Several years ago, the state of New Jersey said it couldn't stand by any longer and watch the Jersey City and Paterson school districts doing a lousy job educating their students. In addition to poor student achievement, it was reported that the districts were mismanaged and corrupt. So the state came into Jersey City in 1988 and Paterson in 1991 and took over the districts' operations. It got rid of the school boards, dismissed the superintendents and proposed to do for Jersey City and Paterson what Chapter 11 is supposed to do for a business on the verge of bankruptcy. But obviously turning around a troubled urban school district is a tougher job than New Jersey had bargained for. Now, the state is having to explain why things have not worked out as planned.
According to a story in the New York Times, "Improvement Lags After School Takeovers, State Says" (April 25, 1995), State Education Commissioner Leo Klagholz admits that "academic improvement has not met expectations" in Jersey City and Paterson. But there's a reason: Klagholz says the state has given its main attention to "improving the management of the schools. 'We can't do everything at once,' he said. 'In Jersey City we have cleaned up the personnel problems and gotten rid of the patronage, but while the schools are now well managed, we didn't pay enough attention to the classroom."'
Well, school boards have to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time. They have to be able to negotiate contracts, hire and fire teachers, take care of law suits, employ principals and select textbooks. Being competent to do one or two of these things is not enough. For Klagholz to say that the state has "concentrated" on tightening up school management and now it will pay attention to student achievement is ridiculous. Suppose a management firm took over a failing automobile company and announced, seven years later, that the personnel and payroll systems were finally in good shape and now they would start concentrating on trying to bring the cars up to standard. Raising student achievement was the first and most important job the state took on. It was the major justification for bypassing local school boards. If the state was not prepared to handle that, it should have limited the takeover to the areas where it was competent.
The chairman of the New Jersey Senate Education Committee, John Ewing, is sympathetic to Klagholz and the state's failure to come through on its plans and promises. Ewing's view is that "Those urban districts took a great number of years to go down and it will take years to bring them back." The picture Ewing paints is of school systems that were once terrific. Then, they started going down hill bit by bit. Every year they got a little worse until finally they crashed. Now, we have to go through the same process of building up.
What Ewing doesn't say is that these districts started out serving communities where an overwhelming majority of kids came from two-parent, intact families who had solid jobs. Gradually the population changed and these kids were replaced by children many of whom were living in poverty. The new children often had only one parent or didn't have anybody caring for them. Ewing's picture suggests that the school systems changed because the quality of the teachers and principals and school boards went downhill when the real story is that the districts used to have children who were relatively easy to teach because they came to school without the huge problems that kids in urban school districts face today.
It would be a good thing if states had the capacity to come into troubled urban school districts and set things right. They should develop that capacity. But there is currently no evidence that any state has it. A state's dissatisfaction with a school district, even if justified, does not qualify it to run the district.
Now, people at the New Jersey department of education are talking about taking over the Newark schools. On the basis of their performance in Jersey City and Paterson, they would be well advised to scale back. Perhaps they should consider appointing a financial control board similar to the one that helped pull New York City and Philadelphia out of their problems. But if they insist on going all the way, my advice is that they put the project off until they're sure they can walk and chew gum at the same time.