In Monday’s  blogpost I looked at the NJ’s DOE’s newly-released list of the state’s  57 “Reward Schools,” our highest-performing ones according to state test scores. This list, to be published annually, is part of our No Child Left Behind waiver application, which promises to divide NJ’s public schools into three categories: Priority (the worst, and now the target of higher levels of intervention), Focus (the second worst, which are officially on notice), and Reward (great job! keep it up!). Many schools will be lumped in an undifferentiated category of “you’re doing okay, but nothing to write home about.”

Most of the schools on the list are either in rich neighborhoods or are magnet schools run under the umbrella of vo-tech county schools.

The Record noted on Wednesday that “[m]ost of the schools winning the new designation — which the state Department of Education posted online last week with little fanfare — are in affluent communities or are selective magnet schools, such as the Bergen County Academies in Hackensack and Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro.”

And yesterday Education Law Center put out a press release that charged that these Reward schools “are, for the most part, located in affluent communities or are schools with high achieving students enrolled through selective screening.” Also many of the Reward Schools serve disproportionately low numbers of kids with disabilities and those who are new to English.

All that is true.  Schools with a wealthier enrollment tend to have higher test scores and our “vo-tech” magnet schools, particularly those located in monied counties like Bergen, are more discriminating in admissions criteria than even top-of-the-line private schools. This leads ELC Executive Director David Sciarra to remark that Education Commissioner Chris Cerf is rewarding schools that, by definition, don’t serve low-income kids: “Commissioner Cerf should explain how this recipe for success is relevant to schools serving high concentrations of poor and bilingual students, students with disabilities, and students at risk of academic failure.”

Mr. Sciarra then alleges that Comm. Cerf has “created a perverse accountability regime” by rewarding high-performing schools that don’t offer admission to “low-income and bilingual students and Black and Latino students.”

It’s true: low-income, bilingual, and (many) minority students don’t, for the most part, have access to the 57 Reward Schools in NJ. But that’s not a system created by Comm. Cerf. It’s created by our fragmented infrastructure that adheres to the tenets of home rule. The only way to get your kid into NJ’s top schools is to live within district boundaries or, in the case of vo-tech magnets, live within county boundaries.  That’s the perversion: not the label, but an exclusionary system that bases access on local residency.

Maybe Comm. Cerf has another idea in mind and the  identification of Reward Schools serves a larger purpose. If we raise public awareness of the educational disparity of access, currently dependent on district/county residence, there could be less resistance to increasing access through public school choice, one of Cerf’s priorities. But that’s going to be a hard one for ELC to square.  The organization has consistently fought school choice, particularly charter school expansion. However, one way to overcome the district residence issues, the very “perversion” that ELC points to in its press release, is to establish schools that are open to kids in larger areas, home rule be damned. Can ELC get behind that?