One of the signs of school district dysfunction is rapid turnover of superintendents and, once again, we turn to Asbury Park, the tiny shore district that illuminates statewide problems. There the school board just appointed its fifth superintendent in the last decade. When systemic degeneration is unaddressed and starts to fester, the rot becomes part of the culture, baked into everything from fiscal governance to professional development to school climate to academic expectations for students. 

We’re in an education rut that is indefensible and unsustainable. Yet it endures. When Gov. Mikie Sherrill says “we can’t keep spending all this money on schools and not getting better results,” she could be talking about Asbury Park, where annual per pupil cost is  $33,000.  But she’s not just talking about Asbury Park.

Not to beat up on this district but it is a useful synecdoche for much that is wrong with New Jersey schools, an emblem of how children’s needs are undermined by a system that tolerates a lack of oversight (fiscal monitors aside), unsustainable costs, and terrible student outcomes.

We can do better than this. 

But let’s stay in Asbury and quickly count those superintendents, then get to the statewide impact. In 2014 the school board hired Lamont Repollet, a principal from Carteret Public Schools. Repollet  ran the district until 2018 when Gov. Phil Murphy appointed him State Education Commissioner. Repollet was replaced by his assistant Sancha Gray, who had come with him from Carteret. She left Asbury in 2021 to follow her boss to his new perch as president of Kean University. 

Then word spread among staff that Repollet had told the Board to pick administrator Rashawn Adams as Gray’s replacement. This did not go over well, given that three other well-regarded internal candidates wanted the position and were more highly-rated according to a survey sent out by the local union.  (See “Asbury Park Teachers Speak Out: ‘This Place Is a Shitshow.’”)

Indeed, after a non-evaluative process (the Board only interviewed one other candidate, an external one who had recently been fired by his board) Adams had the job. Two years ago he was put on “administrative leave” (i.e., he’s still getting paid) for accusations that he violated district policy by using profanity and making misogynistic, racist comments.

From the Asbury Park Press, referring to a report commissioned by the board:

 Adams would frequently use the phrase “these toxic white racist m—“; remarked “can you imagine being a man of color and being married to a white woman” while looking at a picture of an Indian-American legislator and his wife; stated “black kids don’t play tennis” in a discussion regarding the construction/refurbishment of tennis courts; and frequently called women “heifers” and “b—” according to the report.

In February 2024 the Board, after lobbying by the local union, chose Mark Gerbino as its next superintendent, who had come in first on that staff survey. Now he is out – word is his relationship with the union leadership went bad — and the interim superintendent* will be Edwin Ruiz, who, like Sancha Gray, followed Repollet from Carteret. (In Asbury this is called the “Carteret Tree.”) The Board will do a search for a permanent replacement.

Those three other candidates from the survey five years ago, supposedly representing the cream of the crop of Asbury administrators?  One left, one was suspended but is suing the district for “discrimination, harassment, and a hostile work environment,” and Gerbino is on leave until he retires in June. All told, there are eight active lawsuits in Asbury Park. The one from Rashawn Adams claims retaliation for exposing a “pervasive scheme to inflate student grades and falsify records.”

Which brings us back to our state school system. The “pervasive scheme” noted by Adams is a reference to former Asbury Park superintendent and Murphy Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet, who told a Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee he came up with a scheme in Carteret called the 64 Floor, refined it in Asbury Park, and then took it statewide. The Asbury Park version makes it impossible to fail students, regardless of academic growth, behavior, or compliance. Why is such a system necessary, not just in Asbury but throughout the state? Because, Repollet told Senator Declan O’Scanlon at that hearing, teachers “weaponize grades, — it’s “a power thing”, especially for low-income students.  Why, he asked rhetorically, “should we have a district be penalized because their student achievement is lagging behind their other achievement?” That’s not equity, he says, it’s the opposite,  “because, you know, the hardest thing you can do is increase student achievement.” 

And so the students in Asbury Park, most from families too poor to move elsewhere, are victims of this perversion of equity that ascribes low grades to power-hungry teachers and lack of literacy or numeracy, I guess, to misaligned cultural mores. According to last year’s state tests, at Asbury Park 6.7% of fifth graders can read at grade level and 7.7% can do math at grade level. (You have to look at these excel spreadsheets because the School Performance Reports redact any results under 10% and the DOE still hasn’t updated them to reflect last year’s results.)

But New Jersey’s public school system now shines through its equity, even though, statewide, 60% of students can’t do math at grade level and almost half can’t read.

How about high school graduates who take the NJGPA, our diploma- qualifying test? Thirty-nine percent of Asbury Park graduates can pass an algebra 1 test and 66% can pass a 10th grade reading test. So much better than those fifth graders! Why? Because the State Board of Education lowered the score that denotes “proficiency,” another tendril of the 64 Floor that went statewide. After one DOE staff member explained to the board that the lower cut score means  “minimally competent,” a board member worried, “our students are going to go into college or the workplace and find out they’re not ready.”

It’s true. While statewide 81% of students pass the NJGPA reading section and 55% pass the math section, 200,000 NJ college students have to take remedial courses on material they should have learned in high school.

In my edu-bubble, people are talking about the “graduation gap,” which quantifies “the distance between a state’s high school graduation rate and its math proficiency rate.” A new project measures each state’s gap: New Jersey’s is 51 points because our graduation rate is 91% but the percentage of students who can met or exceeded expectations in 10th grade math is 40%.

The system is unfair to students, dishonest to parents, and unsustainable for taxpayers. Gov. Sherrill says we can’t just keep spending this kind of money without better results. What happens next?

*Correction: I originally said Edwin Ruiz was “acting” superintendent but he is an interim replacement. NJER apologizes for the error.