Jersey Public Schools Research Articles

New Jersey

This article is a brief summary and update of the public school funding in the state of New Jersey for FY2023. The state of New Jersey’s per pupil expenditure rate is among the highest in the nation. The public education funding formula is a complex, student-based design that has ever been fully funded by the legislature. The New Jersey legislature passed the largest state budget in history during the 2021 session at $46.4 billion. The education budget is approximately 20% of the entire state budget. New Jersey public schools will receive $9.9 billion, an increase of $650 million in funding. Since 2018, the Murphy administration has increased K-12 formula aid by more than $1.8 billion. Charter schools are the main alternative to traditional public schooling in New Jersey. As of June 2021, there are 91 charter schools and approximately 57,453 students enrolled in these programs within the state. The major issues impacting P-12 include underfunded pension plans, equity of school funding, and special education funding. The legislature approved the governor’s recommended addition of $649.8 million in K-12 formula aid. This increase puts New Jersey on track to fully fund the formula by 2025.

Abstract 13107: Addressing Sudden Cardiac Arrest: An Analysis of the Efficacy and Implementation of Automated External Defibrillators in New Jersey Schools

Introduction: Out of hospital sudden cardiac arrest is a major health concern with a low survival rate. Proper Automated External Defibrillator use has been shown to decrease mortality associated with OHCA. In 2014, New Jersey passed Janet’s Law to mandate automated external defibrillator access in all public and private schools. Our project surveyed NJ schools to evaluate the implementation of AEDs and to analyze their usage and outcomes. Hypothesis: Schools that were adherent to AED placement and training as outlined in Janet’s Law will likely have more positive outcomes from sudden cardiac arrests on school properties than schools that do not. Methods: An observational, cross sectional study was conducted via an online form (Redcap 12.4.2) sent to New Jersey public school nurses. Data was collected from February to June 2023 and analyzed using SAS version 9.4. Results: 301 (99.7%) responses reported having automated external defibrillators. 85.3% of schools provided AED staff training. 42 schools (14.4%) utilized an AED in a cardiac emergency, most often occurring to students in classrooms. An AED was administered by school employees 95.8% of the time. In 80.5% of cases, the patient was resuscitated on scene with no long term neurological complications. 87.2% of schools have an emergency response plan. Conclusions: Our data highlights the impact of proper AED utilization to positively influence out of hospital sudden cardiac arrest outcomes in pediatric populations. Despite Janet’s law being an unfunded mandate, we found near complete compliance among New Jersey schools. The majority of reported sudden cardiac arrests occurred in a classroom setting, necessitating available resources throughout school facilities. In these events, the percentage of positive patient outcomes in our study was significantly higher than the national average with excellent neurological recovery. This discovery may be a product of excellent response rates by trained staff as mandated in Janet’s law. Our findings highlight the need for awareness, training, and accessibility regarding AEDs.

New Jersey

This article is a brief summary and update of the public school funding in the state of New Jersey for FY2022. The state of New Jersey’s per pupil expenditure rate is among the highest in the nation. The public education funding formula is a complex, student-based design that has bever been fully funded by the legislature. The New Jersey legislature passed the largest state budget in history during the 2021 session at $46.4 billion. The education budget is approximately 20% of the entire state budget. New Jersey public schools will receive $9.9 billion, an increase of $650 million in funding. Since 2018, the Murphy administration has increased K–12 formula aid by more than $1.8 billion. Charter schools are the main alternative to traditional public schooling in New Jersey. As of June 2021, there are 91 charter schools and approximately 57,453 students enrolled in these programs within the state. The major issues impacting P–12 include underfunded pension plans, equity of school funding, and special education funding. The legislature approved the governor’s recommended addition of $649.8 million in K–12 formula aid. This increase puts New Jersey on track to fully fund the formula by 2025.

The Best of School Systems, yet Lowest for Inclusion: Does Insufficient General Educator Preparation Make an Impact?

This article examines the unique situation of New Jersey Public Schools being ranked the best in the nation while simultaneously being ranked the worst in the nation for inclusion of students with disabilities. An examination of the legal and theoretical underpinnings of inclusion is presented, followed by a review of current research in general teacher preparation, and an examination of a sample of state university teacher preparation programs. Implications and suggestions are provided.

When school bells last rung: New Jersey schools and the reaction to COVID-19.

This study was an examination of the immediate effects of remote learning during the COVID-19 shutdown in New Jersey during Spring 2020. This mixed methods study relied on survey data capturing the experiences, difficulties, and successes of 708 New Jersey public school educators during the first few weeks of the school closures. These educators were teachers, administrators, school librarians, and other school personnel. The disruptions of COVID-19 will leave indelible changes on education in New Jersey and beyond, and this research examines the beginning of these changes. The findings indicate that while educators found support from their administration, they also encountered a spectrum of difficulties relating to the absence of face-to-face contact with students, in addition to success in coping with the situation as well as some success that surpassed their experiences of schooling before the shutdown.

