New Jersey School Checks Are Defended After Audit

The New Jersey education commissioner, Lucille E. Davy, yesterday defended the state’s new monitoring system for school districts, disputing an audit last week that found the Education Department lacked the staff and resources to carry out its increased oversight responsibilities.

Go to City Room » Ms. Davy said she was redeploying the department’s 690 employees and filling about a dozen vacancies in 21 county offices that will work directly with the school districts to address problems cited in the monitoring reports. In addition, department workers will receive additional training to assist the districts better, she said.

“We’re taking this process very seriously,” Ms. Davy said during a telephone conference with reporters yesterday to release the latest batch of monitoring reports for seven districts, including Atlantic City, Elizabeth and Plainfield. “I’m not sure in the past how committed the department was to doing the kind of reviews we’re now doing,” she said.

On Friday, state education officials released an audit conducted in May and June at the behest of the Legislature. The audit, by the consulting firm KPMG, was intended to evaluate the department’s ability to carry out the new monitoring system and other responsibilities it has been recently charged with.

The Education Department began rolling out the new monitoring system, known as the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum, in 2006 after spending more than a year consulting with superintendents, school boards and teachers’ unions, among others, to develop an evaluation system that would combine existing state and federal standards into one streamlined process.

The system will evaluate every public school district in each of five categories — instruction and program, personnel, fiscal management, operations, and governance — and requires the districts to develop a plan to address problems cited in the monitoring reports. The department will then review the district in six months to make sure that progress is being made.

Education officials have said the new system calls for more follow-up and allows the state to assist troubled districts without taking them over entirely. It also provides a way to return local control to Newark, Jersey City and Paterson, which have been under state control for more than a decade.

To implement the new system, the department spent more than $814,000 to contract with Montclair State University to perform the first 15 evaluations, which included some of the state’s most troubled districts.

Peter E. Carter, interim superintendent of the 6,100-student Plainfield School District in Union County, which received its monitoring report yesterday, said it noted problems that had already been resolved. For instance, he said, the district had made several teaching changes and tightened fiscal operations, and has begun to look at revising the curriculum.

“My team and I came to the district nine weeks ago, and we have already addressed many of the items,” he said.

Michael E. Glascoe, the state-appointed superintendent of the Paterson district, who received a report about two weeks ago, said it was the most comprehensive evaluation ever made of the district. Dr. Glascoe, who took over the 28,000-student district in 2005, said the report had provided a lot of data that could be used for continuing improvements.

He said the evaluation team spent 55 days over four months visiting the Paterson schools, interviewed more than 300 district officials and teachers, and held a community forum.

“This is a step in the right direction,” Dr. Glascoe said, “but with any new assessment tool, there’s going to have to be some tweaking and adjustment.”