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Center on the American Governor, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University http://governors.rutgers.edu/
Lucille Davy Interview (June 26, 2019)
Rick Sinding: Hello. I’m Rick Sinding. It’s Wednesday, June 26th, 2019, here at the
Eagleton Institute of Politics on the campus of Rutgers University. With us today for
the Center on the American Governor is Lucille Davy, who served as commissioner
of education during the administration of New Jersey’s 54th governor, Jon Corzine.
Lucille, welcome to Eagleton.
Lucille Davy: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Rick Sinding: I know you grew up in Livingston, New Jersey. I know you went to
Seton Hall where you majored in mathematics and you got a law degree from Notre
Dame. On your Twitter feed, you describe yourself as an education policy wonk,
mathematician, mom and grandmother. How did you go from being a
mathematician with a law degree to being an education policy wonk?
Lucille Davy: That’s a really interesting question and it really happened by
accident, frankly. Our two little boys, at the time in the early to mid ‘90s, were in
elementary school in Westfield. I was practicing law part time at the time and there
were policy decisions being made at the state level around administrative costs that
were beginning to impact the school district that our boys were attending. And I
began to get involved as a parent—a very, very active parent—and started learning
about the policy that, at least in our district they felt was negatively impacting their
ability to deliver high-quality education. At the time I think the focus was on limiting
administrative costs at the district level, so they were requiring districts to cut back
on their spending, which meant losing curriculum experts in reading and
mathematics and science and music, etc. And frankly because I was active and
involved, I was hearing a lot of this and I was concerned about it, and my husband
at the time was working for then-Mayor Jim McGreevey in Woodbridge. As I’m sure
you know, he ran for governor in 1997, unsuccessfully that year, but continued to
pursue it and ran again in 2001. And after the ’97 election I went—we knew him
socially because my husband worked for him—I went to talk to him one day and I
said, “If you’re going to run for governor, you really ought to have some education
policy; you ought to have a game plan because what happens at the state level can
really mess up what’s going on in local districts.”
Rick Sinding: And vice versa.
Lucille Davy: And vice versa. And I told him the story about what was going on
with administrative costs and I think he was aware of that because he’d run [for
governor] and he’d heard people complain.
Rick Sinding: And he’d been in the state legislature.
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Center on the American Governor, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University http://governors.rutgers.edu/
Lucille Davy: And he’d been in the legislature, and interestingly he also had a
Master’s in education from Harvard, so he had some education-policy background,
too. He certainly had knowledge about that policy.
Rick Sinding: Did he not have other education advisors on his staff or on his
campaign at that point?
Lucille Davy: At the time, in ’97 right after he ran—I mean the first time he ran, I
think it was that he didn’t even expect necessarily to win the primary.
Rick Sinding: Well, everybody expected Rob Andrews, the congressman from
South Jersey, to win that primary. This was 1997.
Lucille Davy: Exactly, so he [McGreevey] won [the primary]. It was kind of a short
time frame to get into a general election. Of course, Governor [Christine Todd]
Whitman was a popular governor. It was a tough election campaign, although he
came fairly close.
Rick Sinding: It was closer than expected.
Lucille Davy: Absolutely, because I think he had some really good messages.
Rick Sinding: Were you involved in that campaign?
Lucille Davy: Very minimally. My husband, because he was the business
administrator in Woodbridge, was not. He was there kind of holding the fort down at
the town, in Woodbridge. I was giving the candidate some advice on education
policy, but really not a lot. There wasn’t a lot of time for that at that point. He really
won the primary in June, early June I guess, and the general election was that fall,
so I did a little bit of volunteering but that was about it. But right after, I did go to
him and say, “I’d like to help you. I’d like to work with you on this.” And one thing
led to another and I actually organized a group of educators with whom he met on
a regular basis throughout, I guess, 1999 and 2000 in preparation for the run in
2001.
Rick Sinding: Who were these educators? Were these local Westfield people whom
you knew or was this a wider universe of educators?
Lucille Davy: It was actually statewide. Because of my education background—I
am a certified teacher. I became certified while I was an undergraduate and had
been active. My dad was on the board of education in Livingston at the time and he
was active at the state level with other school board folks and my dad had been a
Lucille Davy Interview (June 26, 2019) page 3 of 48
Center on the American Governor, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University http://governors.rutgers.edu/
teacher for many years; he had been a college professor. So I had a lot of links to
education.
Rick Sinding: Did you actually teach at any point?
Lucille Davy: After my senior year of college—I was certified at that point—I
taught in the summer school in Livingston, actually with some of my former
teachers, which was really a lot of fun. At the college level, I taught when I was in
law school at Notre Dame. I taught at St. Mary’s College, in the math department,
and then when I first came out and was practicing law before I had our first son, I
taught at Mercer County Community College in the math program in the evening.
And that was an interesting conversation, by the way, to have with the partners in
the law firm when I said, “I want to teach” and they thought I was going to go and
teach business law or something else and I said, “No, no. I’m going to teach
mathematics.” It was a little different, but it was my background and I really
enjoyed it. I enjoyed being a teacher. I probably would have been a teacher if my
father hadn’t said to me, “Teachers don’t make a decent living.” And of course in
the ‘50s and ‘60s, teachers weren’t paid very much. It really took Governor
[Thomas] Kean, I think, to recognize that teachers should be paid as professionals
because they were professionals and to elevate the minimum salary and really
change things. But my father said to me, “It’s good to be certified. You never know
when you might want to use that certificate to teach somewhere, but you should
have another avenue as well.” And that was really why I went to law school. But
there was always this teacher inside me.
Rick Sinding: Were you practicing law throughout this period that we’re talking
about?
Lucille Davy: I was part time, not full time. I was practicing law throughout the
‘90s, once our boys went to school full time.
Rick Sinding: In private practice? Or with a firm?
Lucille Davy: Well, I was with a sole practitioner in town and I basically just did
part-time work for him.
Rick Sinding: Town being Westfield?
Lucille Davy: Yes, in Westfield. He was the Westfield Township Attorney, and in
my prior years of practice in the ‘80s, I had done a lot of municipal work. So I had a
really strong background in municipal law and went to work for him on a part-time
basis. There was a big zoning case; I remember that’s how I first approached him.
There was a huge zoning case going on. The town had turned down some
Lucille Davy Interview (June 26, 2019) page 4 of 48
Center on the American Governor, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University http://governors.rutgers.edu/
development and they needed to defend that action and of course that comes to
the municipal attorney to defend, and so I went to him and said, “Hey, I could help
you.” Our children had just gone to school full time. I’d been out of the practice for,
I don’t know, maybe four or five years. And I said, “I’ve got some time. I’d be
happy to help you work on this case.” And he was grateful to have the help and
because I had some experience, because I had done zoning appeals before, I knew
how to handle that. He was delighted to have the assistance. So I began working on
that.
Rick Sinding: Did you win the case?
Lucille Davy: We did win. Absolutely. I had a good track record as a municipal
attorney. <laughs>
Rick Sinding: Was any of this—your husband’s position in Woodbridge, your
position as a municipal attorney—political, or was this purely professional?
Lucille Davy: They were all professional. My husband had always been a
professional manager.
Rick Sinding: So you were not actively involved politically.
Lucille Davy: We were not, absolutely not. And interestingly, just for a quick side
story, when [my husband] went to Woodbridge—Jim McGreevey had called him
right after he was elected mayor the first time, I think that was in 1992. He called
my husband and wanted him to come to interview. My husband had a really good
reputation as a town manager. And [my husband] Jim [Davy] said, “No, I’m not
interested. I don’t do political. I’m a professional manager.”
Rick Sinding: And McGreevey at the time had just been elected mayor, but also—
was he an assemblyman or a senator? He was in the legislature as well and was a
dual officeholder.
Lucille Davy: He was.
Rick Sinding: And clearly had political ambitions.
Lucille Davy: He clearly did. My husband turned him down and [McGreevey] had
some other people reach out to Jim [Davy] and say, “You should really talk to this
guy. He wants a professional administrator. He doesn’t want a political person. He
wants someone who can do what a good town administrator is supposed to do.”
And so he eventually said yes and went to work for him. The role that I had in the
municipal field—of course municipal attorneys get appointed by elected officials, but
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Center on the American Governor, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University http://governors.rutgers.edu/
in the communities that we served it was mostly councils that were mixed
Democrat and Republican and we weren’t selected because of the party affiliation.
The attorney that I went to work for had been the Westfield Township Attorney for
many, many years. I’m assuming he was connected politically in some way, but I
certainly didn’t work for him on a political basis. So yes, when I went to then
candidate McGreevey—I guess he had been unsuccessful in ’97. Shortly after that,
when I went to him to offer to help him on education policy, it wasn’t from a
political perspective; it really was about good policy. Because I was concerned. Our
boys were in school and I was worried about the impact that bad policy decisions
might have on their educational opportunities, as well as the opportunities of other
children. I never fought just for our children alone. I always fought for all kids
because I thought they all deserved great educational opportunities.
Rick Sinding: In 2001, McGreevey runs again and this time he wins and he
appoints your husband, who has been the business administrator, to be the chief of
management and operations in the governor’s office.
Lucille Davy: Yes.
Rick Sinding: At the same time, you are appointed as an education policy advisor,
I guess you’d call it, in the office of the chief counsel to the governor. Would that be
an accurate description?
Lucille Davy: The title that I had was special counsel for education. It was a
unique role. I think probably other governors along the way may have had someone
like that, but it was different in that I was focused on education, because as we led
up to that campaign in 2001, we had developed an education policy platform from
preschool right through higher education. I had worked on the whole gamut and I
had met with people in the education community with Jim then as a candidate. We
developed policy papers. We had a whole game plan for what we would do if he
became governor in education and so I went into the counsel’s office and had a
really unique role. There were policy people. There were folks that worked in the
counsel’s office on legislation. I did not do that. There was someone else who
looked at the education legislature. I would work with them, but I was focused on
implementing this policy plan.
Rick Sinding: Why from the counsel’s office? Why not from policy and planning, for
example, where that would normally take place?
Lucille Davy: First of all, the policy and planning office wasn’t exactly [set up] the
way I guess it has been in some administrations. But the other thing was that my
husband was involved in that and I couldn’t be working under my husband. It
wouldn’t have been appropriate. But I did have a different role and in the counsel’s
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office, it was a place—I guess I could have been in either place. The policy and
planning office at the time wasn’t as robust in some of the other areas, I think, as it
was in education because of the way the governor had made that a priority and
really had this very, very definite plan, real goals and objectives and very specific
policy initiatives that he wanted to implement.
Rick Sinding: What kind of relationship did you have working out of the counsel’s
office with the folks who were at the Department of Education?
Lucille Davy: A very close relationship. In fact, the person who became the
commissioner actually came out of that group of advisors that I had organized who
met with then candidate McGreevey over a two- to two-and-a-half-year period.
Rick Sinding: Who was that?
