RAY ABBOTT WAS THE SON OF A minister and a teacher. Vivian Figueroa grew up on welfare. In 1981, when a public interest law firm went to court to challenge New Jersey’s school funding system on their behalf, they were Camden kids living less than a mile apart.

That lawsuit, Abbott v. Burke, has shaped New Jersey’s political and economic system in ways that still resonate today, as the Legislature tries, for the fourth time in two generations, to find a fair way of paying for the public schools.

Abbott and its 1970s predecessor, Robinson v. Cahill, helped enact New Jersey’s income tax, destroy Gov. Jim Florio’s political career, and persuade a generation of legislators that tax increases meant political suicide.

Abbott won tens of thousands of city kids the right to a free preschool education, launched the state’s biggest-ever public works program, and ensured that New Jersey spends as much on the education of poor children as suburban parents spend on the education of rich ones.

In a democracy that prides itself on giving every child an equal shot at success, school funding battles reflect deeper conflicts over society’s values and direction. We define the boundaries of community in part by deciding whose children count as “our children,” and therefore deserve the best we can give them. Perhaps that’s why, after 26 years and more than a dozen Supreme Court rulings, Abbott and the state policies it spawned remain deeply controversial.

Forty-five states have faced legal challenges to their school funding systems, but New Jersey’s struggle is one of the oldest and longest-lasting. It dates back to 1970, when Jersey City sued the state on behalf of 11-year-old Kenneth Rob-inson, an African-American who lived with his mother and seven siblings in a housing project in the shadow of the ele-vated Turnpike extension.

Like Abbott a decade later, Robinson v. Cahill asserted that the state’s heavy reliance on local property taxes to pay for schooling ensured that poor school districts could never spend as much as rich ones, even while taxing far more heavily. Such inequities, the Supreme Court eventually found, violated the state constitution’s guarantee of a “thorough and efficient” educational system.

For two and a half years, Democratic Gov. Brendan Byrne fought to pass a statewide income tax, the obvious way to equalize funding burdens. In the summer of 1976, he succeeded, but only after the Supreme Court, declaring that it would no longer tolerate an unconstitutional funding system, closed the public schools for eight days.

Although property taxes fell at first, the spending gap between rich and poor districts persisted as legislators cut school aid to cope with fiscal crises. By 1981, when the non-profit Education Law Center filed Abbott, poor districts were spending about $2,400 per pupil while taxing at $1.65 per $100 assessed valuation, and rich districts were spending $3,000 per pupil while taxing at 97 cents per $100.

The Abbott plaintiffs were a mixed group: 20 children—10 African-American, nine Hispanic, and one white—from 10 families in Camden, East Orange, Irvington and Jersey City. Some, like Ray Abbott, the sole white plaintiff, came from middle-class families committed to staying in the inner city; others, like Vivian Figueroa, grew up poor.

For nine years, the Abbott case wound its tortuous way through the courts, as the Education Law Center presented voluminous evidence of the failings of urban education: the peeling chalkboards, the bare-bones music and art programs, the elementary schools without libraries, the barely literate high school graduates. Poor children were given educational crumbs, the lawyers argued, while just a few miles away, affluent children feasted on banquets.

In its defense, the state asserted that local mismanagement, not funding shortages, accounted for the cities’ prob-lems. Leadership mattered; money didn’t. In any case, the lawyers argued, many poor children were so damaged by their troubled home lives that no school could save them.

In 1990, the state Supreme Court ruled for the plaintiffs, ordering New Jersey to ensure that its poorest urban dis-tricts spent as much on the average pupil as the wealthiest suburbs did. The court further ordered the state to determine how much more money poor districts needed to meet disadvantaged students’ special needs.

The court’s mandate—extra help for the disadvantaged, on top of parity spending for regular education—would soon earn its own shorthand: parity plus. Extrapolating from demographic charts based on soon-to-be-outdated census figures, the court cobbled together a list of 28 urban districts covered by the new entitlement and left it up to the Legislature to add to, or subtract from, that list.

In the wake of the court ruling, Florio’s Democratic administration pushed through a modestly redistributive new funding law, the Quality Education Act, which ended automatic payments to wealthy districts and increased aid to the poor and middle-class, paying for the new spending with an income tax increase. Most controversially, QEA required every school district to pay a portion of teacher pension costs, ending a 35-year tradition of full state payment.

What happened next has become political folklore. In the 18 months after QEA’s passage, the combined fury of an anti-tax citizens’ movement and a galvanized teachers’ union won suspension of the pension shift, forced the Legislature to return a third of the redistributed school funding to the suburbs as tax relief, and handed the Republicans veto-proof majorities in the Assembly and Senate.

The Abbott plaintiffs won another court ruling invalidating the amended QEA, and in 1993, Florio narrowly lost re-election. A few months after the election, the last of the Abbott plaintiffs graduated from high school. He had been a 5-year-old Irvington kindergartner the day the suit was filed.

By the time Florio’s successor, Republican Gov. Christie Whitman, took office, most states had begun to reorient their public education systems around academic standards laying out the skills and knowledge students were expected to acquire in 13 years of public schooling. As New Jersey joined this national movement, Whitman’s administration also sought to reorient the state’s 20-year debate over school aid.

The administration’s school funding proposal, the Comprehensive Educational Improvement and Financing Act, or CEIFA, defined a “thorough” education as one that delivered the newly adopted Core Curriculum Content Standards and an “efficient” education as one that cost what a hypothetical model school district might spend—which, it turned out, was far less than many New Jersey districts were already spending.

Although no district would have been required to cut its budget to the model-district level, initial versions of CEIFA would have re-quired districts to label the extra spending “not constitutionally required,” right there on the school-budget ballot—a tempting target for tax-weary voters.

CEIFA had a plausible logic: decide what students should learn, figure out what it costs to teach them, enable every district to spend that much, and discourage districts from spending more. But suburban fury over the spending-discouragement provisions had a predictable political effect, and legislators quickly abandoned them. The state would fund poor urban districts up to the T&E level; the suburbs would be free to spend far more, undiscouraged.

The new approach openly flouted the Abbott parity requirement, and in May 1997, the Supreme Court found CEIFA’s funding formula unconstitutional for poor urban districts, though acceptable for all others. The court gave the state three months to close the remaining 11 percent spending gap between rich and poor districts, at a cost of over $200 million.

Then the justices turned to the “plus” part of the “parity plus” mandate. Despite the court’s 1990 order, the state had never identi-fied and priced out necessary programs for disadvantaged students. Instead, whatever money was available had been allocated through the usual legislative bargaining.

Now, the justices ordered the state to present a programmatic study to a lower-court judge, and in the May 1998 Abbott V ruling, the Supreme Court ratified an ambitious reform agenda. The state was required to institute half-day preschool for Abbott 3- and 4-year-olds; to restructure every Abbott elementary school around then-popular “whole school reform” models, preferably the well-researched Success for All; to provide needed health and social service programs; and to pay the full cost of repairing or replacing dilapidated inner-city schools.

The nine years since have seen nearly non-stop wrangling over implementation details: litigation over preschool class size and teacher credentials, legislative combat over how generously to subsidize school construction in non-Abbott districts, academic reports on the shortcomings of whole school reform, efforts by cash-strapped governors to dial back expensive social supports.

Those years have seen significant achievements—the creation of a highly rated preschool program, rising elementary school test scores, the building of dozens of new schools. And they have seen significant setbacks—revelations of waste and mismanagement in school construction, stagnating secondary school test scores, corruption allegations in a few problem districts.

For a while, the CEIFA formula continued to give non-Abbott districts state aid for growing enrollments, new special education costs, and the like. But as the 21st century ushered in huge, intractable budget deficits, the Legislature froze most school aid, and newly squeezed districts made up the difference with service cuts and property tax increases.

The squeeze was less severe for the Abbott districts, protected by the court’s “parity plus” mandate, and by 2006, they were get-ting 57.6 percent of the state’s school aid while enrolling 23 percent of the state’s students. That politically uncomfortable situation encouraged the Legislature, for the first time since the Robinson era, to consider revising the school funding formula even without a court order to do so.

Legislative leaders say they want a formula that replaces the court-mandated distinction between Abbott and non-Abbott districts with a formula providing services to disadvantaged students, no matter where they live. The Education Law Center has promised to return to court, if necessary, to protect hard-won gains. We’ve had this conversation before.

As the Abbott case changed the face of New Jersey, the children of Abbott reached adulthood far from the spotlight. Despite his middle-class roots, Ray Abbott spent a troubled youth, dropping out of high school, descending into drug addiction and crime, serving years in prison for burglary. But today he works as a truck driver and has been drug-free for years.

Despite the poverty and family chaos she weathered as a child, Vivian Figueroa finished high school and earned a college degree. Today, she teaches public school in south Jersey.

Abbott v. Burke was always about them, and about tens of thousands of other children like them. It’s easy to forget that—and im-portant to remember it

Deborah Yaffe has reported for the Jersey Journal, the Asbury Park Press and the Gannett Statehouse bureau. Her book about the Abbott case, Other People’s Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey’s Schools, will be published this fall by Rutgers University Press.

By Mike Yaple

CAPS ON SCHOOL BUDGETS. ELIMINATING SMALL SCHOOL DISTRICTS. “Super” county superintendents with near dictatorial powers over local school budgets.

These are just some of the measures that the New Jersey State Legislature has proposed to control property taxes. And they seem to send a message to citizens and school officials up and down the state: That school spending is the un-derlying cause of New Jersey’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes.

But a new report from Rutgers provides a markedly different picture.

New Jersey’s high property taxes have been caused in no small part by the chronic flat funding of public schools, according to the report by the Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers-Newark.

“Had the state fully funded CEIFA (the Comprehensive Education Improvement and Financing Act of 1996) during the past five years, it is quite possible that the furor over New Jersey’s excessively high and ever-escalating local property taxes might never have arisen,” said an Institute on Education Law and Policy statement in January announcing the release of the report.

“The law provided for a dynamic set of state school aid formulas that would send varying amounts of money to local New Jersey school districts reflecting annual changes in enrollment, budgets, and local fiscal resources,” said the report, authored by Dr. Ernest C. Reock Jr., one of the state’s leading authorities on local government and taxation. Instead of running the school-funding formula, the Legislature has largely frozen aid to local school districts at their 2001-2002 lev-els, regardless of changes in enrollment, cost or need.

Just how much have school districts been shortchanged by the state? By 2005-2006, under-funding of state aid had reached an annual level of $846 million. Middle-income districts bore $508 million of the shortfall and poor non-Abbott dis-tricts $170 million, according to the report. That amounted to shortfalls of $1,627 per pupil in the poor non-Abbott districts and $758 per pupil in the mid-wealth districts.

If the entire amount had been applied to property tax reduction, the results would have been significant. Poor non-Abbott districts could have reduced their local tax levy by 20.2 percent. In the middle-income districts, the local levy would have dropped 8.9 percent; and the burden in Abbott districts would have decreased 5.7 percent. Even the most affluent communities—classified as “I” and “J” school districts in the state Department of Education’s district factor groupings—would have seen property tax reductions of 3.5 percent, according to the study, titled “Estimated Financial Impact of the ‘Freeze’ of State Aid on New Jersey School Districts, 2002-03 to 2005-06.”

“This report confirms our position all along: New Jersey’s high property taxes have resulted from the state’s consis-tent under-funding of public education,” said Edwina M. Lee, executive director of the New Jersey School Boards Association. “This is a crucial element to bear in mind during this time when many state Legislators are characterizing local gov-ernment spending as the cause of high property taxes.”

National Education Association statistics show that, in 2005-2006, New Jersey state government funded less than 37 percent of the total cost of public education—as compared to the average state, which pays close to 50 percent. This lack of funding from the state forces property taxpayers to pay for the larger share of the cost of their public schools, according to Lee.

“This report paints a sobering picture,” Lee added. “Many of the property-tax reform proposals coming from the state Legislature are designed to constrain, constrict and control local school budgets. But this report puts the focus where it needs to be.”

“CEIFA was fully funded for five years. Beginning in 2002-03, constricted state fiscal resources were cited to justify ‘freezing’ most parts of CEIFA at their 2001-02 level, and this has continued through 2006-07,” wrote Dr. Reock, who re-tired in 1992 from the Rutgers University Center for Government Services, where he worked as director since 1960. He also served during the 1970s as secretary of the Joint Education Committee and Joint Committee on the Public Schools of the New Jersey Legislature.

Reock’s report concluded that “the state aid freeze caused massive under-funding of many school districts through-out the state, especially in poor non-Abbott districts, and may well have contributed to the property tax crisis New Jersey faces.”

For more information on the Institute and its work, go to http://ielp.rutgers.edu. Reock’s report can be found by clicking on the “Education Funding” link.

By Dale Caldwell

America is in the midst of an educational crisis in urban schools.

An unacceptably large number of students in urban districts perform poorly on standardized tests. The drop-out rates in many of these districts exceed 50 percent. All too often urban schools have become the training ground for drug deal-ers and gang members. To make matters worse, in New Jersey these problems have persisted even after millions of tax dollars have been sent to the Abbott districts.

The Blame Game Over the last 20 years, the problems of urban school districts have increased exponentially because of an unfortunate “blame game.”

• Taxpayers blame politicians for spending too much money on poor performing urban schools.
  
  
• Politicians blame school boards for paying superintendents too much.
  
  
• School boards blame school administrators for poor test scores.
  
  
• School administrators blame teachers for not taking responsibility for the poor academic performance of their students.
  
  
• Teachers blame parents for not doing their part to educate students.

Unfortunately, while this blame game goes on, tens of thousands of students leave school to enter a life of poverty, drug addiction or crime which costs state and federal taxpayers millions of dollars.

Instead of trying to assign blame, we need to focus on developing solutions to the root causes of problems in urban schools. Most problems in these schools stem from either the inability of students to read at grade level and, possibly, that many students do not live in an environment conducive to learning.

Every day 3,000 students drop out of school because they do not read at grade level, according to the National Council of Teachers of English. Amazingly, more than 50 percent of black and Latino eighth grade students read below the proficient level.

Frustrated Students Skip School Ideally, students “learn to read” by third grade and “read to learn” after third grade. This is the goal of most educators. In urban communities large numbers of students are not reading at grade level. After third grade, they fall behind until they are so frustrated that they skip school and fall prey to negative community forces.

In spite of receiving millions of tax dollars, urban school districts have not been able to focus their human and financial resources on the literacy problem because of many federal and state education requirements that shift the academic focus away from teaching the fundamentals to high stakes testing. Unfortunately, urban school board leaders have not been able to convince the State of New Jersey to allow schools to focus enough time on teaching the fundamental skills needed for academic success.

Clearly, the first step in addressing educational challenges in urban communities is to focus the majority of the instruction on helping all students read, write and do math at grade level. This has not happened because some state law-makers have given up on students who need intense remediation after fourth grade. They believe that, if you are behind in reading in fourth or fifth grade, you will never catch up.

However, all of the major education publishers have developed technology-based educational tools that help stu-dents at any age learn to read at grade level. The money that urban districts receive should be focused on implementing these programs and not preparing for standardized tests. To get the most out of the state dollars invested in urban schools, taxpayers should demand that every student in New Jersey be taught to read at grade level.

Unfortunately, being a good student in an urban school does not guarantee success in life. Large numbers of students in urban communities do not live in environments that are conducive to learning. We all know that if you are poor, life is a challenge. Yet few of us take the time to consider what life is really like for children from families in urban commu-nities in New Jersey that fall below the poverty line. Unfortunately, urban education policies are too often made by people who know little about the challenges faced by students in these communities. As a former state official and a school board member for 14 years serving students in Newark, New Brunswick and Trenton, I have had the opportunity to see life through the eyes of these “at-risk” students and their parents.

Struggling Parents, Struggling Children I have met many parents who want the best for their children. However, they cannot properly supervise them because they have to work two jobs to pay the bills. I know a 10th grader who ran away from his single-parent home. I know an eighth grader who has to make breakfast for her 5 year-old brother every morning before going to school because her mother is too high on drugs to do it.

I remember the senior who was a model student up until her last year in school, then got involved in a gang. I know a senior who had done well in school and had planned to go to college, whose plans changed when the drug dealer for whom he had been delivering drugs (to provide food for his family) pointed a gun to his head and said: “If you go to col-lege, I will kill your family when you are gone.” He never went.

There are many stories I could share about elementary school children who are being verbally, mentally and physi-cally abused. I also could share stories about the many parents who withdraw their children from public school as soon as they learn English so that they can go make money and/ or get married. There are also students that I have met who, to avoid being ridiculed and ostracized, tell their classmates that they got a “D” when they actually received an “A.”

I remember the two 16-year-old high school drop outs who passionately tried to convince me in front of a group I was speaking to of the benefits of being a drug dealer compared to working for someone else. And, I could tell you about the parents who pulled their children out of a successful mentoring and tutoring program because they were jealous of the opportunities their children were getting.

Epidemic Proportions Gang membership is at an all time high because the situations described above have reached epi-demic proportions. However, the focus of educators has been on improving these students’ education during the day and ignoring (until they break the law) the challenges students face after school.

Unfortunately, most residential programs in the country are for “at-risk” students who have violated the law. It is time to develop residential programs that prevent young people from committing crimes. As the old saying goes “it is cheaper to send students to Yale than to jail.” The only way to create educational environments that are conducive to learning for the most troubled students in urban communities is to create residential programs that enable students to attend public school while living temporarily or permanently in a boarding environment that provides meals, a safe place to sleep, aca-demic tutoring and effective counseling.

Vacant buildings in urban communities could effectively be renovated to house approximately 20 or more boys or girls each. These students would attend their local public school and live in these buildings from Sunday evening through Friday morning. They would receive two meals a day, housing, tutoring, mentoring, counseling and access to state-of-the-art technology. Parents or guardians would have the option of visiting the program regularly and sending their children there free for one week a month, or for a year. Teachers and administrators would be encouraged to recommend students for the program.

The advantage of the community-based Residential After-School Program is that it provides a positive environment to teach students fundamental academic skills, prevents students from being recruited into gangs and gives parents and guardians a much needed respite from parenting. Best of all, it enables professionals to identify problems early that they otherwise would never have diagnosed.

These programs can be established throughout New Jersey without the addition of new tax dollars. The New Jersey departments of Community Affairs, Education and Human Services spend millions of dollars funding housing, social ser-vices and education programs for children and families in urban communities. This money could easily be pooled to de-velop Residential After-School Programs to revitalize vacant buildings and create an educational residential environment conducive to learning for thousands of at- risk students.

Clearly, the most effective way for the state to use tax dollars in urban school districts is to support educational pro-grams that ensure all students read at grade level and to invest in the creation of Residential After-School Programs. If tax dollars are not reallocated in this way, New Jersey’s urban school districts will continue to struggle.

Dale G. Caldwell is president of the New Brunswick Board of Education and the Middlesex Regional Educational Services Commission and a former Deputy Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs. He can be reached at (732) 208-9808 or dalegcaldwell@aol.com.

Closing the Opportunity Gap

By William Foley

Educators are their own worst enemies when it comes to discussing educational change.

We are in a perpetual heads-I-win, tails-you-lose contest with legislators. Whether it is our lofty commitment to the importance of educating children or a fervent desire to answer our critics, our language always seems to defeat us. Con-sider the issue of the achievement gap in public schools. Poor children and minorities are failing to reach state standards. Educators respond by rededicating themselves to finding solutions and the fruitless task of seeking more financial sup-port. In the end, we believe every child will learn if we just have the right level of resources, successful programs and well-trained teachers. The resources never come, the problems of student achievement are multi-dimensional, the promised reforms fail, and the public grows disillusioned.

