New Jersey’s application to the Feds for a waiver from the strictures of No Child Left Behind includes a wishlist of legislative bills that would ballast the DOE’s reform intentions. The waiver application specifies four changes to State law that “will both strengthen our proposed interventions and will significantly facilitate our work with struggling schools.” Those four are:

1) “Comprehensive educator effectiveness legislation” which would “create a statewide educator evaluation system…, tie tenure to effectiveness, end forced placements and Last-In-First-Out (LIFO), and improve compensation systems.”

2) New charter school legislation that would “expand the number of charter school authorizers (proposed as A 3500), permit private schools to convert to charter schools (already signed), and increase charter school accountability (proposed as A 3356).

3) Passage of the Opportunity Scholarship Act (in one form or another)

4) Passage of the Urban Hope Act, which “would encourage the development of new high-performing schools in the State’s five lowest performing districts.”

Let’s assess the success of passage. The charter school legislation package is kind of a no-brainer. Who doesn’t want more accountability? Who can find one study that shows that a system of a sole authorizer for charter schools – in New Jersey it’s the DOE – is an effective system of governance? The only way we could muck this up is to get mired in the suburban/urban politics of a gratuitous bill, 3852, which would subject each aspiring charter to a community vote. This bill is being pushed hard by Save Our Schools-NJ. Step carefully, legislators.

The Urban Hope Act, sponsored by Sen. Donald Norcross, “permits charter school conversions in five failing districts” and “ permits private entities with approval to build and operate up to two school in five failing districts.” The bill’s language limits conversions to large urban districts where 60% or more kids fail state standardized tests. Applications for conversion must come from the local board of education, a majority of parents in the failing schools, or a majority of teachers in the failing schools. It’s all tightly circumscribed with a neat nod to both parent triggers and teacher power. What’s not to like? My guess: it’ll pass.

But now it gets messy. The “comprehensive effectiveness legislation” – ending LIFO, using student achievement for 50% of a teacher’s evaluation, and changing tenure from lifelong job protection to a conditional assurance based on continued classroom effectiveness – will be a tough sell to NJEA. The union’s own tenure reform proposal is far weaker, and merely adds a fourth “residency” year before the acquisition of tenure. Is there room for compromise? Charles Stile in today’s Record writes, “on the road to education reform, Christie still has one plan for the NJEA: road kill.” So much depends on legislator willingness to take tough action. Their best bet is the bill proposed by Senator Teresa Ruiz (backed by Sen. Sweeney), which strikes a fair and middle ground between the two poles between Stile’s “Governor Smashmouth” and NJEA’s Union Mealymouth.

Then there’s the Opportunity Scholarship Act, which provides corporate-funded scholarships for kids in poor districts to pay for private and parochial schools. In yesterday’s NJ Spotlight John Mooney summed up the bill’s prospects, which he describes “as close as ever to passage…but hung up on the politics and the details:”

The politics hinge largely on the support of Sweeney and Oliver. Sweeney’s allegiance to Norcross, a strong OSA backer, has helped its prospects. But Oliver has said she would only post it if it included certain assurances, such as limits on the number of districts and students affected. Once more than 30 districts were included; the latest version has trimmed that down to just a half-dozen or so.

If legislators can find their Solomon (or Richard Simmons), they’ll gather behind a slimmed-down version of the original legislation. I’ve written previously on the reasons to leave out districts like Lakewood Public Schools, which deprives its largely Black and Latino public school kids of educational services in order to pay for private school special education placements for its Jewish kids in thinly-disguised yeshivas. The original bill allows 25% of the scholarships to go to kids already in private school – that’s too much – and sets eligibility at 250% of the poverty level, which could make half of NJ’s families eligible. Inclusion of districts like Lakewood and overly generous thresholds undermines the bill’s original intent: to offer choice to kids trapped in failing districts.

The NJ DOE legislative agenda is ambitious — but doable — if the Legislature is able to focus on the most meaningful reforms. Ending LIFO, which forces schools to lay off great young teachers and keep less effective ones, is essential, even if it means a trade-off of lowering the percentage of student achievement tied to teacher evaluations. School choice for truly poor kids trapped in drop-out factories is more important than offering spots to districts with political clout. Offering merit pay on a school-wide basis rather than to individual teachers (anathema to NJEA) is a positive first step. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize.