Chris Christie—Michelle Rhee to Begin New Era in New Jersey Schools?

 ”Governor Thrusts New Jersey to Fore on Education”, is the title of this piece by Winnie Hu at the N.Y. Times:

“Gov. Chris Christie’s tough-on-schools approach in a state that has zealously protected its public schools — and its teachers — has already put him at loggerheads with legislative leaders, unions and some parents in New Jersey.

And on Tuesday, the governor, a Republican, used his State of the State address to push his education agenda further by calling for an end to teacher tenure, on top of his support for merit pay for teachers based partly on student achievement and adoption of a voucherlike system that would give students in low-performing schools other options.

The proposals are not new; many have been suggested and tried in other school districts and other states. But with Mr. Christie’s growing national stature and his ability to attract news media and political attention through his blunt — and very public — persona, his latest salvo has placed New Jersey center stage in the increasingly rancorous national debate over education.

It also increases pressure on teachers and their unions, which are under criticism nationally as educators, lawmakers and taxpayers try to lower costs and improve results.

Mr. Christie, in the past, has proposed taking tenure away from ineffective teachers. But on Tuesday he called for abolishing it, saying “the time to eliminate teacher tenure is now.”

During an interview at The New York Times on Wednesday, Mr. Christie elaborated on his education proposals, saying he is focusing on teachers because “the most important thing for learning is the quality of the teacher standing in front of the classroom.”

“All the rest of the stuff helps, enhances the process,” he said. “Parental involvement, the atmosphere in the school, the level of technology, all the rest of that enhances it. But if you don’t have a good teacher in front of the classroom, all the rest of that stuff is a sideshow.”

He said it might be possible to achieve change without ending tenure. He said teachers could be given five-year contracts. “And at the end of five years, you know, up or down, are you kept or aren’t you, based on a merit decision,” he said.

Mr. Christie already has fans, both in New Jersey and in education circles across the country. Michelle Rhee, the former Washington schools chancellor, who sat beside Mr. Christie’s wife during Tuesday’s speech in Trenton, has committed her new organization, StudentsFirst, to providing policy support for Mr. Christie’s education initiatives. “I think it’s incredibly courageous of the governor to take these issues on,” Ms. Rhee said Wednesday. “These are ones that have long been considered sacred cows.”

But in seeking to improve student performance and control rising school budgets, particularly in a time when many states face large deficits, Mr. Christie is hardly unique. Nor are his ideas.

Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Brooklyn, said that teacher tenure was being scaled back by lawmakers and education officials as a way to improve teacher quality.

In the past year, Mr. Daly said, Colorado, Oklahoma and Arizona have passed bipartisan legislation that would require teacher layoffs to be decided based primarily on performance, rather than seniority. Other states have also taken steps to tighten tenure requirements or reduce traditional job protections, like increasing probation periods before tenure is granted and expanding the acceptable causes for dismissing or not renewing a teacher’s contract, according to the Education Commission of the States.

Some states have sought to repeal tenure — much as Mr. Christie has — though critics say that in some cases other provisions remain that have an equivalent effect on protecting teachers.

Mr. Christie has also called for more charter schools and adoption of a voucherlike system that would provide scholarships so students in low-performing schools could attend other schools. (The New Jersey scholarships would be financed by private corporations in exchange for tax credits.)

Vouchers have been tried in Cleveland, Milwaukee and Washington, among other places, with mixed success, said James Lytle, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the superintendent of the Trenton public schools from 1998 to 2006.

“There isn’t much evidence that these approaches improve student performance,” said Dr. Lytle, who is concerned that such plans could divert resources from the public schools.

Nevertheless, he said, these kinds of proposals, meant to introduce competition, choice and incentives to improve education performance — something he calls “market models of school reform” — are becoming more popular, attracting the support of the Obama administration and influential groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In New Jersey, as in other states, the teachers and their unions are resisting. “All I can say is that this is very bad education policy, and very bad public policy,” said Steve Baker, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union. Mr. Christie’s proposals to repeal teacher tenure or create a voucherlike system require legislative approval.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the hostility against teacher protections had intensified because of budget pressures. “The governors that are trying to roll back collective bargaining or other kinds of workers’ rights are using their state budget crises as an excuse to do that,” she said.”

Comment:   I worry a bit about this rush to blame school teachers for the financial and academic failures of the urban school districts throughout the country.   One reason is modern leftwing American culture  has corrupted the health of countless numbers of  its school age young  by failing to exterminate  drug culture from its shores.   Perhaps in some schools teachers are totally superfluous to education.   It would be easier to  hire armed police to run drills until the population is ready to be   civilized human beings capable of learning something from a teacher who has learnings to teach.

I have often commented that senior high school teachers are over paid for what they accomplish, but underpaid for what they endure….and that I began to quote over thirty years ago.   American school young should be so lucky these days to have the discipline and subsequent learnings in today’s urban schools  as they young  had in the 1970s.