The Jersey City Independent "

The Jersey City school district is approaching one of the most momentous changes in decades, as interim superintendent and longtime district administrator Franklin Walker takes the reins from departing superintendent Charles Epps. The Jersey City Board of Education (BOE) chose the team of West Hudson Associates and HYA and Associates last night as the firm that will seek candidates nationwide to fill the job after Walker’s term ends. Local and state politicians have declared the chance to choose a leader for the city’s public schools, and their 29,000 students, an extraordinary opportunity for reform.

But education reform is one of those catchphrases such as “tax relief” or “war on terror” that sounds less ambiguous than it is. Everyone wants the best interests of schoolchildren, and many feel that schools are not doing enough to help low-achieving children, primarily in high-poverty areas, succeed. But reasonable people differ greatly on what a quality education is and how that can be achieved.

The national drumbeat for “school reform” usually calls for more choice, in the form of voucher programs and more charter schools, and more accountability, in the form of school and teacher evaluation based on student test scores. Recently, Governor Chris Christie and acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf have been pushing four bills that would expand charter schools, offer vouchers for private and parochial schools, privatize failing schools, and evaluate teachers in a large measure on student test scores.

To parents and officials in Jersey City, school reform tends to mean emphasizing transparency and good governance rather than choice and accountability. Locally, reform means getting rid of inefficiencies at the central office, eliminating cronyism, and hiring a superintendent who plays by the new business rules of educational leadership today. Even local parent and vocal “reform” advocate Shelley Skinner, who is deputy director of Better Education for Kids (B4K), an advocacy group for merit pay, tenure reform, and vouchers in select districts, speaks publicly about the need to change “ethically challenged practices” rather than overhaul schools.

“I’m looking for someone who is responsive to parents, gives more flexibility for principals and teachers, and a real house-cleaning” within the board of education, says Felicia Noth, Parent Council head at PS5. Board president Sterling Waterman says he “expects bold and innovative ideas” from any new superintendent, including the interim, and that he personally does not support vouchers, although he “has no problem with charter schools.”

With the departure of Epps, who had been superintendent since 2000, the Jersey City Board of Education gets to pick its own superintendent for the first time since 1989, when the schools came under state control. In 2007, the state returned to the district control of two benchmarks, finances and governance, which covers the firing and hiring of superintendents.

Parent groups and local education professionals in Jersey City, however, have feared for months that the state might still swoop in and appoint a superintendent by fiat. A spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Education reiterated that the hiring choice is entirely in the hands of the Jersey City Board of Education now. Yet in a recent email to BOE president Sterling Waterman, Acting Education Commissioner Cerf chastised him for allegedly mangling the selection of an interim superintendent and took the tone of a corporate manager making the case to fire a subordinate. “It is now abundantly clear to me that this board is not interested in pursuing an agenda of transformational change for the children of Jersey City,” Cerf wrote, after the selection of Walker. (Cerf himself was in fact a private sector manager, as president of Edison Schools, the largest for-profit private manager of public schools, which today functions as EdisonLearning.) He and Waterman met in late December to smooth things over, and Cerf was apologetic, while Waterman made clear that he welcomed state assistance in the national search process.

But the potential tussle with the state over the hiring process has not buried, for the moment, divisions within the Jersey City school board itself, which hews to an old and a new guard. On the current board of nine volunteers, four are new within the last two years, including Waterman. In October, other new board members Carol Lester, Carol Harrison-Arnold and Marvin Adames voted along with Waterman and Sue Mack in favor of the agreement that ended Superintendent Epps’ contract last month. More recently, outgoing board member Sean Connors has publicly derided Waterman and, separately, Ward E Councilman Steve Fulop, through the letters of this paper.

The Board has control over a budget of more than $630 million for the city’s schools, much of which is state money. That amount is $150 million more than the city budget. That leaves a conspicuous job opening on the top of that $630 million pile, which Walker’s appointment fills only temporarily.

“There’s the opportunity to do something very meaningful,” says Fulop. “This is a unique window to attract some real talent.” Fulop has been a driving force behind the recent changes in the Board of Education composition, even as he tries to distance himself from being seen as a kind of ed-board Svengali.

Two years ago, the councilman established a screening committee for Board of Education candidates. The committee vetted candidates for the board and then put forth a slate of three names in 2010 and 2011 who received support from Fulop, in the form of marketing, endorsement, and fund-raising. Both years, those candidates won, with several running as outspoken critics of superintendent Epps.

Now, 15 volunteers are vetting applications from potential Board of Education candidates for the 2012 spring election, to fill at least three seats. The current chairperson is Ellen Simon, who has a young child herself and saw volunteering on the committee as a chance to help the public school system. She and Fulop both emphasize that the group’s choices this year are independent and not beholden to Fulop or his views.

Councilman Fulop is upfront about his own ideas about reform, which align with those of national “education reform” press darlings, such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former Washington DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, and, lately, Chris Christie. He says he is personally a “big believer” in changing teacher tenure policy, charter schools as options, and accountability for school administrations. “If we attract the right person, a proactive progressive voice will be able to attract meaningful private dollars,” he adds.

In June 2010, Fulop co-hosted with Shelley Skinner a lecture at City Hall by Whitney Tilson, a wealthy hedge fund manager and prominent spokesperson for the education reform movement. Tilson told his audience that teacher quality was the single most important aspect of a good education, that to ensure good teachers we should make it easier to fire the bad ones, and that bad teachers could be uncovered through comparing students’ test scores over time.

Today, Fulop, a declared candidate for the 2013 mayoral race, distances himself from Tilson and his ideas. Moreover, he stresses that his personal views are irrelevant to his committee or to his mayoral run, since he is not on the school board. Instead, the councilman says he’d like the city council to interact with the board on issues such as facilities, potentially transforming empty buildings into new schools instead of selling them, and after-school programs.

For their part, vocal parent groups such as Jersey City Coalition of Parent Teacher Organizations (JCCPTO) and Parents and Communities United for Education (PCUE) worried early on that their voices would not be heard in the search for the new superintendent. Their fears that the BOE would not listen were allayed by several public meetings, at which both groups presented their own search criteria. Among the criteria for superintendent candidates listed by JCCPTO were five years experience as a superintendent and commitment to public schools “over initiatives that would undermine them such as charter schools, vouchers, etc.”

Although some parents are agitating for Walker to stay on permanently, the new superintendent is just as likely to come from outside Jersey City. And it is possible that whoever she is will be as young as Newark’s new superintendent Cami Anderson, who is 40, with young children who need to go to school. Like Noth and Waterman and thousands of other parents, she may find herself gaining inside knowledge about the schools by dropping of her child there every day.

“We all agree schools have to be better and have better management,” says Dan Levin, a Cordero parent-teacher-partnership board member and good government advocate. “The most direct influence and stakeholder is the families. To someone not at the schools it doesn’t matter if the superintendent transition is smooth or bumpy—let’s move on. To parents, it is critical.”

The final public meeting on the superintendent search process is Friday, January 20, at PS11 at 6:30 pm.

Photos by Eric Schkrutz

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