Reassignments, Resignations and the Berkeley Heights Public School District’s Decline

May 20, 20239 Comments

The First of Several Emails I will be sending to the Berkeley Heights Board of Education Exploring the Reasons For the Decline and How to Reverse It

Last week I wrote a series of emails to the Berkeley Heights Board of Education and published articles outlining the drop in proficiencies, their relation to our significant drop in the rankings, and the role that the District’s budget priorities may have in playing a role- higher Administrative and Legal cost with less investment in teachers salaries and textbooks compared to other Districts in our area.

The Budget is a deliberate process – the Superintendent and BOE Majority own what the Budget prioritizes and the process for community input.

Dr. Varley, during the most recent BOE Meeting, stated that the reason for our declines had to do with COVID and AP Students giving up on the tests. In the public, other reasons residents conveyed included that some of our students go to magnet schools. When you consider that every single school experienced COVID, has AP students and students that decide to go to magnet schools, these reasons don’t appear to explain why Berkeley Heights had the largest declines out of the seven schools on our dashboard.

This article looks at two other factors (in addition to budget priority) likely connected to the decline that started with the reconfiguration and continues to this day: teacher reassignment and resignations.

In 2021, now BOE Member Gale Bradford wrote a rather compelling op-ed expressing her concerns about the reconfiguration in which she stated:

“The result of the redistricting implementation is the restructuring of over fifty teachers and the moving of over 50+ classrooms by September 1, 2021, with only 20 teacher-contracted work days left this year.
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Even the most experienced teachers need time to adjust to a new grade level. It takes several years to become comfortable and effectively implement the best practices in education. The District has invested professional days and money to train teachers in grade-level specific programs that they may not use next year. Yes, the broad strands of the programs across the grade levels are similar, but you want your child’s teacher to know the specific materials and that takes time. Let’s take the time to do it right.
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Teaching is a collaborative profession. We work together, and we share together, and we invest in each other for the benefit of our students. Education is not a business. Your children are special and unique individuals, not products. They don’t deserve a teacher who quickly packed materials over a few days and hurriedly set up a new classroom and is working as hard as they can to learn and then teach new grade-level curriculum within weeks. Let’s take the time to do it right.” (source)

At that time, Ms. Bradford was speaking of Dr. Varley’s decision (supported by the the BOE Majority) to pick up and throw 50 teachers into new assignments.

During that time, the District also experienced a mass exodus of teachers (~35 overnight) as Dr. Varley’s leadership style and management philosophy became apparent. All of this prompted the President of the BHEA, during that time, to make the following statements (05/13/2021 BOE Meeting):

What does the research say about teacher exits and grade reassignments?

We use panel data from New York City to compare four ways in which teachers are new to assignment: new to teaching, new to District, new to school, or new to subject/grade. We find negative effects of having a churning teacher of about one third the magnitude of the effect of a new teacher. (source)

This study documents that teacher turnover is strongly related to the pattern of grades that a teacher is asked to teach. Elementary teachers in North Carolina that teach the same grade in their first two years are approximately 20% more likely to stay than teachers who teach two different grades in their first two years of teaching. More generally, within total experience categories, teachers with the fewest years of grade-specific experience have the highest probability of turnover. We argue that this pattern is driven both by the disruption caused by grade reassignment and by the fact that teachers with stable grade assignments have effectively smaller workloads since they can reuse lesson plans and, more generally, apply grade-specific skills. (source)

Teachers who switch grades leave schools at higher rates than their colleagues and exhibit lower impacts on their students’ achievement. For teachers who switch to a nonadjacent grade, these negative effects can wipe out any gains due to increased experience and can persist in the year after the switch occurs. (source)

The results indicate that students in grade levels with higher turnover score lower in both English language arts (ELA) and math and that these effects are particularly strong in schools with more low-performing and Black students. Moreover, the results suggest that there is a disruptive effect of turnover beyond changing the distribution in teacher quality. (source)

So grade reassignments harm academic performance and create resignations which also harm academic performance – a bit of a death spiral when you consider the numbers we are talking about for a District of our size. Experienced teachers leaving the District and being replaced with newer, less experienced teachers either to the school or grade. As Laura wrote in her article yesterday (I hope you all read it), this shell game with teachers has not stopped and neither has the bleeding of experienced teachers leaving our District.

Looking at the whole picture-budget priorities, the atomic nature of the decision to reconfigure our schools made by Dr. Varley and supported by the BOE Majority just as students were returning to school, along with the research on these topics, we can better understand our significant declines.

It is still shocking (but in a “not really” sort of way) that the collective (I’m speaking to you Ms. Penna, Ms. Young, Mr. Cianculli, Ms. Stanley and Ms. Bradford) prevented Dr. Varley from taking the month to prepare to discuss this with the public and threw this in a committee that the public has no access to. This is one month in addition to a whole other month of what had been a community wide discussion.

My Suggestions in connection to this specific issue:

Get rid of Dr. Varley and Ms. Kot’s assistants, stop using lawyers for political hit jobs, personal vendettas, and a defense of claims already admitted to, and put that money into increasing after-school and in-school support for all students on Math, Science, and English Language Arts to help them catch up. Incentivize teachers to stay and stop moving them around – this isn’t a corporation that makes widgets, it’s a school system that serves children and young adults.

But it’s not only the Budget, Grade Reassignments, or Resignations that are likely harming our student achievement- there are other factors at play that I will cover in the days ahead – and they all connect to the very top of our District. In fact, the most likely, problematic and impactful harm unleashed by the Administration and BOE Majority has not yet been explored in the past weeks.

Lastly, Ms. Bradford, an earnest plea to get back to your roots and turn your loyalties away from the sharks and toward reason and evidence – become the voice many of the people who voted for you (not me) thought you would be.

To the Board as a whole: Please make Dr. Varley face the public and present her plan to repair the damage she and her echo chamber have created and answer the reasonable questions we have. It is not too late to turn this around – we can probably fix this in a year or two if you simply accept the evidence and make common sense choices. The research suggests that if you stop the movement of teachers right now we may be able to catch up on the damage caused by this specific issue in a year. The suggestions in this email are, I believe, a good starting point for discussion and there will be more coming.