Global citizenship education starts with teacher training and professional development

In recent years, the idea of global citizenship has grown in scholarly circles and developed into a nascent discipline known as global citizenship education. As a general matter, global citizenship education strives to deepen cross-cultural understanding through the study of current transnational issues. This qualitative, interpretivist case study examined the roles and responsibilities of global studies teachers at an urban New Jersey public high school. The study included interviews with an administrator, two global studies teachers, and six students enrolled in the second sequence of a two-year course in the global studies curriculum; as well as observations and analysis of the course curriculum, syllabus, and student assignments. This study highlights the continuing need for increased pre-service and in-service training opportunities for teachers of global studies related courses, including teacher education and professional development programs. This study also underscores the need for more research on global citizenship education, and global studies training and certification programs in the United States.

Initial evaluation of the sustainable Jersey for Schools Program and certifications achieved by new Jersey public schools, 2014–2018

Sustainable Jersey for Schools (SJS) includes free and voluntary certification for New Jersey (NJ) public K-12 districts (SD) and schools. SJS promotes increased awareness for waste and greenhouse gas emissions reductions via energy efficiency and conservation measures; environmental education; equity; etc. SD first register with SJS; school(s) then register and pursue one of two current certification levels, bronze or silver. We conducted an initial external evaluation of successes, challenges and potential barriers faced by SJS registered schools pursuing certification 2014-2018. We also assessed potential associations between registered, certified schools in registered SD-compared to registered, uncertified schools and non-registered schools-and available socio-economic status and socio-demographic indicators using other State of NJ agencies data for five school years within 2014-2019. These included per student costs, number of students per teacher and per administrator, number of teachers per administrator, and average daily enrollment. Future SJS successes and challenges may be determined by political will of registered, certified participants; available paid human resources and contributions of unpaid volunteers; financial and technical resources available. Future evaluation research should expand on our initial non-statistically significant regression analyses on factors influencing SJS re-certification and expired certifications plus challenges in rural and relatively sparsely populated counties.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN PUBLIC EDUCATION: THE CASE OF NEW JERSEY HIGH SCHOOLS

ABSTRACT Empirical investigation shows that, even though New Jersey has a very diverse population, most of its public schools remain extremely segregated. According to the Civil Right Project at UCLA, New Jersey is America’‘s sixth most segregated state for black students and the seventh most segregated for Latino students. Such segregation prevents not only hundreds of thousands of minority students, but the entire country from realizing their full potential. The scope of this paper is to analyze selected New Jersey public high schools, understand why they are segregated, and suggest policies to promote greater integration, as well as higher quality education. Keywords inequality, education, social, New Jersey

New Jersey Public School Funding: Efficacy in Distribution and Outcomes

New Jersey Public School Funding: Efficacy in Distribution and Outcomes

“Orange is the New Black” Comes to New Jersey’s Public Schools: Black Girls and Disproportionate Rates of Out-of-School Suspensions and Expulsions

This paper explores out-of-school suspensions and expulsions among Black females, who have often been ignored in the extant educational research literature. More specifically, the authors explore the question of whether Black females have been overrepresented in out-of-school suspensions and expulsions in New Jersey public schools. Using data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), the authors found that Black females in New Jersey have in fact been overrepresented in both, out-of-school suspensions and expulsions. The extent of that overrepresentation of Black females has not only worsened over time but could also be considered graver in New Jersey than in the rest of the United States. The authors additionally contend that these school push-outs increase the likelihood that Black girls will enter the school-to-criminal justice pipeline. After discussing the study findings in detail, the authors provide several recommendations that are designed to help better comprehend and address the various discipline-related issues impacting Black girls in the New Jersey public school system and that could potentially have broader implications for all of the nation’s schools.

Recruitment, Preparation, Placement, and Retention of Alternate Route and College-Prepared Teachers: An Early Study of a New Jersey Initiative

This article reviews survey findings about the recruitment, preparation, placement and retention of 315 elementary, secondary English, and math teachers prepared to enter New Jersey public schools in fall 1987, either having just completed New Jersey college-based education programs (CB) or entering through the New Jersey alternate route (AR) program. Teachers were surveyed through their sixth year of teaching. The AR program increased the number of teachers for urban and rural schools and diversified the teaching pool. AR teachers held more traditional views than those prepared in CB programs, but neither program recruited teachers with a consistently higher quality profile. Programmatic aspects (i.e., fusing of AR recruitment, preparation, and placement phases) correlated with some differing attitudes of teachers toward teaching and their programs, and qualitatively different experiences in preparing to teach. During the first two years, AR teachers were more likely to teach in urban schools, but differences diminished over the next four years. Three-year retention rates were highest for elementary and CB math teachers and lowest for AR math teachers. Six-year retention rates were highest for CB math teachers and lowest for AR math and English teachers. AR retention rates were higher for males, while CB retention rates were higher for minorities. Attitudes related to retention indicate program, subject matter, and elementary/secondary differences.