Lucille Davy: That was Bill Librera.
Rick Sinding: Oh right.
Lucille Davy: He was among the individuals. There were about 18 folks that I had
brought together. There were several superintendents, there were some principals,
and there were some teachers. So it was a mix of folks in the education community.
Rick Sinding: Frequently, when there is an expert in a particular subject area in
the governor’s office or the counsel’s office or policy and planning, and a whole
department out there that’s focused on the subject area, there is conflict—natural
conflict—over who really speaks for the governor and who has the governor’s back
or whose back does the governor have when it comes to settling any kinds of
disputes. Did you have any of those kinds of situations occur between your position
and the Department of Education or was it all smooth sailing?
Lucille Davy: It was smooth sailing because we had developed this education plan
together. Bill Librera, who was the commissioner, had been involved in that and so
it was the governor, the commissioner, and me. We were all on the same page. We
were all working towards the same goals, and what I was able to do was I had the
governor’s ear and I had the ability inside the governor’s office to move some
things. If anything, I think it gave the Department of Ed a little bit of an advantage
because all the other departments didn’t have someone like me who could advocate
for them, go to the governor directly. It was a unique opportunity but there was
this very, very wide-ranging set of policy objectives, so there was a lot to be done.
The governor had been talking about the funding formula. He’d been talking about
early childhood. He’d been talking about teacher preparation. He’d been talking
about standards and assessments. He’d been talking about accountability. He’d
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been talking about the integration of higher ed with K-12, more closely working
together. Better preparation of teachers. So there was a lot to do. And because the
commissioner had been part of that group, he helped develop this blueprint of what
the plan was.
Rick Sinding: How much of that required legislation and how much legislation was
actually introduced during the two years or two-plus years of the McGreevey
administration?
Lucille Davy: Not a lot of it required legislation. Some of it required funding, which
came through the budget, so we did need legislative support. The work on the
formula that started didn’t happen until actually Governor Corzine was in office but
that work began during McGreevey’s years. It was really difficult because the
formula, as you know, had been struck down multiple times by the [state] supreme
court, so there was a little bit of work on that but we had a very, very statewide
early-learning focus on, really focusing on improving pre-K standards, making sure
that there were opportunities, there was funding. We had an early-literacy initiative
where we funded reading coaches that went into school districts throughout the
state to help support improving early-literacy outcomes because we understood the
importance of children learning to read before they got to third grade. The research
was pretty clear that if they weren’t strong readers by third grade, it was going to
be much more difficult to help them become strong readers. And after third grade,
children are really expected to read for learning purposes and so it was important to
ensure that from pre-K to three you were helping all children become strong
readers.
Rick Sinding: And you got legislative appropriations to do this.
Lucille Davy: I think the first year there was $10 million appropriated just for
reading coaches. We had a program where we identified districts. We put them in
the districts that needed the help the most, so we were looking at outcomes. Where
were the districts where it looked like children were having difficulty? Where could
we support districts that might not have the local funding that would be required to
help them address this? We also put in place an early-literacy-development plan
and we had professional-development opportunities. We actually were fortunate
enough to have Dorothy Strickland who was a professor at Rutgers at the Graduate
School of Education, who was a nationally-recognized expert. She had worked for
presidents from Democrat and Republican administrations. She was really highly
respected and she was right here in our own backyard. So we tapped her and she
led the effort. I mean she was a national early-literacy expert, so we were so
fortunate to be able to work with her and she led an effort to develop really a
blueprint for early literacy that districts could utilize as they were implementing
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early-literacy programs in their districts and there was professional development
offered; this reading coach initiative was just one part of that.
Rick Sinding: Were these programs specifically geared toward districts with large
numbers of students who needed extra assistance or was it statewide?
Lucille Davy: It was statewide, but because the funding was limited to some
extent, we certainly looked at the districts that appeared to be most in need so the
ones where there were more students who weren’t performing at grade level and
we prioritized those districts, but it went across the state.
Rick Sinding: And were those primarily the Abbott districts?
Lucille Davy: It was not the Abbott districts because the Abbott districts had their
own resources. At that time, the court decisions required that the Abbott districts
be given whatever resources they said they needed and so we focused them on
early literacy and wanted them to make sure they were making investments in
early literacy. But they had the resources.
Rick Sinding: So the funding for this program was going—
Lucille Davy: The extra funding went to those non-Abbott districts, which were
districts that had kind of suffered as a result of not having a formula to implement
for so many years. A lot of the money was going to the Abbott districts because of
the court orders.
Rick Sinding: For people who are either watching this or reading the transcript of
this who are either not from New Jersey or have not been living in New Jersey for
the last 30 or 40 years and don’t know what Abbott districts are, we’ll get to that in
a minute when we talk about the whole thorough and efficient system of public
education in the state constitution. But before we get there, let’s get back a little bit
to your biography. With Governor McGreevey’s resignation and the reins of the
governorship going to acting Governor Dick Codey, he appointed you as the acting
commissioner of education. How did that come about?
Lucille Davy: It was very interesting and again quite accidental. I was in the
governor’s office, still in that role of special counsel, when [Codey] took office I
think it was in December or the fall of 2004, I think.
Rick Sinding: Yes.
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Lucille Davy: Maybe that September or October or something, at some point,
because I remember we talked to him. Jim [Davy] and I were actually both in the
car going to visit our son.
Rick Sinding: Are we talking Jim McGreevey or Jim, your husband?
Lucille Davy: No, my husband. My husband, Jim, and I were driving up to
Massachusetts to visit our son who was in a summer program at one of the
hospitals in Massachusetts. We were driving up there and actually Pete
Cammarano, who was at the time the chief of staff I guess. He’d been running the
senate office for, I guess he was then Senate President Codey. But we talked to him
and we talked to the governor actually, Governor Codey, as well. And they asked
both of us to stay on. Jim was at human services at the time and I was in the
governor’s office. So [Codey] said, “Would you stay on?” And we were obviously
delighted to do that; I was really happy to do that because we were in the middle of
a lot of work and there’d been a lot of time and effort put into it, so I was delighted
to have the chance to keep that going forward. So I remained in there and really
had the same role.
Governor Codey—interestingly, his wife is a teacher, or was a teacher at the time.
She may be retired now; I’m not sure. But she was a teacher and so he knew about
what was going on in schools and he had some very specific things that he wanted
to focus on. It was the issue around testing, the way the state tests were being
administered. Teachers were not happy. The tests were being given at the end of
February, the first week of March, and they were supposed to be testing a child’s
knowledge from the full year of school. And yet, if you give the test at the end of
February, you’re basically about two-thirds of the way through the year. You still
have several months of school to go. But you’re asking children to show that
they’ve learned everything for the whole year by the end of February. So there was
that. He was concerned about school funding because of course he was a legislator
and he had constituents in his district and he knew that there was real inequity
coming out of the fact that without having a formula to distribute the money, the
Abbott districts by court order were getting the funding they needed and most of
the other funding was happening first of all very minimally; there wasn’t a lot of
extra money to pass out to every other district. But also it was done by Band-Aids.
So a legislator would say, “Well, there’s not enough money going to this so I want
to isolate some funds and we’ll give it to this.” And then only a certain number of
districts would qualify. So if you had a legislator that had some pull or had some
leverage over the state budget, they might be able to put a Band-Aid on here or
there, but it wasn’t getting funding out in an equitable way.
Rick Sinding: And I imagine that Senator Codey representing the district that he
did had some municipalities that were benefiting from Abbott money and others
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that were not because his district, the Oranges, has East Orange which I’m sure is a
receiving district.
Lucille Davy: That was an Abbott, yes.
Rick Sinding: And West Orange, which is—
Lucille Davy: Not.
Rick Sinding: —an affluent area.
Lucille Davy: Well, although West Orange at the time had a really changing
population, as was happening in many places throughout the state, which was the
reason why I think it really became an imperative to begin to look at funding.
Because as communities that bordered and rimmed a lot of the Abbott districts
were changing and as some of the Abbotts were changing, a place like Hoboken for
example that was attracting a lot of young professionals who couldn’t afford rent in
New York City so they would live in Hoboken and take the train or a ferry over to
the city, they were becoming much more affluent. Jersey City was changing; the
waterfront was changing. Some of the Abbott districts in the Ocean County area,
Monmouth County area, Long Branch, Asbury Park—their populations were
changing and they were becoming wealthier so the inequity—
Rick Sinding: And there were some inner suburbs that at the same time were
beginning to decline.
Lucille Davy: You had suburbs that were beginning to serve student populations
that were harder to serve because either the children came from families where
English wasn’t the first language, maybe English wasn’t even spoken at home, or
they were lower-income families and those children, as we knew from the Abbott
decisions, those children need more resources. They need more support.
Rick Sinding: Also those districts, because the tax base was declining, were less
able to raise the money through local property taxes to pay for public education and
that really is the basis of the entire structure that the supreme court has been
talking about all these years. But wait a minute. Let’s get back, before we get
there.
Lucille Davy: Okay. So I was in the governor’s office. I’m still working for Codey.
He had some things he wanted me to focus on and I did. I continued to do the
policy work. In the middle of the summer, the commissioner, I guess, gave his
notice that he was going to be leaving at the end of August and then—I guess she
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was the chief of management and operations, Diane Legreide—called me into her
office.
Rick Sinding: She had succeeded your husband, who was now the commissioner
of human services.
Lucille Davy: She had replaced my husband, yes. So she called me into her office
and she said, “The governor wants to send you over there to DOE.” And I just
looked at her like, “What?” And she said, “No, he wants you to go over there. When
Librera leaves, he wants you to go take over.” And I said, “I can’t do that. I’m not
qualified to do that. I’m not prepared to do that.” And she said, “What do you
mean? No one knows more about the policy work and what we’re trying to achieve
than you do.” And she said, “He wants to talk to you.” So I said, “Okay.” So we
scheduled a time. I went in to meet with him and I told him also that I didn’t really
think I was equipped for the job. And he said, “You most certainly are equipped for
the job.” And he gave me three priorities. One was testing, one was the formula,
and I can’t remember what the third one was. There were three things he said to
me: “Go over there and get these three things straightened out.” Oh, I know, it was
the QSAC, the Quality Single Accountability Continuum, which he had been pushing
because the plan was that the state needed an exit strategy out of those state
takeover districts. At the time, Newark, Jersey City and Paterson were all in state
takeover and it was just taking too long. None of these districts were able to get
themselves out from under it and he didn’t think that the department had focused
enough on coming up with a plan for how you would evaluate whether or not the
districts were able to begin to regain some local control. One of the problems was
that in the past the theory had always been you don’t give them back local control
until student achievement reaches 80 percent of students proficient and that was a
really high bar.
Rick Sinding: That’s a high bar, yes.
