Funding Alert

by Leah Z. Owens, Founder and Chief Organizer, Teachers as Leaders in Newark (TaLiN)

On April 14, 2010, a coalition of Newark students, teachers, parents, and community members took to the streets to demand transparency from the Newark Public School District, in particular concerning the School Improvement Grants (SIG) application process. (See the Fire on the Mountain Blog for a full story and pictures.)

A week earlier, Newark Public Schools (NPS) held a community meeting at Central High School in order to gather community input as to which "turnaround" model should be chosen for each NPS school identified as among the lowest performing. The introductory presentation held in the auditorium was brief, and participants were not given an opportunity to ask any general questions about the SIG program during the main part of the program. Instead, everyone was quickly ushered to one of ten separate locations in the school building to discuss their respective schools.

In the library, my group was told to write down all questions on an index card along with our contact information. I wrote down seven or eight questions and have yet to get a response or even acknowledgement of receipt of my index card. Meetings organized in this manner are not the equivalent of community engagement. In TaLiN's view, this was another opportunity lost for the district administration to build the capacity of the community around education reform. In addition, without the community's understanding---and subsequent buy-in---of these new reforms, Newark faces the possibility of more poorly implemented strategies for improving our children's academic achievement.

School Improvement Grants

This past March, New Jersey was awarded $66.7 million from the U.S. Department of Education's SIG program to serve schools identified as Persistently Lowest Achieving (PLA). Of the 32 schools identified in the state, 10 of the schools are part of NPS, 9 are in Camden City, and the rest of the schools are scattered around the state with no other school district having more than two PLA schools. In the application process, each school has to choose one of four models to implement: Turnaround, Transformation, Restart, or Closure.

According to the program description, federal SIG funds will be used to improve student achievement in Title I schools across the country identified for improvement, corrective action, or restructuring in order to enable these schools to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) and exit improvement status. A total of $3.5 billion has been allocated to the SIG program, the bulk of which---$3 billion---comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It is fitting that the federal government wants to recover and reinvest in the nation's lowest performing schools as quality education is a vital element in securing the future economic prosperity of a country.

With the threat of losing a significant portion of state aid based on the proposed FY2011 state budget, NPS has submitted applications for all 10 eligible schools. The applications are reviewed on an individual basis. If all are approved, one school will close, one will restart (which means it will become an in-district charter), three will be turned around, and five will be transformed. The Turnaround and Transformation models are very similar. They both require replacing the principal if he or she has led the school for three years or more (among other components), but the Turnaround model also requires replacement of at least 50% of the existing school staff.

Toward Recovery and Reinvestment

The coalition of organizations and individuals that demonstrated in April has since been dubbed the United Front to Defend Public Education (UFDPE), and it demands that NPS allow the community to play a more significant role in the transformation of our schools for the 21st century and beyond.

Despite the seeming inability of NPS to harness community input, members of UFDPE continue to believe in the community's ability to contribute significantly to the revitalization of our public education system. Abbott Leadership Institute (ALI), One Newark Education Coalition (ONEC), and Teachers as Leaders in Newark (TaLiN) have joined together and shared resources to offer a series of community trainings to the SIG-eligible schools. These trainings present some of the details of the school's SIG application and have the purpose of establishing a committee of members of the school community who will continue to oversee the process over the next three years upon approval of the school's application from the New Jersey Department of Education.

Even though much needed funding is being directly invested in the schools, we need to remember to invest in the people in our community as we move forward in America's recovery and reinvestment. Helping to empower people in one realm of their lives, such as education, will have a domino effect on the other aspects of their lives, building the civic capacity of us all.