The Times (Trenton, NJ)
July 10, 2011
Headline: Trenton education officials say massive restructuring of failing schools more than just musical chairs

By Matt Fair

TRENTON - When more than 170 teachers in the Trenton Public School system return from summer vacation this fall, it won't just be new students they'll be greeting on the first day. Many will face new grade levels, classrooms, and in some cases, new schools.

The changes are part of an exhaustive and largely government-mandated restructuring of four city schools - P.J. Hill, Columbus, Gregory and Joyce Kilmer - that have repeatedly failed to meet federal testing standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.

While district officials are hoping that the restructuring, which was formally approved by the school board last month, will reinvigorate perennially struggling schools, some worry that, unless coupled with substantive changes to curriculum, the initiative will serve only to take bad teachers out of one school and put them in another.

"Changing the faculty of a school in and of itself is not likely to improve a school," said William Firestone, professor of educational policy at Rutgers University's graduate school of education. "Changing the faculty would only help under a set of special conditions that can't be established by the law itself."

No Child Left Behind requires schools that have failed to meet federal Adequate Yearly Progress standards for more than two years to undertake a different set of reform efforts each year. Under AYP, a certain percentage of students must be proficient in both math and language arts.

In Trenton, both Columbus and Joyce Kilmer have failed to meet AYP for the last five years. Gregory and P.J. Hill, meanwhile, have been out of compliance for two years. Restructuring efforts at those two schools were undertaken as part of an application for a federal School Improvement Grant that would allow extended school days at both institutions. The results of the grant application aren't known yet.

"I'm trying to stop the slide downward of schools that have not made AYP, and I'm capturing them at a point where hopefully we can restructure them so we can increase student performance," said Ray Broach, the district's interim superintendent.

According to Broach, the district submitted its restructuring plan to the New Jersey Department of Education in March.

"By mandate, 50 percent of the teachers and principals in those four schools had to be changed. That meant an extensive, extensive interview process," he said, adding that the district rewrote job descriptions for nearly all positions involved in the restructuring. "We've interviewed between 300 and 400 people (on a voluntary basis) to get where we are now."

However, the process of re-evaluating and reassigning instructors was complicated by state laws related to teacher tenure and bumping rights.

Broach said several different unions representing teachers and paraprofessionals were involved in the restructuring process to make sure that all reassignments were made with full respect given to contractual and legal obligations.

Under state law, teachers who have served more than three years in a district are afforded tenure rights, which make it difficult to remove them from their positions unless extensive documentation of poor performance is gathered and charges are brought against a particular teacher.

It's a process that Broach said the district has historically done poorly.

"That has not been done consistently in Trenton," he said, adding that the district was working with nationally renowned education consultant Charlotte Danielson to help develop new tools to regularly and thoroughly evaluate teacher performance throughout the district.

"I don't want poor teachers continually passed around between buildings," Broach added. "I don't want an administrator to feel that for the past five years someone has been unsatisfactory and now they've got to deal with them."

Even so, experts said that personnel changes alone often aren't enough to improve chronically underperforming schools.

"All the research on educational change suggests that really improving a school depends on having highly skilled, highly committed administrators coupled with changes in the curriculum as well," Firestone said.

Broach said the restructuring is something that Trenton didn't undertake lightly. It's a process that includes top-down changes to curriculum and redesigned professional development workshops to help the district's teachers hone their craft working with some of the state's most troubled students, he said.

"We chose to take this route of restructuring because at the core of student improvement, we needed to deal with three factors: improving student performance, teacher effectiveness and curriculum," Broach said.

"This goes beyond one-time fads and professional development experiences. It's not something thrown together or just a feel-good experience. It has to be deeply rooted in the data and performance of the student in terms of skills that they continuously lack and haven't improved in," he added. "We're looking at the total curriculum, but we're deeply taking a look at language arts and math performance."

It's also a process Broach said isn't going to stop with the four schools currently being restructured. He has said in the past that he is planning to move the district away from current school configurations that put kindergarten through eighth-grade students in the same building in favor of independent middle schools.

Efforts toward that end are expected to start next year at the Grant school, where middle school students will be moved to P.J. Hill. This past year, middle school students at Mott were moved to Hedgepeth-Williams.

"We're looking at all the schools," he said. "It's sort of like stopping the bleeding before it gets worse, and I feel a real renewed enthusiasm and commitment on behalf of teachers, principals, paraprofessionals, parents and students where we've made it clear that we're going to do this and do it right and we're going to be better as a result of it," Broach said.