Lucille Davy: And it’s also not the only thing you look at to tell if the district is
improving and functioning better. So while I was in the governor’s office working
with the department, we had been working on what they called QSAC, the Quality
Single Accountability Continuum, and that was a way of evaluating districts on a
continuous-improvement basis, looking at five different areas. One was around
student achievement but one was on personnel, one was on governance, one was
on finance, and one was on sort of the more administrative other programming kind
of areas, special education, things like that. And so Governor Codey asked me to go
fix the testing. The state was about to award a $70 million contract to basically
continue the testing that was the same kind of testing that we had been doing and
he didn’t want that. He wanted me to really try to go do a better job on that. He
wanted me to focus on the formula. He was getting a lot of pressure from his
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colleagues in the legislature because he was serving as the acting governor but he
was also still the senate president and so they wanted some action on that area. He
wanted me to go over and kind of keep that moving. Work was being done, but he
wanted to make sure that we kept moving the ball down the field. And then the
QSAC issue, regulations and kind of a game plan needed to be completed. So I
went over.
Rick Sinding: You learned that you don’t say no to the governor.
Lucille Davy: You don’t say no, certainly
Rick Sinding: Even if he’s the acting governor.
Lucille Davy: Ever. You never say no to the governor. And I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
He really seemed to have tremendous confidence in my ability to go over there and
do that. The advantage that I had, I think—and I don’t know that I realized this
back then—I had been working closely with the department and with the staff and
they trusted me and they knew that I was about good education. I was focused on
good education policy. I wasn’t going to come over there and fire people and
change the game plan and turn the place upside down. I was going over there to
help them continue to do the good work that they were doing and so I was really
welcomed by the senior staff.
Rick Sinding: I presume that your reason for thinking that you weren’t qualified to
do this is because you had no administrative experience to run a department. Was
that your basic concern?
Lucille Davy: It was that I had no administrative experience to run a department,
but also I had never been a principal or a school superintendent. I mean, in
retrospect I know now that that’s not required. I really think that I actually had the
skill set that served the best and that was that I understood good policy, I was
steeped in the research, I knew what research said worked, what research said
didn’t work, and I had a wonderful network, not just within the state, but I had built
up a national network of resources.
Rick Sinding: Did you find that administration was difficult or because of the fact
that you were respected for your policy “wonkishness” that that sort of came
naturally? Or were there people in the department who handled the administrative
side competently that would allow you to continue to vote for some policy?
Lucille Davy: That was the good fortune. I actually had a group of the senior
team, so I had a deputy commissioner and then six assistant commissioners. I kept
most of the people who had been in place. I kept them there. Two of them left, the
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finance person and the person doing curriculum and standards, but I elevated
people who were in the department who had been lifetime department staff who
really knew their stuff and I guess in many cases people don’t have opportunities to
move up like that because commissioners often bring people in to the top-tier
senior staff positions. I didn’t have time to do that. I went over there the first week
of September, I think, or second week of September and I was really planning to be
there until January 17th or whatever of 2006. I had no expectation that I was going
to be able to stay and actually serve in a full term as commissioner.
Rick Sinding: Now, there was a period there where your husband was serving as
the commissioner of human services, you were serving as the acting commissioner
of education, the only husband and wife team in New Jersey history—the first. I’m
not sure if there have been since then. I don’t recall if there have been or not. But
you were certainly the first husband and wife team to serve simultaneously in a
governor’s cabinet. Did that cause any difficulties for you, any problems? Were
there any situations where you had a cabinet meeting where you and your husband
disagreed about something or—
Lucille Davy: No, I don’t—
Rick Sinding: —you had to gang up on other members of the cabinet?
Lucille Davy: You know what? It’s interesting, but he was in human services and
he had his hands full. At that time they were really working to change the whole
child welfare system. And I had my hands full at DOE because the governor had
said, “Go do these things. Go work on these things.” So we basically—the biggest
problem was not enough of us at home with two teenagers. We were fortunate they
were good students and really good kids but if anything it was that we didn’t spend
enough time with them during that time period. We both worked really long hours,
each in our own way. It’s interesting because the cabinet—I don’t think there was
ever, at least in the time that I served, I never sensed that kind of cabinet
competition. Even in Governor Corzine’s term, I never sensed that. Maybe it was
because I was always focused on what I was doing and not really worried about
anything else, but I never sensed people were trying to get one leg up on
somebody else.
Rick Sinding: The 2005 election. By this time, your husband, Jim, is entering the
private sector. He’s setting up his own consulting company. He’s leaving
government. You’re staying on and you stay on as acting commissioner of
education. At what point did the Corzine transition team let you know that you were
going to continue in that capacity? Was it like most situations, the Sunday before
the Tuesday of the election they call you and say, “Would you like to stay here,
please?”
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Lucille Davy: No, it was right after New Year’s, I think. I received a call from, I
think it was Heather Howard. She was the governor’s chief policy counselor and she
said that [Corzine] wanted to talk to me. so I went and met with him.
Rick Sinding: Did you know him at all? Had you ever met him?
Lucille Davy: I had not met him. I had been advising off-time, on my own time. I
had been giving some advice to folks who were working on education policy for him.
I mean, that was to some extent selfish because I was keenly aware that the states
that had made the most progress in terms of improving student outcomes and
really helping all children to be prepared for postsecondary work and college, etc.—
the states that had been most successful were the ones that had sustained
leadership and sustained policy focus. Massachusetts comes to mind for example.
They catapulted to the top of the country because in the early ‘90s they set some
very strong goals and the commissioner served, I think, almost two decades
through Republican and Democrat governors and it made a big difference. And so I
understood that if everything that we worked so hard on for four years was going to
be left by the wayside, that that was going to mean that we weren’t going to make
the kind of progress that I had hoped we would and certainly that I had invested a
lot of my time and energy into helping make happen. So I had been giving them
some advice. And Governor Corzine was a huge supporter of early childhood. He
had been when he was in the U.S. Senate. He was an incredible supporter. He
understood the importance of early-childhood education. He understood why that
was the best investment you could make to help children succeed when they get to
K-12 and beyond. And so that was already a big priority for him. It was also a
priority in the McGreevey and Codey years. So that was a good thing.
But I wanted them to know what we were doing on the formula. He was obviously
interested in the formula because, again, everybody throughout the state was
saying, “This has to be fixed. School funding can’t be given out in a piecemeal
basis. There needs to be more equity and these districts that are really suffering
because they don’t have the tax base to provide high-quality educational
experiences need help. The state needs to step up and fulfill its constitutional
obligation.” So I gave them a little bit of advice hoping that they would have the
same priority from a focus perspective. I went to meet with him. It was an evening
during the first week of January, I think it was. And he said to me that he’d heard
really good things about the work that I was doing but that he had already
committed to doing a national search for a commissioner. And I said that I
understood that. He said, “Well, I hope you’ll stay on. I hope you’ll put your name
in to the search process.” He wanted to know what we were doing and I told him
where we were and what the status was of the things we were working on and he
said, “Keep doing what you’re doing.” He was pleased to know that we were
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working on a formula because he knew that had to be a priority. And so I stayed
on, I put my name in the mix, and I think in—
Rick Sinding: July.
Lucille Davy: Sometime in July, I guess, I emerged as the successful candidate.
Interestingly I didn’t skip a beat from the day he was sworn in. I never acted like an
acting commissioner even though I never knew how many days I had. <laughs> I
acted like the commissioner because I felt like I had to. I had this deep feeling
inside that I was working on behalf of the state’s children and so that was my goal.
For however many days I was going to be there I was going to give it a hundred
and fifty percent to make sure I did whatever I could to improve their opportunities
in education. So even though that was almost six months I guess—it was almost six
months to the day, I think <laughs> from January to July—we just kept pushing
ahead and we kept working on the initiatives. We moved QSAC along and we were
working on the formula in earnest and really working with legislators. There were
folks in the legislature at the time—the late Senator John Adler was a huge
proponent of getting the formula done and getting it right. Senator Barbara Buono
was a huge proponent of focusing on it and getting it done. There were some folks
in the assembly the same way. I mean, there was a core group of legislators who
really said, “No matter what else you do we have to get this done and we have to
do it right.” So I was named, I guess, or he nominated me in July. I wasn’t sworn in
until October.
Rick Sinding: It’s interesting because Governor Corzine’s first budget, which he
introduced in I think February or March of 2006, called for two billion dollars in
spending cuts and eliminating a thousand state jobs. Every commissioner of every
department was ordered to come up with a list of program cuts or places where
money could be saved. You’re the acting commissioner at the time. How did that
affect your department? How did you function as acting commissioner, having to go
through the department’s budget and either lay people off or cut programs or cut
money from your budget?
Lucille Davy: Well, we did have to cut back on some programs. The real challenge
was from the perspective of personnel because we couldn’t hire people.
Rick Sinding: Because there was a hiring freeze.
Lucille Davy: I had created a math and science office and we were really trying to
focus on elevating mathematics because we understood that in the twenty-first
century knowing how to read is not sufficient. Children have to be numerically
proficient as well and they have to be critical thinkers and jobs in New Jersey, given
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the pharmaceutical industry and a lot of the other industries, really required
students that had more science, technology, mathematics skills.
Rick Sinding: This was STEM, right?
Lucille Davy: Yes, exactly, before STEM became as popular as it is. And we also
knew that districts were struggling because student math achievement was flat. We
weren’t getting the kind of improvement that we needed. And we also knew that
there were lots of children that were having difficulty on the high school test, which
was frankly a fairly low bar. Mid-year Algebra I was all we were asking.
Rick Sinding: Was it the HSPT or had that already been—I can never keep up with
all the acronyms of the different statewide tests that have come along.
Lucille Davy: Well, the HSPT was the first high-stakes high-school test. At that
point, it had become the HSPA, which was the High School Proficiency Assessment,
but almost the same test, still with a relatively low bar. We were actually asked to
participate with a group of, I think it was eight or nine states, where Achieve, a
think tank in D.C., looked at the test—looked at the items, analyzed the test, your
high-school exit test or your high-school exam—analyzed the items and then
analyzed what it took to be deemed proficient for your graduation exit. And we
actually stacked up pretty well among the other states, but it was still determined
to be a relatively low bar. They were the ones who concluded that children could
leave high school having passed the High School Proficiency Assessment with about
the middle of the Algebra I year of knowledge despite the fact that for many
years—from the ’90s at least—the state standards required that children master
parts of Algebra II and Geometry to graduate. I mean, that was in the high-school
standards. But the high school test was never measuring those standards. So one
of the things we were transitioning to—and this was with Governor Corzine’s
support—was moving to end-of-course exams where children would take an Algebra
I test at the end of their algebra course so that they would know for sure whether
or not they had mastered algebra. We had a test that we worked on with other
states for Algebra II and for Geometry, an end-of-course exam. We actually knew
that we had to focus on that. We had to improve mathematics achievement.
Literacy wasn’t enough of a focus; you had to be balanced in both areas.
