It’s a new day for Newark public schools. The new superintendent has vowed to win back Newark’s right to control its own schools, but can it free itself of the corruption, incompetence and carelessness that led to state control 20 years ago? Junius Williams, Director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers Newark, spoke with NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams about how he thinks Newark schools should be run.
Former state Education Commissioner and newly appointed Newark Superintendent Chris Cerf has said he is “unalterably, authentically, and completely committed” to returning Newark’s schools to local control. Williams wrote in an Op-Ed in The Star-Ledger that the change has to come from the bottom up. “I think it has to come from the people engaged in jointly deciding how to plan the schools, how to budget them and how to evaluate success on a school by school basis. Because you see each school has a different population, and each school has a different set of needs,” he said. “Now with the advent of the charter schools that have come forth, currently there are about 28 percent of the schools are charter schools. 28 percent of the school population go to charter schools and the rest of the 72 percent are in the general population. That general population needs more resources because they are challenged. The charter schools have been able to get, as a former superintendent said, ‘the best students.'”
While charter schools are also public schools, they are run privately with public money, and Williams says that’s the important distinction he makes. He says each charter school can run itself; each charter school is like an independent district, but the vast majority of the kids, the 72 percent, are in what’s called “the new public schools.”
“I’m suggesting that there’s a model for us from the old ABBOTT program, it’s called school management teams,” he said. “Under the direction of the principal, who has the final say so, parents are to be involved in the planning of what the schools would look like, the curriculum, etc. They would be involved in the actual budgeting process, because each school based on that plan was decided would need a certain amount of money, and then they would at the end for the school year be involved in the actual assessment as to what went wrong. So at the beginning of the next school year you can make adjustments.”
Many parents in Newark have been disheartened and felt disenfranchised by the old reformers. It begs the question: how is Newark going to get those reformers to feel like they have a stake in the district again? “You let parents know they’re important,” Williams said. “You also have on that board you have community advocates. You also have students. You have this group of people that’s talking about, ‘well, what do we need.’ See if you have a school that has 37 percent special education, for example, you’re going to need more staff, you’re going to need more programs, you’re going to need special kinds of programs and that’s going to cost more than a school that has maybe 12 or 13 percent. So once the parents see that they’re going to respond.”
The trouble lies in avoiding the pitfalls that led to the state takeover 20 years ago in 1995. Williams says schools have become less important as centers of learning and more important as a source of jobs and contracts.
Williams says you avoid it by having an ever vigilant population. “What happened was the politicians were able to get control of the electorate process. I’m in favor of the elected board, by the way, but I think the people, the ordinary voters, have to have a stake in this and the way to do that is to say, ‘Hey, if you’re involved in your school you have to protect your interest.’ That’s the way to get people more educated, and therefore any people that come along, I call them the interlopers, they can’t take over,” he said.