Board Opposes Portion of Teacher Accountability Bill

 passed a resolution Thursday urging the New Jersey Legislature to amend a Senate bill that seeks to remove the superintendent and board of education from the hiring and firing process for school personnel.

“In a school system like Fair Lawn, the superintendent knows all the personnel, knows what we’re looking at, and he oversees the principals who are evaluating the teachers," Board President Michael Rosenberg said. "We feel that we need that oversight."

The board's proposed amendment would "ensure that personnel hiring and placement decisions remain under the authority of the district superintendent, with the approval of the local board of education."

The Teacher Effectiveness and Accountability for the Children of New Jersey, or TEACHNJ, Act, introduced in February by Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), would give sole authority to appoint or remove instructional staff to a school's principal, in consultation with a school improvement panel, consisting of the principal, an assistant principal and an instructional staff member.

As hiring currently works in Fair Lawn, a school's principal, along with a committee of teachers, interviews prospective teaching candidates and then makes recommendations to Superintendent Bruce Watson.

Watson then meets with the selected candidates and makes his own recommendations to the board, which has the ultimate say.

If the TEACHNJ Act becomes law, the superintendent and the board would be eliminated from the process, which Watson said would lead to inequity in hiring practices.

"People should be evaluated with the same criteria in the same way," said Watson, who favors standardization of hiring and firing. "If you have one principal hiring because of their particular fancy and you have another principal hiring because of theirs, all of a sudden you have this inequity of hiring, so we’re trying to stay the way we have it here because we believe it’s the right way."

Rosenberg said he felt the Christie Administration fails to separate urban from suburban school districts in its education reform initiatives, which leads to problematic bills like this one.

"They're two completely different animals," he said. "Suburban education is working, we have some of the best schools in the country."

Placing hiring authority in the hands of school principals might make sense in a city school district like Paterson, where the superintendent can't be as hands-on given the large number of faculty, Rosenberg said.

But that isn't the case in Fair Lawn -- which has nine schools compared to Paterson's 39 -- Rosenberg explained, because the superintendent knows every staff member working for him.

"I think that may work in an urban district, but I don’t think it works in a suburban district, and it certainly doesn’t work for Fair Lawn," he said.

Copies of the board's resolution seeking changes to the bill will be sent to the governor, select members of the New Jersey Senate and Assembly, the New Jersey School Boards Association and the Bergen County School Boards Association.