Our critics come from a very different place. Our elected representatives are loathe to raising taxes and like to find a simple solution for every problem. It is far easier to argue that the achievement gap is the result of failing public schools, bad teachers, and over paid administrators. These messages resonate with the public and provide the necessary cover to vote for tax cuts and higher standards. Unfortunately, the task of meeting these higher standards is left to the imagination of educators without added support. There is no way that every child will be proficient or even close by 2014, the target date that the federal government set for all students to be 100 percent proficient.

Opportunity Gap First, educators must reframe the problem we are facing. We do not have an achievement gap in this country, but rather an opportunity gap. The plight of poor children and children of color requires a broader understanding of the economic and social gaps that exist in their lives. Where is the data on housing, medical care, and families?

The Health and Well Being of Children is an annual report published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The report concludes that the access of poor families to insurance and adequate health care “combine to put children in low-income families at a health, developmental, and educational disadvantage.”

The Children’s Defense Fund, a national organization dedicated to the health and welfare of poor children in the U.S., reports that “reading scores and school attendance of uninsured children improve dramatically after they receive adequate health care.”

The achievement gap is just a small manifestation of a much larger and troubling opportunity gap. Second, educators must define their responsibility for closing the opportunity gap or others will do it for us.

There will always be exceptional schools and schools should be held accountable for student performance, but they cannot close the opportunity gap without help.

Defining the Problem The language of education critics frequently exaggerates the role of the schools in causing our na-tion’s problems.

The failures of public education are described in sweeping generalities: The Russians would bury us in math and science, the Japanese would trounce our technology, and now India will run all of our businesses over the telephone.

In every era, all of these threats were directly traceable to failing public schools. Public schools will need to help students adjust to the global economy, but the recent record performance of the Dow Jones average is not because our schools are good or bad. The outsourcing of jobs to India is not happening because we lack skilled programmers in this country.

Despite all the talk of public schools failing, 88 percent of American students still attend them, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Thousands of immigrant children have become productive citizens and high school completion rates are as high as they have ever been.

The Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank that seeks to broaden public debate to achieve a prosper-ous and fair economy, found that, while much work needs to be done, the black/white high school completion gap has shrunk to about 10 percent, the lowest in history.

What has changed is how we measure the success of public schools. Author Patricia Graham in Schooling America describes how during different historical periods public schools served different purposes. Now public schools are ex-pected to educate everyone to a universal level of competency.

In 1955 when Rudolph Flesch asked a nation to consider his book, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do about It, Johnny did not suffer from any learning disability.

What are elements of school accountability? How do we measure the success of schools in serving immigrant students, creating high tech workers, and preparing a new generation for active citizenship?

In New Jersey, we expect schools to be free from bullying and violence. Students should be educated to avoid the dangers of drugs and alcohol. Most recently, we are asked to identify the symptoms of teenage depression and educate staff on how to prevent suicide. Many schools have sizable immigrant populations that must learn English and become citizens.

Measuring Student Success Aside from a school report card that addresses multiple goals, assessing student achievement requires multiple assessments. There are many ways to assess student progress that go well beyond standardized tests. Long-term studies of student performance beyond 12th grade can also help identify strengths and weaknesses in the cur-riculum. When pencil-and-paper tests are in use, it is important to analyze results based on individual student growth and not arbitrary percentages of grade level proficiency.

The opportunity gap naturally requires that students be offered more educational opportunities. Some students will never complete high school in the traditional four years, nor do they see the connection between academic work and their daily lives.

Stepping out of school and pursuing academics part time while working should be an option. What should be avail-able is the second and third chance to earn a high school diploma that would be available in every community high school. The door to reaching higher standards should never be closed. Classes could be offered at night, on weekends, or even online. Some of the options to earn a high school diploma also could be supported by the workplace. Our fast food industry could make a commitment that builds meaningful incentives to earn a high school diploma to the many young people it hires.

Finally, since we are assessing an opportunity gap and not merely an achievement gap, every state should publish data that assesses the physical and emotional health of children. Alongside test data we need to publish statistics, such as the number of days absent, mobility ratios, homeless rates, and access to dental, vision care and health care. Naturally, states should be ranked, and schools that fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress, as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, should be noted. The responsibility for closing the opportunity gap is one shared by educators, legislators, and parents.

The term No Child Left Behind was coined by Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. Sadly, that is precisely what is happening as 13 million children are classified by the U.S. Census as poor, an increase of more than 1.3 million since 2000.

As educators we embrace accountability for student performance. Will our elected officials make the same commitment to the health and well being of all students?

William Foley is the superintendent of the Westfield Public Schools, Union County. He could be reached at (908) 789-4420 or wfoley@westfieldnjk12.org.

By MARY ANN ZEHR

TAKING A POSITION THAT IS unusual these days, New Jersey officials are promoting research that says bilingual education methods have an edge over English-only methods in teaching English-language learners to read.

Recent U.S. Department of Education publications with “research-based recommendations” for teaching English-learners have avoided addressing the same research that Garden State officials are endorsing. And many school districts in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts have abandoned bilingual education after voters approved state ballot meas-ures to curtail the educational approach.

