New Jersey Begins to Venture Beyond No Child Left Behind

A decade into the federal law that changed the debate on public schools, the federal No Child Left Behind Act looks like it will be gone well short of its goal that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

President Obama's education secretary Arne Duncan yesterday announced that his department will be granting regulatory waivers to states to get around the 100 percent proficiency goal and other rigid provisions of the NCLB.

In New Jersey, more than half of the public schools don't meet the federal standards now, according to the state. Some predicted a failure rate as high as 80 percent nationwide in the next few years.

But then came Duncan's caveat. To be granted a waiver, states will need to set up their own school oversight systems with some tough requirements concerning student testing, teacher evaluation and school-by-school accountability.

It will require more frequent testing using new national Common Core standards, looking more at student growth than static scores. And it will also require new teacher evaluation systems that that take into account student performance, he said.

A Waiver for New Jersey

With actual guidelines still a few weeks away, New Jersey education officials yesterday wasted little time in saying they would likely apply for the waiver, since this is an approach the Christie administration is already pursuing with its own reforms.

"We need to see what the regulations will look like, but we have been actively considering a waiver," said acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf yesterday. "From the day I got here, I have always thought it made much more sense to have a single, layered accountability system."

And in fact, the administration has quietly begun placing similar rules on some of its largest districts through the leverage of another federal program, the School Improvement Grants (SIG).

Cerf has placed several conditions on the recent grants to low-performing schools in six districts, including Newark, Paterson and Jersey City and Camden. They must revamp their teacher and principal evaluation, institute so-called formative assessments that take place throughout the year, and change other personnel policies that he said hamper improvement.

Several of these conditions are currently under debate in the legislature, but Cerf said he felt the new SIG grants offered a unique chance to press them in districts.

"It is pushing the envelope a little bit," Cerf said yesterday, in describing the conditions. "This is a lever we have to affect change . . . another tool in the toolkit."

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