Rick Sinding: Were you able to fill the position of the science and mathematics—
Lucille Davy: We had one person. Our goal was to have more math specialists that
we could then send out to help districts. We were never able to do that. I did have
one person because we had gotten her on board before the hiring freeze.
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Rick Sinding: Well, in the next budget, the cabinet officers were ordered to create
plans to cut three billion dollars in the budget and the final budget that was adopted
cut another 2100 jobs. By this time, you are the commissioner, not the acting
commissioner, but you’re under the gun again to reduce costs and to reduce staff.
How did that affect your ability to do what you felt the department needed to do?
Lucille Davy: Well, again it was really difficult to hire people. You had to go and
get special permission to fill a spot. And there were a few occasions where we lost
someone who couldn’t be replaced by advancing someone within the department.
We had to go out to find someone. So that was a problem. But the other thing I
should point out is that most of the Department of Education’s budget was school-
funding money that was going out. Our budget compared to most of the other
departments was relatively modest.
Rick Sinding: The actual operating budget of the department.
Lucille Davy: We had a relatively small staff compared to many of the other
departments, so our operating budget was minimal. We didn’t get impacted the way
some of the other departments did, where they actually had to reduce staff or not
fill positions. We didn’t fill positions. When we lost people through attrition or
retirements, we didn’t get to fill most of those positions, but we didn’t have that
many to start with.
Rick Sinding: How large was the department at the time?
Lucille Davy: I think we had about 800.
Rick Sinding: Yes, that’s small.
Lucille Davy: It was relatively small and many of those people were in county
offices, as well. All those people counted. We had people that worked on special
education. The state school for the deaf was within our department, so those people
were counted within that. The nucleus down in our offices in Trenton on Riverview—
we were a minimal staff, candidly. It was difficult because there were a lot of places
where I wanted to beef up the staff. I wanted to bring more help in and we
couldn't, and that made it difficult. But because most of the money went out for
school funding, there weren't any cuts to school funding. There were no increases.
But my recollection is there weren't any cuts.
Rick Sinding: I want to move on to April, 2007, when Governor Corzine was nearly
killed in an automobile accident that had him out of commission for several weeks.
We've talked to a lot of people, both from the governor's office and from the
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cabinet about not only their personal reactions to that but how it affected their
ability to do their job during his absence. How did it affect you?
Lucille Davy: Well, I mean, obviously it shakes you up to know that something like
that's happened to the governor. I think many of us got to see him when he first
came home, which was reassuring. There was a lot of good communication from the
governor's office about his well-being, because we were all obviously concerned
about that. Again, I have to be candid; I was laser-focused on some really difficult
work. We had a lot of initiatives that we were trying to move forward and I knew he
was counting on me to deliver. And so my theory was, while he's recovering, we
need to make sure that we're delivering on what he expects of us from the
department. One of the things I don't think I mentioned was we had tried at the
end of 2006 to move ahead with a formula. We had really been working hard on it.
And I remember sitting with him and with Heather [Howard] in a meeting to talk
about where we were. I think it was early to mid-December; it was just before the
holidays. Because the guillotine kind of came down for the budget in February, so
you had to be ready. If we couldn't get a formula done and passed through the
legislature in time to be able to run those numbers for school aid numbers as part
of his budget address, it was going to be impossible. We'd have to wait another
whole year.
Rick Sinding: Right.
Lucille Davy: So we were really working hard to try to get it to a point where we
could move it to the legislature. We had been working with legislators. We had done
focus groups with people trying to help them understand what we were trying to
accomplish with the formula. But candidly, it wasn't really quite ready. I thought we
could try. I wasn't sure we could convince enough legislators to vote for it. We sat
down with Governor Corzine and he wanted us to be candid with him and we were.
Heather was working closely with us on this. We were working with the Attorney
General's Office as well, because we knew it was going to go to the court
eventually, the [state] Supreme Court for a ruling. And I think the governor said to
me, "It sounds to me like you're really not quite ready." And in my heart I knew he
was right. I was disappointed because I felt like I was letting him down because I
knew how much he wanted to do that sooner rather than later.
Rick Sinding: But he also must've recognized how complicated this was.
Lucille Davy: He did. And he said, "You know, it's been 30 plus years. People have
put forth formulas. They haven't been upheld. So if we take another year to get it
right and to do the work that we need to do to convince folks that this is the right
formula, let's do that." So we at that point regrouped and said, "Okay." And then
had a game plan to get this done during 2007. So that I think is where the accident
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sort of impacted us a little bit, because while we were moving ahead, there was a
lot of upheaval around everything that was happening. So it wasn't as easy to—
certainly we weren't able to communicate with him on where we were going. His
staff though—Heather was just wonderful, phenomenal. She was a huge supporter
and a huge asset to us. I liken her, by the way, during my tenure to the way I was
in the governor's office for the department. And she was the head of policy overall,
but I think she had a real soft spot for education and I think the governor did. And
so she worked really closely with us to help us move this thing along. We did a
series of meetings with legislators. We did a series of community meetings. We held
a whole group of hearings throughout the state to try to go through each of the
areas that we were impacting.
And when I say impacting, I mean we were changing the way special education was
funded. We wanted to make sure people understood what the impact would be on
that. We were looking at how transportation was funded. So we had a meeting
about transportation. We were looking and changing and moving to a weighted
formula where children who were low income would get extra resources. But we
had expectations for what school districts would do with that. So we were meeting
with people to explain all these different pieces of the formula. And then in the fall,
we began meeting with the legislature, with the committees to talk about what we
were doing. The bill was written. It actually, I think, was finished in early December.
In the interim, we also brought in experts from around the country. We wanted to
make sure that we were addressing the needs of children at risk adequately. So we
brought in some experts who knew best how to serve children who came from low
income families or who came from families where English wasn't the first language.
And we were really calling upon them to review our work and to help us see if there
was something we were missing.
The other balance that we were trying to strike was we were doing a weighted
formula so children get extra money based on what grade they're in, what special
needs they might have. We were changing special education from a kind of a per
pupil—you tell us how many special ed students you have—to a percentage basis. It
was one of the ways that states had successfully funded special education. So we
brought in some folks that understood different ways to fund special ed to make
sure that we were on the right track there. One of the reasons why—and you may
know that today there's a lot of talk about the way special ed is being funded in the
funding formula, because they're back to actually using our formula again, which is
great to know. But there's a concern because people are saying not every district
has, you know, 12 percent special ed students. And that's basically what we did. We
set a percentage of students. We said, "This many students on average would need
special education services." And then we funded them based on a percentage, as
opposed to the number of pupils. We did that for a very simple reason: up until that
time, before a formula was in place, the only way to get extra money was to tell the
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state you had children who were special ed classified because the state funded
special education separately. And so districts had an incentive to just classify
students. And we saw districts that had, you know, 30 percent of their children
classified. Well, they did that because they needed the resources and we
understood that, but we didn't want them classifying students just to get them
extra money. We felt strongly that the formula, if it provided the resources fairly
across the board, that the formula would distribute what needed to be for all
children. They didn't have to be classified special ed. They would get those extra
resources anyway. They wouldn't have to have that that title to get special ed
funding.
Rick Sinding: Let's talk a little bit about the history of this 800 pound gorilla you
were talking about, the funding formula. I'm old enough to remember Robinson vs
Cahill, the very first—
Lucille Davy: That was the start.
Rick Sinding: —of the challenges to the system of funding public education based
on the notion, or based on the constitutional provision in the New Jersey
Constitution, that the state provide for a thorough and efficient system of public
education.
Lucille Davy: Right.
Rick Sinding: The Robinson vs Cahill decision led to the something called the
Botter Decision, which said that the current funding based almost exclusively on
property taxes was unconstitutional.
Lucille Davy: Right.
Rick Sinding: And ordered the state to come up with up a funding formula that
would satisfy that thorough and efficient clause. Every effort to do so failed. The
next one was Abbott vs Burke, and that's why we talk about the Abbott districts.
Again, saying that the formula that had that the state had come up with—there
were several formulas that the state had come up with—all failed to equalize or
lessen the imbalance—
Lucille Davy: Right.
Rick Sinding: —between property-rich school districts and property-poor ones and
that the state had a responsibility to step into the breach. When you're working on
this formula, what is the status of the current formula? Is it under review by the
Supreme Court? Has it been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and
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you're working to find a new one? What kind of a gun are you under from the
courts?
Lucille Davy: Well, it had been declared unconstitutional in the late '90s, and that
was when the court ordered the Abbott remedies. And so there was a specific list of
programs and services, including early childhood in the late '90s—that was when
the court said that three and four-year-old children in Abbott districts needed to be
in early childhood programs. That happened late in Governor Whitman's second
term, not long before she left to go to the federal government. So one of the things
that we did when I came in under Governor McGreevey was really focus on enrolling
children, getting those programs up to speed in the Abbott districts. That was one
that was court-ordered. And, you know, a lot of people said, "Well, how could be
court ordered? The Constitution said ages 5 to 16. How can three and four-year-
olds be covered?" But the court said in Abbott that in order to give those children a
chance at a thorough and efficient education, there had to be early childhood
opportunities. And they'd been waiting for the state to turn around and do the right
thing and the state just for whatever reason, fits and starts, never got it right.
Rick Sinding: Well, I think in fairness, the legislature was never able to get the
number of votes necessary to approve a formula that could stand constitutional
muster. You had too many districts that were winners and too many other districts
that were losers and to get the consensus that you needed in both the Assembly
and the Senate you ended up having to come up with a formula that was almost
doomed to failure.
Lucille Davy: Right. Yes. And I guess they put some things forward they could get
the votes for and the court always said, "This is inadequate."
Rick Sinding: Exactly.
Lucille Davy: So we used those experts to help us make sure that we had put the
right pieces together. Our goal always was equity both in terms of the distribution
of resources and equity in terms of what the local district is expected to contribute.
So our belief was that the property wealth, regardless of what it was, that you
should give the same percentage of your property wealth towards your schools. So
we wanted all districts to contribute something. Under the Abbott decisions, which,
in the '90s when the last formula was thrown out and the court basically said, "The
Abbotts get A, B, C, D, E, F, G and fund this," that really meant that most of the
money had to go to fund those programs. Because the districts would say to the
Department of Ed, "Here's what we need to do A, B, C, D, E, F, G, so write us a
check." And the state had to come up with the money because they had no other
way to respond. The department never had the capacity to evaluate. You know,
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those were some of the largest districts in the state. Many of them had probably
more employees in the front office than we almost had working on this, certainly.
Rick Sinding: And at least three of them were under state supervision.
