Christopher Cerf This school year represents a major turning point for New Jersey’s public schools.
State law required sweeping changes to curriculum standards and the teacher-evaluation system to take effect this month, ahead of a new standardized assessment that will be implemented in the 2014-15 school year.
State Commissioner of Education Christopher Cerf highlighted the importance of the overhaul during his annual convocation, which was hosted by the New Jersey Association of School Administrators at Jackson Liberty High School in Jackson on Sept. 19. The commissioner delivered the address to hundreds of administrators, some of whom have voiced frustrations with the rapid pace of the reforms.
The changes call for schools to base lessons on the Common Core State Standards, which sharply raise the bar for the content taught to students and the rate at which they learn. Administrators will measure how well teachers deliver that material through evaluation models that fall under the AchieveNJ program. The evaluations will occur more often than in the past and take more data into account, Cerf said.
New Jersey Commissioner of Education Christopher Cerf discusses school reforms in front of hundreds of school administrators gathered at Jackson Liberty High School. “Our goal is to make sure that every child, regardless of the circumstances into which she or he was born, graduates from high school, ready to be launched into adulthood prepared for success,” he said.
Right now, that is far from reality in New Jersey, Cerf said.
According to data provided by the state’s 19 community colleges, anywhere from 57 to 92 percent of first-year students were enrolled in remedial courses — material that should be conquered in high school — in 2011. Although the state’s K-12 public schools fare better than many others in the country, poor and minority students scored drastically lower — sometimes by more than 30 points — on recent standardized tests, Cerf added.
“We can’t live in a state where if you’re poor, black or Hispanic, you just don’t get an equal opportunity at life,” he said. “That’s not a state or a nation that we want any of us to live in.”
Officials hope the new state standards and teacher evaluations will turn those bleak figures around, Cerf said. He said schools cannot succeed without defining what success means, and that the new curriculum standards do just that. Also, to place the best teachers in classrooms, school districts need a more in-depth evaluation system, he said.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exam will cap the stream of initiatives next year, when students will be tested on the Common Core State Standards in a more rigorous manner.
But for the boots on the ground — superintendents, curriculum directors and other administrators — the implementation of these plans is not an easy task.
The new standards and AchieveNJ have demanded a great deal of training and work on both the teacher and administrative ends, local school officials said.
Mike Gorman, superintendent of Pemberton Township’s school district, said he had to assign additional staff members to his principals’ offices while they conducted teacher evaluations last year as the district piloted the program. Gorman said he cut the number of meetings that he had with his principals to make time for the observations.
“The biggest issue here is the obligation became the priority,” he said, adding that he told administrators that the matter was “non-negotiable.”
That commitment to the program enabled Pemberton to tackle the matter, and the district’s success should continue this year, Gorman said.
Still, three of Pemberton’s 10 principals retired amid the wave of new regulations, he said. District officials also had to instill trust in the teachers so that they would not perceive the evaluation system as a means to cut their jobs, Gorman added.
The PARCC will be administered to students via computers. That means that local boards of education must buy large numbers of the devices before the 2014-15 school year.
Cerf said his office is trying to keep track of school districts’ progress in obtaining the computers.
“I’ve frankly been impressed with the level of readiness that we have seen in the state, but there are still many districts that are not yet at the finish line,” he said.
The Department of Education has released specifications for hardware, bandwidth and other components to districts, he said. Local districts are expected to treat the mass purchase as a general budget item, but the state offers some aid and grants for technological and operational acquisitions, he said.
Some district officials said they felt burdened by regulations from the state.
“It just feels overwhelming,” said Thomas Baruffi, superintendent of the Linwood and Mainland Regional school districts.
Cerf pointed to several areas where the state has loosened its grip, including the budget-review process. He said the state will soon fall back in other areas, too.
Despite the concerns and the likelihood that there will be bumps in the road, the responsibilities placed on local districts came about in a way that should not have caught anybody off-guard, he said.
“This has not been an overnight decision,” Cerf said. “This has been a process that has been several years in the making.”