Since 1976, New Jersey has required bilingual education—in which students are taught some subjects in their native language while learning English—for school districts with at least 20 students in the same language group. Over the past three years, the state has added requirements for districts to provide Spanish instruction for several early-reading initia-tives, including state implementation of the federal Reading First program.

Now, New Jersey appears to be the only state that has written into its Reading First grant application to the federal government that native-language instruction is required, with some exceptions, for children who arrive at school with no proficiency in English.

Districts in Illinois and Texas, which also have state laws requiring bilingual education, are also using Reading First money for Spanish materials. But those states haven’t required bilingual education in their Reading First applications.

Russell W. Rumberger, the director of the Linguistic Minority Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, applauded New Jersey officials for taking what he views as an evidence-based approach.

“The research is increasingly supporting the idea that bilingual education is not only not bad, but is beneficial,” he said.

A Blended Approach At Lincoln Avenue School here in Orange, a gritty suburb of Newark, the state’s push for bilingual reading instruction means that on a recent day, Latino 1st graders who didn’t know much English first read a story about a rat in English, and then followed it up with a different story about a rat in Spanish.

During the 120-minute literacy block, Enid Shapiro Unger, an English-as-a-second-language teacher, and Maria Al-buquerque-Malaman, a 1st grade classroom teacher, used the same theme—animals and their homes—to teach in both English and Spanish. Under Reading First, the state requires that at least 30 minutes of that block be in English.

With bilingual education, said Ms. Albuquerque-Malaman, “the transition from the mother language to the second language goes more smoothly” than with English-only instruction.

Not all New Jersey teachers agree. “I feel that bilingual methods hold the students back,” Charmaine Della Bella, the ESL teacher for Norwood Public School, a K-8 school with 650 students that makes up the Norwood school district, wrote in an e-mail message. She said ESL techniques have worked for the 17 English-learners in her school, all of whom are Korean. The district can get a waiver from using bilingual education because of the difficulty of finding teachers who speak Korean.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, which governs the Reading First program, doesn’t say anything about what language must be used for reading instruction, Chad Colby, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, noted in an e-mail message.

But regional and national meetings for Reading First paid for by the federal department tend to feature English-only programs as models, said Jeffrey Cohen, the lead consultant for Reading First for the California Department of Education.

California initially wrote in its plan that Reading First money could be used only for English instruction, but the state had to change that stance after losing a lawsuit in 2003 brought by districts that demanded to use the money for Spanish instruction and materials as well. About 10 percent of the state’s Reading First classrooms provide instruction in Spanish, Mr. Cohen said.

Research Cited In New Jersey, Fred Carrigg, the special assistant for literacy to the state education commissioner, is the engine behind the policy that essentially calls for Spanish instruction for early reading.

In 2003, the state started requiring certain school districts—those with a concentration of Latino English-learners that receive Reading First grants or that get court-ordered extra aid to offset their disadvantages—to provide two years of Spanish instruction in kindergarten through grade 3.

New Jersey’s Reading First application for federal funding provides two exceptions to the general requirement for bi-lingual education: if districts don’t have enough children to warrant such a program, or if they don’t have adequate teach-ers or materials to carry one out. Mr. Carrigg said the second exception isn’t valid for Spanish-speaking students.

“Our attitude is that if we are going to accept scientifically based reading research for the general population, we must accept that same research base for children who speak a language other than English,” Mr. Carrigg said.

He cites findings from two reviews of research to back the state’s requirements. The first is Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, written by a panel headed by Harvard University reading expert Catherine Snow and published by the National Research Council in 1998. The other is Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, edited by second-language-acquisition expert Diane August and reading expert Timothy Shanahan, and published last year by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.

The National Research Council report says that if appropriate learning materials and bilingual teachers are available, it’s best for children who don’t know English to be taught to read in their native language while acquiring oral proficiency in English. Then they can transfer their reading skills from the native language to English.

The National Literacy Panel report contains a chapter with a review of studies that concludes there is a “small to moderate” advantage for bilingual education over English-only methods.

The federal Department of Education paid $1.8 million for the National Literacy Panel to write that study, but then declined to publish it; department officials said it didn’t stand up to the peer-review process.

When asked why he puts stock in that publication, Mr. Carrigg said that the federal government’s criticism of the study concerned procedures and process, not “recommendations or results.” He added: “We note that fine line.”

Implementation Varies But elsewhere, some officials have disregarded the literacy panel’s finding that favors bilingual education.

Margaret Garcia Dugan, for example, who oversees programs for English-language learners for the Arizona Department of Education and opposes bilingual education, said the federal department’s decision not to publish the study raised “a red flag” for her, pointing to potential questions about its validity.

How New Jersey educators meet the state’s requirements for bilingual education varies.

In the 5,400-student Orange district, Latino kindergartners through 6th graders who are learning English are concentrated in a bi-lingual track in a single elementary school, in which classes are made up only of Latino children.

In the 1st grade bilingual class in Orange, children sound out words in English and Spanish during each morning’s literacy block.