Lucille Davy: Three of them were under state takeover. That's another whole story
for another time, what takeover really meant and whether or not that worked. But
in any case, the districts—we wanted to make sure that everybody had skin in the
game. We wanted all local taxpayers to give a fair share. It was built that way. At
the same time, we wanted to make sure that you didn't get penalized based upon
the profile of your student population. So as I mentioned earlier, there was a
certain base amount of funding for an elementary school student. We knew that it
cost a little more to educate a middle school student. And we had done this with
educators around the table to say, "What is required to give a middle school child
an education that allows them to master the state's core curriculum content
standards?" Which include, by the way, world languages, music and the arts, and
your basic subjects: science, math, social studies, English, literacy, etc., writing,
Phys Ed, health education. So we looked at what it would cost to educate a middle
school student to those core curriculum standards. And that was more than an
elementary school student, in part because in middle schools oftentimes you have
teachers who specialize in their content area, kids move around and have different
teachers, there are more opportunities in music for children, etc. Similarly, in high
school there are more electives, more specialized course work, more teachers
oftentimes and greater resources required.
There was an add-on for children who went to vocational schools, because we
understood that in a vocational school where children are getting some specialized
training in a certain skill area, maybe they needed special equipment. For kids who
were in an automotive program, for example, as cars were becoming more tech-
oriented and you weren't just lifting the hood but you're plugging into a computer
to diagnose what's going on, they needed more equipment. So the children in
vocational schools got an extra add-on. There was extra money for children who
were low income because oftentimes those children didn't have the opportunities at
home to help support their education, whether it was summer opportunities, things
like that. There was more money for children where English wasn't their first
language, because it was understood that those children in school were going to
need to learn English. Besides learning in English, they needed to master the
English language. And so all those weights were added to the profile of the students
in the district. And we felt that was the most equitable way to ensure that no
matter what population the district was serving, they would get adequate
resources.
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Rick Sinding: So what you were basically trying to do at this point, it seems to
me, is that you were looking at what the court had ordered in the absence of a
suitable remedy from the legislature and saying, "We think we can do better. We
want to change, essentially, the formula that the court had dictated in the late '90s
and substitute it with this brand new one and hope that the court will say okay to
that." Is that basically what you were doing?
Lucille Davy: Well, I think so. But two other things. The first is that at that point
the Abbott districts—many of them—were receiving from the state in excess of
$20,000 per pupil in funding. That was more than twice what most districts in the
state were spending. It was more than twice what most children around the country
were having spent on them, regardless of where they lived. And also the other
thing that we learned as we were doing this work was that almost half of the
children who were free and reduced lunch eligible, so poor children, were living
outside of Abbott district boundaries and in many cases they were concentrated in
districts that were not classified as Abbotts. They weren't getting any of these
resources and yet they were educating a population of children who looked very
similar. I mean it seemed completely unfair to me that by the nature of geography,
for example, where the Trenton and Ewing boundary is, that children who lived on
one side of the street in Trenton got all these extra resources and a poor child who
lived across the street in Ewing got none of them. That just was patently unfair to
me. And once we knew that the Abbott districts were getting adequate resources,
we really concluded that the conversation had to stop being, how much more
money do they need? It had to be, how do they use these resources well, that the
department had to step up and really help them do a better job of delivering
education with the resources they had and then making sure that there were
equitable resources for all these other children who were living all over the state in
many other districts. I mean, there were lots of districts that had a pretty significant
concentration of children.
And by the way, in many of those places the local tax levy was also through the
roof. So besides not having the resources from the state, they were raising and
asking their taxpayers in many cases who were not high income people—they were
middle and lower income people—asking them to give a greater portion of their
resources to fund their children's education. So it's just gross inequities across the
board and something really had to be done to make sure that we could distribute
equitably. We did look at a lot of what the court ordered. So the idea of early
childhood—we built early childhood into the formula. And that was a question,
frankly. We went to the governor and we said, "We want to include early childhood
for every low income, free and reduced lunch eligible child, in New Jersey because
we don't think you should only receive it if you're poor and you live in Abbott
districts." And he agreed. And so we built that in. I think at the time that was
unheard of in the country the idea that a funding formula would require—we were
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requiring the delivery of early childhood and we were going to fund it a hundred
percent through the formula.
Now, of course, history now shows us that once Governor Corzine left office the
focus on early childhood really went by the wayside for a while and the impetus to
provide the money for that expansion was really minimal. We started the
expansion. There were several districts that stepped up right away because they
knew that the population of their children could really benefit. They had seen what
was going on in the Abbott districts. And this had been studied. There were folks
around the country looking at, “What were the early childhood impacts of kids when
they got to the upper elementary school grades?” But we had our own evidence
here because by this point in time children in some of the Abbott districts had been
in high-quality Pre-K and they were reaching grades three and four and we had test
results and we could say that we saw the difference when children had those
opportunities for early childhood. And so we knew that they really paid big rewards
and big benefits for the children.
Rick Sinding: At the end of 2007, you had come up with a new school funding
formula.
Lucille Davy: Yes.
Rick Sinding: It did away with Abbott. It apportioned money based on enrollment,
with special weight given to students from low income households.
Lucille Davy: Right.
Rick Sinding: That bill squeaked through the lame duck legislature at the
beginning of 2008, and at the end of 2008, it was rejected by the Supreme Court.
Lucille Davy: No, it wasn't rejected.
Rick Sinding: Well, maybe I've got this wrong, but here's as I understand it: it
was rejected by the Supreme Court but turned over to a special master who then
gave it provisional approval and the Supreme Court subsequently reversed itself,
with the proviso that the formula be reviewed after three years. Do I have that
wrong?
Lucille Davy: Well, I don't think the court rejected it. I think the court said, "We
don't have the wherewithal in a hearing with the attorney general and a couple of
attorneys to determine whether or not this is an adequate formula. We want
testimony." And that's when they appointed the judge up in Bergen County, whose
name is right now is escaping me. <laughs>
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Rick Sinding: But he was the special master to review this.
Lucille Davy: It was Judge [Peter] Doyne. He was the special master in Bergen
County; he was assigned to the case and he took testimony, so we had to present
our case.
Rick Sinding: I see.
Lucille Davy: We had to justify. So it's almost like going back to a lower court. I
think what the Supreme Court said was, “We're not at this level going to say, ‘Yes,
this formula looks good.’” They weren't prepared to make that decision at that
point.
Rick Sinding: Okay.
Lucille Davy: We went before Judge Doyne. I didn't go every day but many of my
staff did, drove from Trenton to Bergen County for almost a month. Because we
presented witnesses and we presented experts. We explained the entire formula.
Our folks were questioned. Our experts were questioned. The Law Center,
unfortunately, at that time didn't see the wisdom of the formula.
Rick Sinding: The Law Center, being the ELC, the Education Law Center.
Lucille Davy: The Education Law Center.
Rick Sinding: Wwhich had brought the original suit in Robinson vs Cahill and
Abbott vs Burke.
Lucille Davy: Yes. The Law Center was challenging us.
Rick Sinding: Right.
Lucille Davy: And said that there were parts of the formula that were not
adequate, that they were not constitutional. They were arguing to a large extent, in
my mind, for a continuation of this sort of bifurcated system, Abbotts and non-
Abbotts. And it really was time to move away from that. I think we convinced the
court that not only was that not a fair system, that it wasn't serving many, many
children, poor kids particularly. But also that what we had put forth was
constitutional. We proved to Judge Doyne that we were providing the resources that
would be adequate to deliver the core curriculum content standards to children in
every district, regardless of their own personal individual educational needs, that
our formula was constitutional. Now built into the formula—the formula was
supposed to be reviewed every three years. That wasn't the court order. That was
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in the law. And candidly, we weren't around long enough to do that for the first
time. I think Governor Corzine funded it in the '08-'09 school year, because it was
adopted in January of 2008, so it went into the budget for the fiscal year '09, which
was the September '08 to June '09 school year. And then it was funded again the
following year, despite the fact that that was the year the bottom fell out nationally
with the recession. But we did get money from the federal government at that time
that helped us make that maintain that.
Rick Sinding: Yes. You got $890 million in the federal stimulus fund.
Lucille Davy: We did. And it helped us maintain the work that we had done.
Rick Sinding: And that money actually went into funding the formula?
Lucille Davy: Yes.
Rick Sinding: Okay.
Lucille Davy: Absolutely. But the court, after were before Judge Doyne, he wrote a
special master's report. Then we had to go back before the [state] Supreme Court.
I remember the governor going there with us. And Anne Milgram, who was then the
attorney general, argued the case on behalf of the state.
Rick Sinding: Before Stu Rabner, who had been her predecessor as the attorney
general. <laughs>
Lucille Davy: Although, interestingly, he had to recuse himself.
Rick Sinding: Did he recuse himself?
Lucille Davy: He did. Because in 2006, he was the chief counsel. He'd been the
chief counsel and then he became the attorney general, if I remember right. Is that
right?
Rick Sinding: I'm not sure.
Lucille Davy: I'm pretty sure he was the chief counsel for a brief period of time
and then he became the AG. [Ed: Rabner was chief counsel in 2006 before being
appointed attorney general.] Either that or he was the AG directly. In either case,
he had been involved tangentially with the work we were doing in '06, which was
not the way the formula actually came out. In my mind, especially as a lawyer, I
didn't really think he even knew anything about what we were putting forth, but in
an abundance of caution, he recused himself. So it was not before him, but it was
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before the other justices and we convinced the court that the formula that we had
put forth was constitutional and would deliver a thorough and efficient education,
would allow for that delivery to every child in the state.
Rick Sinding: What's happened to the formula since?
Lucille Davy: Well, I think after Governor Corzine left office, I don't think Governor
Christie thought the formula was right. I don't think he thought it was the right
formula to use or whatever, despite my efforts to try to go to other people who
might be able to convince him to just look at it. Because honestly, an objective—
and I know you probably think I can't be objective. But I mean objectively, this
thing couldn't have been more vanilla. It was fair in every respect. It gave no
advantage to anyone. It was based on the students you served. Nobody got extra
because somebody liked the superintendent or somebody had a legislator who had
more clout in the Senate or the Assembly or somebody was the budget chairman. It
wasn't like that. It was completely devoid of any of that. It was just fair and
equitable and applied to everyone the same way. And so I had hoped that people
would be able to explain that. I don't know that he ever really got his arms around
it. You know, to some extent—and this happens, I think, it's not just here in New
Jersey—but governors come in and they think if it's something my predecessor did
it probably isn't good, I should change it, especially if they're from a different party.
And so for whatever reason they didn't fund the formula. And then they started
doing the band aid approach, which is the worst thing. That's where whoever
squeaks the loudest gets more money. Somebody demands, "I want more money
or I won't vote for this." That's what was going on before we did the formula. And
then, of course, the Law Center, when they stopped funding, it went back to court.
And the court said, "Well if you're not going to fund the formula, then you have to
keep funding the Abbotts the way the Abbotts need funding." And so then they
basically just went back to where we were before the law was implemented.
