School Improvement Program Needs What Money Can't Buy - Time

The latest effort to save New Jersey's very lowest-performing schools faces any number of challenges, from the quality of teachers and leadership to the high-risk communities outside the building.

Add one more obstacle that may prove even more daunting: time, or the lack of it.

State Department of Education officials yesterday gave the State Board of Education an update on School Improvement Grants (SIG), a federally funded program that is providing close to $100 million in grants to leverage what officials call "transformational" changes at New Jersey's worst public schools.

These changes include replacing principals and a majority of teachers and imposing longer school days and years.

The Bottom 5 Percent

Twenty-one schools have been approved for SIG grants, including Newark, Camden, Jersey City, Paterson, Lakewood and Roselle. All were in the bottom 5 percent in overall achievement, with as many as half the students not proficient in math and language arts.

Officials said there have been some encouraging signs out of the first 12 schools receiving the grants, but there have also been overwhelming obstacles and at least one outright failure.

And with another nine schools added this fall, officials said it will probably take a few more years to really tell if this cure will hold in even the most successful models.

Other experts have put success on an even longer trajectory.

The state's acting education commissioner, Chris Cerf, acknowledged that patience may be in short supply. He has upped the volume, too, requiring that with the latest SIG grants districts revamp their teacher evaluation and student testing for all their schools, not just those getting the money.

The program is "a genuine experiment to see whether this amount of investment, focus and attention can turn around what have been labeled dropout factories," Cerf said at yesterday's board meeting. "We're nervous, but I'd say we're hopeful."

Then he raised the stakes: "If this doesn't work you have conclude that the turnaround strategy is destined to failure and you have to think about a replacement strategy [and] closure. There are a lot of chips on the table."

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