By contrast, in the 9,900-student Perth Amboy district, teachers generally focus on teaching reading only in Spanish, complemented with instruction only in oral English, for the first couple of years that a child with limited proficiency in English is learning to read.

Meanwhile, the 2,700-student Englewood district has 57 percent of its 290 English-learners in a dual-language program in which children who are dominant in either English or Spanish learn both languages in the same classroom.

As evidence that the state’s policies are working, Mr. Carrigg says 50 percent of English-learners in 3rd grade are scoring at the proficient level or above on the state’s language arts test, which they must take in English. He added that 75 percent of former 3rd grade English-learners are scoring at those levels. Among all 3rd graders, 82 percent scored at least proficient on the test.

Statewide, only 22 percent of 11th grade English-learners are testing as proficient or above on New Jersey’s language arts exam.

The scores aren’t surprising, Mr. Carrigg said, because so many of those students are new to the country. The state’s focus on having students learn to read in Spanish is concentrated at the K-2 level, he added, and thus test scores for 3rd or 4th graders give a good indication of how those efforts are working.

The state’s next steps, Mr. Carrigg says, “are focused on expanding successful practices from the elementary experience” into the middle grades.

At the same time, he said, “New Jersey has not made any efforts to publicize our primary language policies. We are very cognizant of each state having different policies and attitudes about the use of languages other than English.”

Mary Ann Zehr is assistant editor for Education Week. She could be reached at mzehr@epe.org. As first appeared in Education Week (January 10, 2007).

Reprinted with permission from Editorial Projects in Education. Coverage of education research is supported in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.

By Rosa Cirianni

MOUNT LAUREL TOWNSHIP IN Burlington County is among the New Jersey school districts discussing and planning how it would operate and continue to educate students if a pandemic should strike.

The kindergarten through eighth grade district of 4,600 students is among eight that send students to the Lenape Regional High School District. Each district has administrators who serve on a panel called the Lenape Council, which discusses pressing issues affecting the communities. A major issue—the next pandemic.

In November, every district in Burlington County was required by the county health department to send a representa-tive to attend a pandemic planning session. There they received a thick binder containing a management plan, including school resources and media planning tips during a crisis, said Marie Reynolds, director of communications services for the Mount Laurel Public Schools.

Strategies to Continue Education While Mount Laurel teachers post homework and project assignments online, officials are discussing the possibility of creating workbooks should the Web become overloaded during a crisis. Each grade would have a workbook for each subject, to ensure that student learning is not interrupted, Reynolds said.

“They would have these workbooks that would give them a basic education,” said Reynolds.

Mount Laurel also is devising a plan to distribute pandemic information to parents, but officials are exercising caution. It is important to consider the context of your message and the setting in which it is delivered, according to Reynolds.

She indicated that sending home a letter to students about pandemic “out of the clear blue” would not be the best approach.

“There’s a fine line. We want to be very careful about distribution of materials on pandemic because we don’t want to heighten alarm,” Reynolds said.

Pandemic Threat Is there a legitimate pandemic threat in the U.S.? Experts say, definitely—yes.

There have been three pandemics in the past century, and most experts believe that there will be another.

“We don’t know right now if Avian flu is going to be what causes the next pandemic, but given that we believe there will be another one, it just makes sense to start preparing now,” said Christine Pearson, spokeswoman for the U.S. Cen-ters for Disease Control and Prevention.

Avian flu vs. Seasonal flu The seasonal flu occurs annually, generally from October through April, and is largely preventable through a vaccine.

However, the Avian flu, or the H5N1 strain that has been found in Europe and Asia in infected poultry flocks, has been transmitted from birds to humans with a relatively high mortality rate. The good news is that there has been limited human-to-human transmission. But, the CDC warns that could change.

A pandemic, or global outbreak of a new disease, is identified by three characteristics. It must be a new virus that has the ability to make humans sick, be easily transmitted among humans, and be one that people do not have immunity against, according to CDC’s Pearson.

“People are concerned about the Avian flu because it has two out of those three characteristics,” Pearson said. “It can make people sick and it’s a new virus that people don’t have immunity to.

“The good news is, right now at least, we are not seeing it spread easily from person-to-person.”

Flu viruses constantly change, which explains why the U.S. faces a different strain of flu every year. The threat of the Avian flu is the possibility that it too could change by gaining the ability to pass easily from person to person, resulting in a pandemic. Or, there could be another virus that develops and causes a pandemic.

Since 2003, there have been 267 cases of the Avian flu reported in Europe and Asia, resulting in 161 deaths in 10 countries, according to the CDC.

“If there were to be a case in either a bird or human of H5N1, Avian flu, that would not necessarily mean that there’s a pandemic,” Pearson said. “There’s a lot of work going on now to monitor wild birds and people [who] come into hospitals with new flu viruses.”

How Are School Districts Affected? “The illness rates for both seasonal and pandemic influenza are high among children, and schools are likely to be an important contributor to the spread of influenza in a community,” according to the Pan-demic Flu – A Planning Guide for Educators, distributed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC. The guide offers basics for pandemic planning and suggests that school districts should close early during a com-munity outbreak.