To his credit, Governor [Phil] Murphy I think recognized that the formula was
something that they ought to be looking at again. I know that Senate President
[Steve] Sweeney, who I'm pretty sure voted for it, and in the Assembly—I don't
think that the Assembly Speaker was in the legislature at the time. I don't think
Craig Coughlin was there, but I know Lou Greenwald, who's the budget chair—or
was the budget chair—is still there. Those folks understood that this made sense
and so the legislature has been pushing and they're actually running the formula
again now. There is no question that the formula needs some changes, including I
would agree, to special education. Because the reason that we did that percentage
funding was because we were trying to accommodate and account for these high
numbers of children who were classified—over classification that just was done for
different reasons. That's not the case anymore. Once you get adequate resources in
the system, you should really fund special education children based on the number
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of children you're serving. Some districts become magnets for children with certain
disabilities because they get a reputation for serving those children well. Well, they
shouldn't get penalized for serving kids well.
Rick Sinding: But how do you do that and at the same time prevent the
phenomenon of districts over-classifying in order to get more money?
Lucille Davy: Well, because I think number one, you still have some oversight of
that. You wouldn't just leave it to their design. But they're getting extra funding for
children with other needs. What I'm talking about is children with disabilities, things
like autism, where the earlier you get intervention for them, the better their
educational outcomes are. There were some districts that started some really
incredible in-house programs and parents with young children moved to those
communities because they knew there were great opportunities for their kids to be
served well. You don't want to penalize them for that. So I mean I think you have
to have oversight, you have got to keep an eye on it. But I think saying that flat out
everybody just has 11 percent of their children who can be classified is not the right
way to do it either.
Rick Sinding: One of the things that happened late in the Corzine administration
was a school construction bill providing $3.9 billion to repair or rebuild schools
across the state. Was that under the rubric or the bailiwick of the Department of
Ed? There was a school construction program that was separate. But how involved
was the Department of Education in that initiative?
Lucille Davy: We were involved to the extent that the districts told us what their
needs were. So they all had to file school construction plans and long-term plans—
five years, 10 years, etc.—what their needs would be. And, of course, when the
court ordered in the late '90s those Abbott remedies, one of the remedies was
money for school construction. So 6.2 billion for the Abbotts and 2.6 or 7 for non-
Abbotts was appropriated back in 2001, I believe, before McGreevey took office.
But our responsibility was to look at what the district's needs were, what they
needed in terms of repairing facilities, what they needed in terms of replacing them,
what they needed to meet student population growth. In the Abbotts, in many
cases, it was to replace crumbling, dilapidated schools. I remember visiting schools
with Governor Corzine and the two of us just saying—we were shocked that
children were in facilities like that. It was horrifying. But the needs were significant
because candidly, districts had let the facilities go. They had not kept up with the
repairs that should have been made over time. And as you know, if you've got a
leak and you don't fix it, the leak gets bigger and then it starts to impact bigger and
bigger parts of the facility and then before you know it, you know, now you need to
rebuild half the building or something. So there were tremendous needs. We helped
determine the priorities, so we set forth parameters for how you would judge and
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evaluate which school gets top priority for funding. Because the money was limited
but also the resources of the process of bidding and reviewing plans and all that,
even those resources were limited. We couldn't just build 300 schools at one time.
It needed to be done in an orderly fashion.
Rick Sinding: So your agency was responsible for prioritizing those programs?
Lucille Davy: We helped prioritize. We helped determine where they were needed.
And in some cases, people would say, "We need 28 classrooms.” And our folks
would say, "We think you can do it with 24." So we did some of that, too, to really
look at the educational need. We knew what they had to deliver educationally, what
kind of program. And our folks, because they had education backgrounds, knew
whether or not what they were presenting was reasonable and legitimate or not.
And then we would turn that over to the school construction, that's what I think it
was called, the SDA, Schools Development Authority. And then they would take it
from there. But we did sort of the lead-up work, the prep work to get them to a
point where they were ready to then go out to have the building done.
Rick Sinding: For most of your commissionership you had to deal on the federal
level with No Child Left Behind. And then I guess for the latter part you had to deal
with Race to the Top. How did these federal initiatives affect your day-to-day
operations at the state Department of Education?
Lucille Davy: Our federal funding was oftentimes tied to those federal initiatives
and being able to prove to the feds that you were delivering what they were
expecting you to do. In the case of No Child Left Behind, that was sort of right up
my alley. It was about leaving no child behind, making sure all children got
educational opportunities. Well, that's what I was all about and that's what the
department was focused on. The game plan that McGreevey came in with in
education wise to give all children a high quality education, to help support
teachers, to make sure our standards were high standards and that we could
actually deliver and children could succeed in meeting those standards. So No Child
Left Behind kind of fit with our policy objectives. One of the challenges was that No
Child Left Behind also required that you test every child in grades three through
eight in English, Language Arts and Mathematics and then once at the elementary
level and once at the middle school level in Science. And then you had to test all
high school students once in English, Language Arts, Mathematics and Science. At
the time, the state had been using fourth grade, eighth grade and eleventh grade
tests. That was it. So we basically had to add grades three, five, six and seven.
That was more than double the testing that we were doing, so that was a huge
budgetary issue. That was one of the challenges I faced when I went to the
department under then-Acting Governor Codey. That was 2005. The feds had been
turning up the heat on the testing. The NCLB [No Child Left Behind] came into play
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in 2001 and they gave you some time to get all those tests in place. So we moved
pretty quickly and got a third and a fourth grade test. Or we had a fourth grade
test; we got a third and fourth grade test that kind of went together, and then we
had the eighth grade test and then we had the high school test. But we had been to
some degree a little recalcitrant about getting grades five, six and seven. Tests are
really, really, really expensive. In fact, the bulk of the department's budget that
didn't go out for school funding went for testing. <laughs> And the feds basically
said, "We're not going to give you," whatever small amount we got from the feds. It
wasn't that much but it was still money, so we couldn't turn it down. But you had to
do the testing to get the money. So when I went over to the department in
September of '05, a bid had come in for the testing for grades three through eight
and that was the one that was $70 million for five years and that was a lot of
money. It was way more money than we had in the budget. And it wasn't going to
fix the problems with the testing that Governor Codey and I had really prioritized,
and that was testing later in the year and getting results to the schools faster. I
don't think we talked about it earlier, but the test results used to reach the schools
either in the summer or sometimes in the fall.
Rick Sinding: Geez, like six months after.
Lucille Davy: So we gave this test in February or early March and you don't get
the results and then how does a teacher use that to help a child do better? I mean
to me it was just a total waste of money, because you got no benefit from it. You
did it because the fed said you have to, but you weren't getting any educational
benefit. So we wanted to make sure that we got some educational bang for that
investment, bang for the buck. So we actually rejected the $70 million bid, or we
got multiple bids but I think the lowest one was 70 million. We rejected the bids and
we said we're going to start from scratch again. I had to go to the feds and again, I
was acting commissioner because it was 2005. I had to go to the feds and I
remember meeting with Margaret Spelling's team—she was the then-U.S. Secretary
of Education. And I had to explain to them why we couldn't deliver a grade five, six
and seven test that spring because the cutoff for doing it was '06. We were
supposed to deliver it by then. And basically what they said to me was, "Well, you
have to give a test. You can recalibrate and rebid and try to reform your testing
system, but in the meantime you have to give a test." So I got them to agree to let
us use an off-the-shelf test that was not necessarily totally aligned with our
standards, because your test was supposed to be aligned to your state standards.
And they agreed to let us do that if we could find something that was relatively
close. And we did. We found something that was fairly close. In the meantime, I
organized an assessment workgroup.
Rick Sinding: Is there a whole retail store out there of off-the-shelf tests?
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Lucille Davy: Oh, testing became a—well, it had always been a cottage industry of
sorts because school districts for years tested students. It just wasn't done as
publicly. You know, I think NCLB forced districts to make those results public and to
print them in the newspaper. I don't know if you remember, back when the Star
Ledger would do an entire special section that would go school by school, district by
district of all the results from all the grade levels that were being tested on an
annual basis. Those results would be made public. Shining a light on it really
changed it. There had always been tests, though. Our children took the Iowa test of
the basic skills in the ‘90s.
Rick Sinding: I remember that. <laughs>
Lucille Davy: There was the Stanford 9 test. There were a couple other ones. I
think districts had always tested students to see how they were doing, probably for
placement purposes, maybe determining whether students needed special help in
class if they weren't doing well. It was sort of an objective measure that was
different than what you were getting from a classroom assessment.
Rick Sinding: Right.
Lucille Davy: And it's important, I think, to have an objective measure like that.
By the way, I'm a big fan of those kinds of tests because I think objective measures
where everybody's measured by the same bar really tells you how well students are
doing. It's too easy to hide children who are not doing well if you're just giving a
local test or a teacher is giving a test that he or she creates in the classroom. It was
one of the reasons why I felt so strongly about going to end-of-course assessments
at the high school level. Because when we were looking at the high school
proficiency assessment we had a lot of children, particularly in Abbott districts, who
couldn't pass the high school test. And after Achieve had done that evaluation of
our test and basically said you need about the mid-year of algebra pass it and
maybe early 10th grade Language Arts skills to pass, I couldn't understand why we
had so many children who were not passing it who were taking it at the end of 11th
grade. Those children should have mastered algebra and they certainly should've
had high school English skills, if we're actually teaching them. And one of the things
I said to my staff was, "Let's find out. What kind of courses are these children
taking in mathematics? Maybe they're not taking algebra in high school and that's
why they can't pass this high school test that covers algebra." And to my utter
shock, frankly, it turned out that children were taking algebra. They were taking
geometry and many of them, almost 70 percent of them, were taking Algebra II
and they were passing those classes. So they were being told at their school level,
in their classroom, "You mastered this content." But then they couldn't pass our
high school test that was measuring Algebra I. So something was wrong. There was
a real disconnect. And I thought the only way to be honest about that was to give a
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test at the end of the coursework so that the parent would know my child either got
the algebra or he or she did not.
Rick Sinding: And what did you learn, that it was grade inflation?
Lucille Davy: We didn't drill down to figure out what the real issue was. I can only
assume that children were being passed along, just moved through the system. If
they're coming to class and they're handing in some homework, we're passing
them. And that wasn't doing those children any favors. Because if you let a child
think that they're leaving high school with high school skills and they go into the
workforce or they go to college, then they're told at that point, "You don't have high
school skills." And that's not fair to them. They should be told that while they're in
high school while they can still do something about it. You probably know there was
a huge issue around remediation in our community colleges and again, not unique
to New Jersey, across the entire country. It was one of the things I had worked on
while I was doing education policy in the governor's office. We had some
community colleges where 70 and 80 percent of the entering students needed to
take remedial coursework.
Rick Sinding: You must've found that particularly when you were teaching math at
that level.
