N.J. Prepares to Seize Ailing School District

Last year, almost three-quarters of the ninth-graders in Jersey City, N.J., public schools flunked a basic proficiency test. A state investigator denounced the physical condition of the district’s 35 schools as deplorable and noted that politics seems to determine who is hired and promoted in the system.

This week, New Jersey’s state government--fed up with the inability or unwillingness of its second-largest school district to solve its own problems--is expected to move to seize control of the troubled Jersey City system and fire those who run it.

The action, which would be the state’s first use of its 4-month-old school-takeover law, would be the boldest and riskiest step yet in what has become a national drive to make school districts more accountable to the states that fund them, a drive that pits the public’s growing dissatisfaction with educational quality against a fiercely guarded tradition of letting local communities run their own schools.

Other States Watching

New Jersey’s decision is likely to be felt in the eight states that have passed but not tested their own versions of school-takeover laws. Also interested will be states, such as California, which are moving toward such measures.

“We’re all watching New Jersey, and I’m sure they’re watching us,” said California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig. Legislation under consideration in California is not as stringent as the New Jersey law and would allow state takeover of individual schools, rather than entire school districts. It is backed by Honig and Gov. George Deukmejian.

New Jersey Republican Gov. Thomas H. Kean has charged the Jersey City district with “corruption and incompetence, political favoritism, nepotism and as many things as you can imagine.”

But Jersey City school officials have vowed to fight the move, saying there is no evidence that the state could handle the job any better than they without spending a lot more money--which the district’s residents do not have.

Others agree and suggest that New Jersey may be shifting control in the wrong direction.

“We aren’t all that convinced that the state has a better idea of how to do it,” said Robert Hochstein of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Hochstein contends that the tougher standards states have put on local school systems in recent years have failed to produce much improvement. “If the last years have taught us anything,” he said, “it’s that management of schools should be school-based. The key here is to move more authority and autonomy to the school level.”

Move Gains Steam

Nevertheless, the push toward more state control is gaining steam as employers, taxpayers and politicians grow increasingly dissatisfied with public schools and the graduates they are producing.

States also are demanding more authority over schools as they are being asked to pick up more of the cost of running them. Federal budget restraints and measures such as California’s Proposition 13 limiting local property taxes have left states paying a greater share of school district budgets.

The concept behind New Jersey’s new law has been praised by President Reagan, and Education Secretary William J. Bennett has described it as “perhaps the most decisive measure a state can take to ensure accountability. The fact that someone is watching--and the implied threat of action--will undoubtedly serve as a spur to improvement.”

New Jersey will not announce its decision until Tuesday, but all signs are that it plans to go ahead with the takeover. If it issues the order as expected, the district will have 20 days to begin an appeal to an administrative law judge.

Saul Cooperman, New Jersey’s education commissioner, likened a takeover to declaring the district “educationally bankrupt.”

He said it would be handled much like a corporate bankruptcy, when a firm’s operations are turned over to trustees. The top administrators and school board would be replaced by state-appointed officials, who would make both day-to-day and long-range decisions for at least five years.

Big Political Risk

Cooperman admitted that the political risk is a big one, given the enormous stake that Kean has invested in dramatic and creative education reform.

“When schools fail, it’s adults who failed, and adults should pay the price,” Kean said as he signed the legislation last January after a bitter two-year struggle with the Legislature.

If the state takes over the district and does not solve its problems, Kean’s words may come back to haunt him. “The pressure will be on us, (with critics saying) ‘OK, smart boy, let’s see what you can do,’ ” Cooperman said. “There will be people behind the trees who absolutely want us to fail. Local control is sacrosanct.”

Cooperman himself expressed strong support for local control as a general rule, but added: “Some of the districts just kind of thumb their noses at us. I can’t just turn my back.”

Although Jersey City leaders acknowledge that their schools have severe problems, they say a state takeover is not necessarily the right solution.

“It’s not all that bad. We have deficiencies, but we work on them. We want to work on them,” Jersey City Mayor Anthony R. Cucci said. He believes that the embattled district has made “baby steps toward improvement.” For example, although last year’s 74.1% failure rate on the ninth-grade proficiency test was abysmal, it represented a gain from 1986 when 84.6% flunked the exam.

Jersey City is a faded Hudson River industrial town that has struggled since the 1940s to rebuild its eroded economic base. It has a long history of corruption, but a series of federal and state investigations have only occasionally shaken local residents’ faith in their elected officials.

Failed Minimum Standards

Its school district, which has almost 30,000 students, failed to meet minimum standards to win five-year certification from the state in 1984, setting in motion the three-stage process that has brought it to the brink of takeover.

As the system continued to show little progress, Walter J. McCarroll, an assistant education commissioner, ordered a detailed investigation last year. It produced a 6-inch-thick report being studied by Cooperman as he makes his decision on whether to take over the district.

Although the report has not yet been released, McCarroll indicated in a letter last June to district officials that an initial review already had found cause for serious concern. The district, he suggested, has problems that go beyond those facing most urban school districts. Among them:

--”Positions are created, abolished, personnel transferred, demoted, promoted and hired with each change of municipal leadership.” McCarroll noted that 70 employees were ordered transferred or demoted in 1985, the last year that the mayor’s office switched hands, and that the district has had four superintendents in as many years.

--Financial controls are haphazard. McCarroll cited one instance where the superintendent received a $1,000 cash advance from the school board secretary’s revolving account, and another in which public funds paid for repairs to school district employees’ personal automobiles and more than $400 in parking fines.

--Bidding procedures, where they exist, are not followed. Two contractors, for example, were paid $3.5 million more than they were authorized over a three-year period.

--”Generally, the facilities are in a deplorable condition of repair.” McCarroll cited non-operating ventilation systems, filth, severe roof leaks, missing electrical fixtures and numerous safety hazards.

--Curriculum is outdated, and in a low-income district with an 86% minority enrollment, school officials display an inadequate knowledge of bilingual, remedial and special-education programs.

Mayor Cucci charges that the state investigators “leaned very heavily on political malcontents from the previous Administration” to come up with a conclusion that “everybody must go in Jersey City.

‘Darn Good Teachers’

“There are some darn good teachers and some darn good administrators” in the school system, he insisted. “There may be someone corrupt; there may be someone inept. But I will not tolerate these generalizations.”

Although the mayor acknowledged that the district “could use help” from the state, he said: “I have all kinds of reservations about giving the state a blank check.”

The law allows school districts under state control to receive expedited state funding, but other spending increases would be financed by local property taxes.

But McCarroll expressed no sympathy for the district’s complaints that it does not have the resources to solve its problems. He said other school systems in New Jersey do a better job with smaller budgets.

“Money is not the problem,” he said. “People are the problem.”