Identifying New Jersey Teachers’ Assessment Literacy as Precondition for Implementing Student Growth Objectives

The Student Growth Objectives are assessments created locally or by commercial educational organizations. The students’ scores from the Student Growth Objectives are included in teacher summative evaluation as one of the measures of teacher’s effectiveness. The high amplitude of the requirements in teacher evaluation raised a concern of whether New Jersey public school teachers were competent in assessment theory to effectively utilize the state mandated tests. The purpose of this quantitative study was to identify New Jersey teachers’ competence in student educational assessments. The researcher measured teachers’ assessment literacy level between different groups based on subject taught, years of experience, school assignment and educational degree attained. The data collection occurred via e-mail. Seven hundred ninety eight teachers received an Assessment Literacy Inventory survey developed by Mertler and Campbell. Eighty-two teachers fully completed the survey (N=82). The inferential analysis included an independent-sample t test, One-Way Analyses of Variances test, a post hoc, Tukey test and Welch and Brown-Forsythe tests. The results of this study indicated teachers’ overall scores of 51% on entire instrument. The highest overall score of 61% was for Standard 1, Choosing Appropriate Assessment Methods. The lowest overall score of 39% was for Standard 2, Developing Appropriate Assessment Methods. The conclusion of this study was that New Jersey teachers demonstrated a low level of competence in student educational assessments. In general, the teacher assessment literacy did not improve during the last two decades.

‘Neither here nor there’: an examination of language curriculum and ideology in a New Jersey public school

ABSTRACTThis case study focuses on one primarily Latino public primary school in New Jersey that waived the state’s bilingual education requirement and implemented a curricular alternative, comprised of bilingual and monolingual English classrooms. A corpus was generated from one-to-one interviews (N = 8) with administrators and teachers, as well as ethnographic observations during the course of two years. Data were then analysed using a critical discourse analysis. Findings reveal clear patterns between educators’ overtly expressed language ideologies and their covert expression in the curricular alternative where (1) bilingual teaching was equated only in relation to the Latino students’ purported limited English proficiency and (2) the belief that monolingual English instruction was to remedy students’ so-called language gaps. Furthermore, different interpretations of the programme and even disagreements that the school actually held a bilingual programme type were observed among teachers and administrators. Considerations for equitable teaching practices are addressed in the discussion.

The Lived Experience of Market-Based School Reform: An Ethnographic Portrait of Teachers’ Policy Enactments in an Urban School

In 2010, the Obama administration called for schools with low standardized test scores, often in high poverty, urban communities, to be targeted for rapid school improvement through reforms in teacher professional development, curriculum, and other areas. Since that time, many of schools deemed in need of improvement have experienced a vast array of reform mandates and intense pressure to put mandates into practice without delay. This article presents a critical policy analysis and an ethnographic portrait of the ways math teachers at a low-performing New Jersey public school make sense of multiple, often incoherent, policy mandates. Using a policy enactment lens, which highlights the discursive dimensions of policy and the significance of context, the author interrogates the ways national discourses—in particular, the promise of private companies’ research-based products and services and the teacher as bad or resistant—enter into the school and inform or delimit teachers’ policy enactments. The author provides a discriptive analysis of the institutional reform narrative based on interviews with school administrators. The author then draws on observation data from teachers’ meetings to show how teachers generally worked diligently to make mandates coherent within their institutional context, but their efforts were often frustrated by the inefficacy, inappropriateness, or sheer number of top-down mandates. Findings challenge conventional policy convergence studies that do not account for the ideological dimensions of enactment. Further, the study challenges conventional scholarly and popular perceptions of urban teachers as resistant to change.

Grounding and Confounding the Educational Entrepreneur: An Exploration of Entrepreneurial Educational Practice Under Market Policy and Discourse in New Jersey

Purpose: This study explores the entrepreneurial behavior of public and charter school leaders in New Jersey as they contend with and are acted upon by the policy environment and develops a theory of the educational entrepreneur grounded in school leaders’ narratives. Research Methods: The work reported here is the qualitative phase of a sequential explanatory mixed methods project. This phase of the study engages situational analysis, a postmodern approach to grounded theory that takes into consideration the situation of the phenomenon under investigation. As a result of theoretical sampling consistent with this approach, 16 school leaders of New Jersey public and charter primary and secondary schools were interviewed between October 2012 and January 2013. Findings: Overall this study produced a grounded theory of an educational entrepreneur as researcher, synergist, and leader within the educational marketplace. These behaviors were mediated by global conditions, such as competition and policy change, and the extent to which the educational entrepreneur is acted upon by these conditions is related to organizational characteristics. As a result, public school educational entrepreneurs are more inward oriented, judging their performance and needs by the benchmarks established by other public schools within a district. Charter schools are more outward and forward oriented, establishing goals and comparing performance in relation to other charter schools and public schools within proximity. Implications: The practical and research implications of this work point toward the creation of graduate programs and educational entrepreneurs empirically situated in continued research on educationally contextualized entrepreneurship theory.