Lucille Davy: Well, it was interesting because I taught back in the '80s. It wasn't
as bad and I was actually teaching a more advanced math class. I wasn't teaching
the entry level courses. But these were children who weren't even qualified to go
into entry level courses. They were taking an entry level placement test and that
placement test was showing that they didn't have these basic arithmetic skills. In
some cases they didn't even have middle school math skills. That problem needed
to be solved and addressed at the high school level. And my theory was the best
way to do that is to be honest about how children are performing. That's
uncomfortable for people, especially if you're the high school math teacher and you
have children who didn't master what they needed to, the fundamentals. And again,
not a problem unique to New Jersey; this is a national, national problem. There are
kids throughout this country who are not learning the mathematics fundamentals
that they need to succeed in upper level mathematics. And as a country we can't
stand for that because we won't survive, given the economic impacts that it has to
have a workforce with so many people who don't have really basic math skills.
I'm not saying everybody has to be able to do Algebra II. Just because I was a
math major doesn't mean everybody else has to be. But I believe all children can
do that. I came from a house where I was told, "Oh, we're not good at math." That
was the mantra in my family. My mom lost her father when she was in high school
and she went off of her college prep track into a secretarial track so she could help
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support her family. Her mom worked but she didn't have a lot of skills. Her mother
really had minimal skills and she had younger brothers and sisters. My dad went to
college on the GI bill. He had been in the Army, but he was a history major and an
English minor and he became a Special Education teacher. And I remember, I was
the oldest and I would go for help because for whatever reason—and it might have
been because I was a musician. I had started piano lessons at a very young age
and people say that music helps develop math skills.
Rick Sinding: Absolutely.
Lucille Davy: But I had particular math aptitude that I guess was identified when I
was in elementary school and when I was in middle school I was put in this
advanced math program. And when I would ask for help at home on my homework,
nobody could help me. And my dad would literally say, "We're not that good at
math. It's okay. I was a history major." And that wasn't helping me. But anyway, I
had great teachers. I was so fortunate in the Livingston Public Schools to have just
outstanding teachers and those teachers helped me learn mathematics as well as
anybody else learned it. And so my theory was that with really good teaching any
child can do it because I did it. It's possible. And when I taught—and I think I told
you I taught in the summer school one summer, I did some substitute teaching at
one point—when I taught even at the college level, I had students who said to me,
"I can't do math." And then I helped them find out that they could do math. And I
believed that with the right teaching, with people who understood how to teach it
different ways, because not all children learn it one way. And I think the advantage
that I had, too, was having majored in math that by the time I went to teach
algebra I understood algebra really, really, really well <laughs> because I could do
things that were much, much harder, so all the algebra made sense. I probably
couldn't have done that right out of high school or even right out of college, but as
the years passed I had a lot of math built up.
So I really feel strongly that all children can do these difficult math problems. They
can learn mathematics so they can have choices. They don't have to say, "Oh, I'm
not good at math so I'll pick a field where I don't have to do any mathematics."
Lots of kids say that and there's no reason for people to say that. It should be
accessible to everybody. So having an objective measure is one of the things—and
by the way, Governor Corzine was brave about this because these were not
popular. These were not popular policies necessarily <laughs> with the school
community, frankly. There was some push back. We got push back from the
Education Law Center, who was supposed to be representing children in Abbott
Districts. They said to me, "If you make these standards, this will hurt kids." And I
said, "How can this hurt children? This can't hurt them. This will ensure that they
get the skills they need when they leave high school, to succeed in college and
beyond."
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Rick Sinding: I would have thought that teachers would have been more of a
difficult sell on this.
Lucille Davy: They were.
Rick Sinding: Because their performance is being judged by how well their
students do.
Lucille Davy: Well, we were not tying teacher performance. That came after me. I,
by the way, would not have led with that.
<laughter>
Because it's not fair to say to a teacher, particularly in the upper grades, "You're
basically responsible for what everybody before you did.” You take the child where
they start. My theory always was we wanted progress. We wanted to know that
children were advancing, especially if they came in behind. So if you had a child in
the seventh grade who was reading at a third grade level and you got that child to
sixth grade level, you should be considered a success, not a failure. And yet if you
make the measure, “Does a child read proficiently at seventh grade level?” you'd
say the teacher failed; I don't think that's fair. So you have to put all the pieces in
place and really support teachers. And that's the other thing, by the way. Our
education certification system never required that elementary teachers learn
mathematics or learn how to teach elementary mathematics. We never required
that. Most of them took that because most had to take some methods class that
included mathematics. But we never made sure that elementary teachers really
understood the underlying mathematics.
The example I always love to use is when you divide fractions. The trick we learned
was flip and multiply, right? If you're going to divide three-fourths by a half just flip
a half. Three-fourths times two and you get six-fourths, very simple. That doesn't
help a teacher explain it to a child who doesn't understand the math behind it. And,
by the way, it's easy to say to do that when it's just a simple fraction but when you
have some complicated equation with variables in it, like one over X divided by X
squared plus three over two, it's a little bit more difficult. And if you don't
understand the underlying mathematics, it's hard to apply it when the math gets
much more challenging. So one of the things that I worked on, and Governor
Corzine was a supporter of this, I began to work with colleagues around the
country, in other states. We came together in '08 to begin to create Standards
together. We said it shouldn't matter whether you live in Massachusetts, New
Jersey, Alabama, California, Minnesota or Texas. If you're in third grade, you should
learn to say mathematics. We have a mobile population. Families don't stay in one
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place for a child's entire K-12 schooling career, so we ought to have some common
expectations.
Rick Sinding: Well, wasn't that in fact what No Child Left Behind or Race to the
Top were supposed to accomplish?
Lucille Davy: Race to the Top came after we began this effort. So the
commissioners around the country, a group of us, got together and said let's work
on these Standards together and let's work on tests together. Because New Jersey
was spending $50-some million on tests, Pennsylvania was spending $50 million on
tests, Maryland was. We all said, “Why are we all spending $50 million? We're all
basically creating tests.” And, by the way, I think the vendors were often times
using the same items but charging us to create our tests. We said, "Why don't we
do this together? We could do it better. We could release the items." Because you
have to be really careful. you don't want the items out in the public domain. And
yet you don't want the test to be a secret. You want teachers to know it's not
supposed to be a trick so that nobody knows what you are going to ask students to
show us they can do. It's not a game. It's really measuring what did they learn so
that you can take that information and improve their opportunity for the following
year.
Rick Sinding: But then you have teachers complaining about the fact that all
they're doing is teaching to the test.
Lucille Davy: And the whole point of that, because we got that argument, is that if
the test is aligned to what teachers are supposed to be teaching, then that
shouldn't be an issue. In fairness to teachers—and this was another thing that I
learned when we began to look at the tests—the tests weren't necessarily aligned.
Mathematics Standards in New Jersey were separated into four different areas, and
at each grade level there were different Standards that fell into it; one was numbers
and operations, one was algebra, one was data, and one was I think patterns or
something. I may have the fourth one incorrect now. It's been a while <laughs>.
But there were four different areas and the Standards were not equally divided
among the four areas. The Standards, particularly in the elementary grades, were
concentrated in numbers and operations, where children were learning addition,
subtraction, multiplication and division. Early fraction work. A lot of their focus in
those grades was on numbers and operations. When we went to look at the tests
that we were administering in grades three and four, it turned out that the test
people hadn't talked to the Standards people <laughs> and so the test was made
up so that all four areas had equal number of questions. So you weren't really
testing most of the Standards in the numbers and operations. And yet you were
placing this crazy emphasis on data or algebra or geometry that wasn't a big
emphasis in the elementary grades. And that was why teacher said, "I have to
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teach to the test. I can't teach the Standards because the test isn't aligned with the
Standards."
It wasn't until the deputy commissioner and I sat—I remember this—in my office
looking at copies of the test that we realized that our alignment was so off. And so
when we did the new testing, the grade three through eight testing, which was the
ESPA test, Elementary School Proficiency Assessment, we looked to make sure that
the balance of emphasis on the test matched the emphasis. I didn't want teachers
to think that we wanted them to do anything other than teach the curriculum
Standards. It's not fair to have them try to guess what they're supposed to be
teaching. It's not fair to children to measure them on something that they didn't
learn. That was the other issue with giving a test in the middle of the year; there
had to be some things kids had learned yet. You know, teachers would tell me, "I
have to stop and teach to the test starting in January." And I would say, "What are
you talking about?" They say, "Well, I have to teach to the test starting in January
because the test is given at the end of February." It wasn't until I started thinking
about what they were saying. They didn't mean teach to the test. They meant teach
January through June between January and February. They had to teach everything
else that was in the Core Curriculum Standards for the year in that two-month
period. Otherwise children were going to get a test and they were going to see
items for things they hadn’t learned. And that's not fair to them. Plus, people were
looking at how teachers were doing based on results and things like that. So testing
was an area that all the states were struggling with. And, frankly, we really felt like
teachers should have more involvement in creating the tests. We wanted the items
to look more like what teachers thought children should be able to do.
Rick Sinding: And did you succeed in doing that?
Lucille Davy: We did. There were two consortia of states—and this came out of
Race to the Top, because money came from the feds to these two consortia. One
was called the Partnership for the Assessment of Curriculum Standards, PARCC or
something. And the other one was called Smarter Balanced. There were two
groups. They were actually both taking off in 2010 when I left the position. New
Jersey actually joined one of them, they joined PARCC. And I think to this day
continue to give the PARCC in some format, although I think Governor Murphy
promised to get rid of PARCC. But PARCC was actually a really good test for the first
time, instead of leaving it to test vendors to create. They brought teachers in with
funding to create the tests and they field tested them with real teachers, with real
students. It was a really nice way to create tests.
The real problem occurred when the states were encouraged, again under Race to
the Top, to begin to hold teachers accountable for student performance and to have
that impact their pay and their evaluation. I think that happened too soon. We were
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raising the bar for what we wanted kids to be able to do. We were raising the bar
for what we were expecting of teachers and I think it was too early to say "And, by
the way, your job is also on the line." We, frankly, in mathematics particularly, were
saying to teachers that it's not enough to teach children how to do a problem from
memorizing the steps. Children have to understand why they're taking those steps.
So teaching for understanding is a lot different than just teaching for rote,
repetitive, reproducing an answer. It's kind of like the skill sheets that we used to
have when we were in school, the teacher would do a few problems on the board
and then you'd do a worksheet at home at night. You'd do 40 problems that look
just like the one that was on the board. Well, that's not enough. You want children
be able to take what they learned and be able to look at a problem they've never
seen before and say, "What do I know that I can use that would help me solve that
problem?"
Rick Sinding: Critical thinking.
Lucille Davy: Exactly, and those are the skills that the 21st century workforce
demands of them. It's what colleges expect of them. It's what employers expect of
them. So those are all really important skills. Governor Corzine was so good about
letting me participate in these national initiatives that gave us the opportunity to
learn from other people who had been doing good work, too. You weren't doing this
on your own. When we came together and did the Standards together and the
assessments together, it was, I think, the best thing for this nation. Unfortunately,
it got all wrapped up into politics and there were states that said, "This is the
federal government forcing curriculum." It wasn’t curriculum. They were
expectations of what children should learn. Children should be able to read and
identify the main character and the theme of a story at the end of third grade.
