serious consideration but in the end, these are core principles that I’ve been campaigning on since I decided to seek this job.”
Schundler, reached by cellphone, said of the last-minute revision, “We made the decision together.”
“Clearly there are enormous disagreements within the administration on how they want to proceed,” said NJEA spokesman Stephen Wollmer. “That doesn’t engender much confidence among the ranks of teachers.”
The governor stressed that his Race to the Top application reflected President Obama’s push to tie teacher pay and evaluations to student achievement, judged in part by test scores. Christie’s office posted the massive application online for public review after 6 p.m.
In a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Christie noted that the application “recognizes that after a child walks through the school house doors, no single factor influences that student’s academic success more than the quality of his or her teachers. … Special interests that have selfishly thwarted reform should not be permitted to hold good ideas hostage.”
Christie, who has sparred for months with the NJEA, wrote that he wanted to enhance schools’ abilities to measure student learning and use that data to evaluate teachers; merit pay would reward the best teachers and give “adequate teachers” an incentive to improve. Such evaluations would be the basis for tenure, promotions and job retention.
The NJEA has long fought merit pay, saying it undermines teamwork. The union also argues against relying on standardized test scores to judge teachers; it says doing so pushes them to “teach to the test” and penalizes teachers facing challenging kids. The NJEA’s rejection of the first-round Race to the Top application in January was one of several factors that hurt New Jersey’s bid.
Last week’s compromise plan called for a committee of educators that would take a year to formulate fair ways to assess teachers and school leaders using a combination of test scores, written assignments and other measures, with student performance accounting for 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.
Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-merit pay group based in Manhattan, said Christie’s approach has been “ham-handed,” but the state’s application still has a chance for success despite the lack of union sign-on. A number of states, notably Louisiana and Illinois, have submitted proposals that don’t included full union support, he said.
Barone said he had been surprised Schundler had agreed to so many concessions since they seemed at odds with Christie’s agenda. “Why did they feel they needed NJEA support so badly that they shredded their application?” Barone asked. “Now they have a strong application but a lot of collateral damage.”
Frank Belluscio of the New Jersey School Boards Association said the compromise version of the application had “watered down” initiatives like merit pay, plus changes in seniority and tenure rules that his group supported.
The latest version – without NJEA backing — provides stronger support for those concepts and still has a good chance of winning the federal funding, he said. “Early on, Bret Schundler said union support was not integral to the application,” Belluscio said.
Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Y. Oliver and the heads of the Senate and Assembly education committees Tuesday blasted Christie’s “abrupt about-face,” saying it seriously jeopardized New Jersey’s chances of winning the aid. They said Christie was pressured by conservative pundits who criticized the compromise plan.
“The governor has apparently decided that hearing good things about himself over the radio is more valuable than $400 million for our schools,” said Sweeney, D-Gloucester. The compromise application “was crafted in good faith among everyone involved, and now that unity’s been blown up because some talking heads disagreed. If the governor was as thick-skinned as he likes to make people think, he would shrug off the criticism and stand by the team that put together the state’s application.”
By the 4:30 p.m. deadline, 35 states and the District of Columbia had submitted bids. The Obama administration said 10 to 15 winners of a total $3.4 billion will be announced by the end of September.
“This took a lot of hard work and political courage,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a news release to commend applicants. “It required administrators, elected officials, union leaders, teachers, and advocates to work together and embrace a common reform agenda.”
Staff Writers Patricia Alex and Charles Stile contributed to this report. E-mail: brody@northjersey.com