Nonprofit Financing to the Rescue? The Slightly Twisted Case of Local Educational Foundations and Public Education in New Jersey

Scholars have suggested myriad characterizations of the relationship between organizations of the nonprofit sector and government. We expand upon Young’s “slight twist” of the economic supplementary view of government/nonprofit partnership to develop a model to explain the variation in levels of funding by local educational foundations (LEFs) in New Jersey public school districts. Seeking to better understand this private financing of public education, we empirically test for correlates of these funding variations using Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990 data. Although we could not empirically verify an inverse relationship between state aid to education and level of LEF granting, we did find some evidence of a direct relationship between such private financing and median household income. Our analysis supports a more historically nuanced explanation of the role of LEFs in New Jersey public education.

Is Family Responsibilities Discrimination the New Sex Discrimination? Lessons from School TeachersÂ’ Perceptions

This exploratory mixed-methods study uses grounded theory to examine the organizational and individual dimensions of Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD) and perceptions of FRD as a phenomenon and emerging law. By employing a primarily qualitative embedded research design, semi-structured interviews and exit surveys were conducted in three New Jersey public schools to study a sample of teachers and similarly situated professional staff to investigate these topics. This study is the first of its kind to examine FRD, as opposed to gender discrimination, in relation to public sector employees, specifically public school professionals. The results of the analysis of the data, consisting of qualitative themes extracted from the interviews and descriptive statistics from the exit surveys, show that current organizational factors not only fail to mitigate effects of FRD on the work/family balancing act but sometimes contribute to them, and that there is a lack of awareness of the legal concept of FRD, despite knowledge of the existence of discrimination against people with family responsibilities. Based on these preliminary results, recommendations for future research and action in the field are suggested.

Finding a third space in teacher education: creating an urban teacher residency

This paper describes an urban teacher residency program, the Newark Montclair Urban Teacher Residency, a collaborative endeavor between the Newark, New Jersey Public Schools and Montclair State University, built on a decades-long partnership. The authors see the conceptual work of developing this program as creating a “third space” in teacher education. We detail the ways in which we conceptualize epistemology and clinical practice in teacher education, and changes in the roles of the community, and P-12 teachers that occur in a third space. Providing an account of our messy and nonlinear process demonstrates the struggles of creating new spaces for teacher education. We believe the theory that informs our work, the challenges we face, and the strategies for meeting those challenges illustrate the tenuous and ever-evolving nature of doing work in the “third space.”

The effect of administrative pay and local property taxes on student achievement scores: Evidence from New Jersey public schools

We theorized that student test score performance will be positively related to the percentage of school district revenues raised from local taxes and with salary levels of school district administrators. Using both fixed and random effects panel analyses, we examine data for 217 Kindergarten-to-Grade 12 school districts in New Jersey for the years 2002–2009. Our results support the inference that increases in the percent of school funds raised locally have a positive influence on student test scores. However, the results for our hypothesis involving administrative costs were mixed. Administrative salaries and administrative spending were found to be positively related to test score performance in the one-way time fixed effects model, but not in the two-way models. Finally, classroom spending and the student–faculty ratio were found to be positive and significant in some of the tests, although not robust to alternative specifications.

The Effect of Local Property Taxes and Administrative Costs on Student Achievement Scores: Evidence from New Jersey Public Schools

In this study we theorize that student achievement varies cross-sectionally with the percentage of school district revenues raised from local taxes and with salary levels of school district administrators (Superintendents and Principals). This theory is tested using a sample of 218 Kindergarten – Grade 12 school districts in the state of New Jersey. Our regression model includes sixteen variables to explain student achievement scores on standardized exams on Language and Mathematics from years 2001-2006. We find that increases to the percent of school funds raised locally has a positive influence on test scores, consistent with agency models that suggest local property tax funding (opposed to centralized financing) provide a disciplinary mechanism to improve the quality of output from local public good providers (Hoxby 1999). Consistent with our predictions, we find that higher administrative salaries are associated with higher test scores. But we also find that other costs of administration (excluding salaries) are associated with lower test scores. Taken in combination, these results help explain the mixed findings in prior studies that explore the nexus between administrative costs and student achievement.