In March 2006, Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of Education, said that educators need to be involved in state and local efforts to prepare for a potential pandemic.

Thomas Slater, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Health and Human Services, recently spoke to ap-proximately 40 communications officers, superintendents and school nurses at a New Jersey School Public Relations Association meeting. His presentation focused on preparing for a health crisis.

During a pandemic, the biggest weapon school officials have early on is to empower people in their communities, he said.

School districts should incorporate risk communications by developing their messages, practicing delivering those messages and beginning the dialogue—now, Slater said. Communicating in a crisis is much different than communicating at any other time.

Each of New Jersey’s 21 counties has a risk communicator. School districts should contact their risk communicators and ask to be part of their teams.

“In the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of this in the news. Major headlines about a bird flu pandemic that’s going around or that could happen. That could really destroy the fabric of society,” said Slater.

U.S. Pandemics The last pandemics to hit the U.S. occurred in 1918, 1957 and 1968. The 1918, by far, was most severe of the three, killing 675,000 people in the nation and up to 50 million worldwide. The CDC, however, wants the public to re-member that in 1918 treatments and surveillance were not at the same level as they are now. So, results could be different.

“We’re overdue. It’s going to happen eventually, so we need to be preparing. We haven’t heard much about it. There haven’t been many new cases of Avian flu overseas and it hasn’t come here,” he said. “Now is the time to prepare. That’s what we’ve been doing on the state level.”

Since 1999, New Jersey has had a flu pandemic plan—www.nj.gov/health/flu— which has been updated four times since and is under revision again, Slater said. The state Department of Health and Human Services has been working with partner agencies, including the state Department of Education, to prepare strategies.

District Planning School-municipal cooperation is key to devising a plan. For example, the Montgomery Township School District is working closely with its municipal government, which has an emergency management crisis team. Montgomery school officials want to create a step-by-step plan for teachers, use their Web site to notify the public, and discuss ways that classes could be held online should schools have to close during a crisis, said Anna Murphy, spokeswoman for the Montgomery schools.

Montgomery is also interested in establishing its own pandemic policy and is asking its teachers and staff to look at ways that they could continue to teach, if they cannot be in school.

“How do we cope with educating students if we’re out for a long time? We have a distance learning lab we want to look at. Perhaps that is a way to do that,” Murphy said. “There’s a variety of options based on technology and resources we have here at the school district. So, we can go beyond just communicating that we’ve got the pandemic flu or health issues.”

Crisis Communications Since 9/11, crisis communications has been essential, according to Slater. He points to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s strong leadership on that day.

Many of Giuliani’s responses to questions were not off the fly. In fact, they were the result of careful planning that began when he first took office some ten months after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, according to Slater. Giuliani decided that he needed to be prepared to lead his city in the event of a catastrophe. So his team got together and came up with the 10 most horrific things that could happen to the city. And once a month or every other month they rehearsed.

One of the first questions Giuliani was asked on 9/11 involved the number of casualties he expected. His response: “More than any of us can bear.”

“You can anticipate questions that will be asked,” Slater said. “And now is the time to do that for a pandemic.”

The public wants facts, they want to be empowered to make decisions and they want to be involved during a crisis, Slater said. Giuliani implored New Yorkers to act as models for the rest of the world after Sept. 11, 2001.

“That’s how he got his people involved,” Slater said.

District Ahead of the Game In Long Branch, the school district has a 3-day supply of water, nonperishable foods, toiletries, medication and other supplies if a pandemic or other disaster should strike.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed shortly after, school officials formed a committee to review security measures at the district’s nine schools, school board office and alternative high school, said Kathleen Celli, director of school-based youth services program, one of 71 in the state under the state Department of Health and Senior Services.

“I feel that we are going to get some advance notice with the bird migration” if an Avian-type flu were to hit New Jersey, Celli said. “It’s not that we’re going to wake up one day and it will be here.”

Long Branch has a registered nurse in each of its 12 buildings who can administer medication such as inhalers, insulin, nebulizers, aspirin and antibiotics. Plus, the district has two nurse practitioners. It also has cots, portable potties and defibrillators in stock to care for the district’s 4,900 students and 980 employees.

Said Celli, “We’re prepared as well as we can be at this time.

On the Net U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: www.pandemicflu.gov. New Jersey pandemic site: www.NJFluPandemic.gov.

Rosa Cirianni is a writer for NJSBA’s Communications Department. She could be reached at (609) 278-5247 or rcirianni@njsba.org.

What Districts Could Do to Prepare

• Incorporate risk communications into an emergency program.
  
  
• Develop messages.
  
  
• Practice delivering those messages.
  
  
• Begin the community dialogue – now.

What Officials Should Remember During Emergencies

• Be first, be right and be credible.
  
  
• Inform the public.
  
  
• Speak with one voice, one message.
  
  
• Show confidence and expertise.
  
  
• Be honest and open.
  
  
• Show empathy early.
  
  
• It is better to back off, than to go back after something is said.
  
  
• It is better to under-reassure, than to over-reassure.

Source: New Jersey Department of Health and Human Services, Thomas Slater