Nobody said, “And you have to use this book to do it.” Or, “You have to do it
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.” It was, “They need to be able to identify the lead
character and the theme. Get there anyway that you want. Use any materials you
want.” But it got tied up and it was unfortunate.
Rick Sinding: Yes. One other major subject area of controversy in the field of
education that I'd like to ask you your views about is school choice. What took place
during your tenure as education commissioner in the area of school choice, either
promoting it or administering the choices available to districts in terms of school
choice?
Lucille Davy: There were two basic programs when I was a commissioner. The
first was the charter schools, which had been done by legislation in the '90s. There
were a few charter schools, mostly in the cities, when I came into the governor's
office in '02. They were taking hold. There was money. There were resources
coming from it, but you really needed facilities and there wasn’t extra money for
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facilities. So it wasn't the easiest thing to do. But certainly in the Abbott Districts, as
the resources were increasing they were getting 90 percent of the local resources,
so they were getting a fair amount of funding for children. We had a system of
evaluating applications for the charter schools. There was a whole process that they
went through because you were not only evaluating, could they deliver on the Core
Curriculum Standards. You wanted to make sure they were fiscally sound, that the
facilities were adequate, that there was leadership and governance in place that
would allow the school to operate well and to serve children. One of the things that
we looked at was accountability because even though parents were choosing to
send children to charter schools in the cities, some of them weren't serving kids
very well. In fact, some of them had outcomes that were worse than the local
district. I understood why parents wanted the choice. In some cases, these schools
were not safe. In some cases, the schools were not led by a principal who had
control of the building. In some cases, the parent thought the child wasn't being
educated and as a parent who advocated for her own kids that way, I wanted that
for everybody's children. So I understood why those options needed to be available.
At the same time for me, though, my theory always was that not every child in an
Abbott or urban district can go to a charter school. And so it's great to help the
charter schools thrive, but we have to figure out how do we support the regular
public schools who are serving all the other children.
While I was working on the McGreevey campaign, I remember visiting a charter
school and talking with the principal of a charter school up in Essex County. And he
said to me, "You know, we have two huge advantages over all the other schools in
the district." He was a former district principal and he was now the principal of the
charter school. And I said, "Well, what's that?” And he said, "Well, number one,
every child who comes to our school has a parent who said,’ I want my child to go
to this school. I will check the homework. I will come to PTA meetings. I'll be here
for teacher conferences.’" He said, "That's number one. Number two, when the
child starts here, no matter where the family moves in the city, the child can stay
here. We don't have school district boundaries.” He said those are two huge
advantages. He then went on to explain to me that in his regular public school, from
September through June, the turnover in a classroom could be as much as 60
percent. So from the day you start to the day you finish, 60 percent of the kids who
started might not be sitting in your room. You might have 60 percent of those kids
who came in at some other point during the year. Think about the challenge that
that presents to a teacher. I mean, it was mind boggling to me. The parent piece
was one, of course, that I fully understood because I was a suburban parent who
was very, very active. Probably more than my kids wanted me to be.
<laughter>
I was very tuned in on what was going on.
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Rick Sinding: Were you a helicopter mom?
Lucille Davy: I was not. I actually was not. Honestly, my children would probably
tell you—and they're grown now—but they would probably tell you that the best
thing that ever happened was when I went back to work full-time. Because when I
did I had less time to dabble in what was going on. Although I will admit that at the
middle school level particularly, and we were in Westfield at that time, a high
performing suburban district. Lots of very interested engaged parents. I will admit
that it shocked me that when our kids went to middle school, lots of moms,
particularly, thought, “Okay, I'm done. I had to worry about elementary school but
now they're in middle school; everything is fine.” That surprised me.
Rick Sinding: Boy, I would have thought exactly the opposite.
Lucille Davy: Exactly. Exactly. And candidly, especially when they're in the building
for the first time where they've got five different teachers and all kinds of other
things and activities and everything else that goes on. I remember being in the
grocery store one day meeting one of my friends saying, "Wasn't that a great
project that they did connected with such-and-such." And she had no idea. She
hadn't even seen it. Now, I wasn't checking homework at that point but I was
looking over what was going on.
Rick Sinding: Full disclosure: my wife spent 35 years as a public school teacher
and has always maintained that seventh and eighth grade are the most difficult
times for students. So that's why I commiserate with your situation.
Lucille Davy: You stay plugged in, absolutely. Absolutely, without a doubt. So I
knew that a parent's engagement in the child's education made a huge difference.
So I understood why those charter schools were attractive to families that wanted
something better and also successful. And that's a good thing and I wanted to
encourage that. And during my tenure, we actually loosened up <laughs> the rules.
I got the State Board of Ed to rewrite the regulations to allow high-performing
charters to expand without starting from scratch. So if you are operating a school
and you're doing well, you can start another school in another location using your
same program. Now, I mean, why wouldn’t you do that? It's kind of a no-brainer. If
you know how to do it, why would I make you start from scratch and take a year
and a half to do a proposal and go through all that. If you know how to do it, you
know how to do it and you've proved it. So we loosened that up. We did close some
people, we closed some schools that were charters and we also turned some people
down. And I know there were some people that were upset that we weren't
approving every application that came to us. Some people thought we should just
approve them all. I was especially disturbed by what I saw at charter schools that I
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thought were beginning to move toward segregation of children. There were
communities where people were starting schools—
Rick Sinding: Racial segregation? Cultural?
Lucille Davy: Ethnic; religious; cultural. I was very troubled by that. I didn't think
that with public dollars, especially in a nation that's growing more diverse and that,
frankly, needs to understand diversity better, that we should be encouraging any
kind of segregation. In some cases, it may have resulted in racial segregation by
nature of the school. But in some cases, it was an ethnic kind of focus. And, you
know, if you want your child to do that cultural stuff do that on your time. They
should be in a public school with all the people they're going to live on this Earth
with <laughs>. You know? They shouldn't feel like they can be isolated like that. I
just thought it was not a smart thing to do.
Rick Sinding: You mentioned that there was a second area. Charter schools was
one; what was the other?
Lucille Davy: The other area was the Interdistrict Public School Choice Program,
which had been authorized, I think early in McGreevey's term or maybe right before
it. And that was where a district could say we have room and we'll take children
from other districts into our district. The state provided the funding.
Rick Sinding: Other municipalities?
Lucille Davy: Yes.
Rick Sinding: Or other areas within the town?
Lucille Davy: Other municipalities. So I remember one that I can remember off
the top of my head, and that was Kenilworth. We used to live near that because
Westfield was near Kenilworth. Kenilworth at the time was an interdistrict school
choice district. They had room in some of their buildings and so they opened the
doors, basically, and families could choose to send their children [there]. And there
were a handful of districts around the state that did that. At the time, baby
boomers' children were in the system and a lot of these schools were pretty
crowded already anyway from all the baby boomers' children. But I think there were
districts that were able to do that and we expanded that program a little bit over
the years. It was direct state funding so it was budget-dependent, frankly, because
we provided all the money. The money did not follow the child from the home
district. So if the child left Westfield to go to Kenilworth, Westfield didn’t lose any
money. Kenilworth got money directly from the state to educate that child. So those
were the two programs.
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I think there's a reason to have choice. Again, I would come back to, I don't want it
to be for segregation purposes. I also don't want to skim off all the children whose
parents are engaged, because those are the parents that help improve schools. In
Westfield, one of the reasons the schools were so good was the parents were
watching and when they saw something they weren't sure about they questioned it.
And if they saw something they didn't like they raised hell about it. And you want
that side of the equation. You want that piece of the puzzle involved. And parents
know a lot about what's going on in those schools, too. And if you take out the
children whose parents are engaged and you leave only the children who for
whatever reason—mom has three jobs to support the family, or perhaps the mother
is sick. Or maybe the mom is on drugs, or maybe that the mother has died and has
a child living with a grandparent who is elderly and who doesn't have the ability to
navigate the system. Or in some cases, there were parents who felt that the system
had failed them and they didn't want to have anything to do with the system. You
can't leave the schools to serve those children. They are as needy and you need to
make sure that you address the needs of all those kids.
So my theory has always been that I would like to see charter schools operating
inside of school districts. Cliff Janey when he came to Newark—we brought him in.
Governor Corzine hired him in 2008 to be the superintendent in Newark. He was
beginning to do that, where he was opening charters inside of the local public
school so that they could work together. The regular, traditional public school could
learn what the charter was doing. They could learn from each other. They could
share space. The charter school didn't need facilities then because the facilities
were there. As you pull kids out to go to charter schools, spaces open up in the
district. Those buildings do not function efficiently if half the children have left for a
charter school. So you're much better off letting the charter school operate in there.
Cliff had the foresight to see that. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see is those
kinds of partnerships, because honestly at the end of the day, the real hope for me
has always been that you improve the education for all children. And the way you
do that is to improve opportunities for every child in every school. You can't just
say we'll take some off and we'll put them in a place that’s better or a place that
does a better job or a place where there's a better opportunity. I want those
opportunities for all children, no matter where they live.
Rick Sinding: I think I know the answer to this question that I'm about to ask you.
November 2009, the campaign for Governor Corzine vs Chris Christie—the polls are
going back and forth, showing it's going to be a close race. Did you have any
expectation that on the day after the election in November of 2009, you would
suddenly find yourself in a position where you were probably going to have to go
out and get another job or do something other than what you were doing? Or did
you anticipate that you were just going to continue plugging along doing your job
and come what may, que sera sera?
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Lucille Davy: Well, so interestingly, I didn't expect that I would be kept on in the
next administration.
Rick Sinding: The next administration even if it was the Corzine second term
administration?
Lucille Davy: Oh, if it was Corzine I would.
Rick Sinding: Yes.
Lucille Davy: Oh, my gosh. Yes. But I thought you said the day after the election.
Rick Sinding: Well, yes. I'm—when you woke up the day after the election and
recognized that Governor Corzine had lost—
Lucille Davy: Right, I didn't have any expectation that I would be asked to stay.
And candidly, given what I'd watch of the campaign, I didn't know that what I was
working on was going to gel with maybe what the priorities would be anyway. So I
don't know that it would have even made sense. You know, Chris Christie and I
grew up in the same hometown. His mom actually worked in the board office when
my dad was on the Board of Education <laughs>. But I didn't have that expectation
and I understood. Although I hadn't been involved in politics, I'd been observant of
politics and I understood how the world worked. I mean, frankly, I didn't have
expectations when Governor Corzine was elected the first time that I would stay on.
So I certainly had none. We did have things we were still working on and so we
worked to the last day, including filing a Race to the Top application that
coincidently was due the morning of the swearing-in of the next governor. We had
people who drove it down to Washington that morning and I didn't pack up until
that day. We worked that whole weekend because we had done an application. We
thought we had support from the teachers and it turned out that we didn't have the
support and we had to work really hard. Anyway, it didn't matter because it wasn't
going to be our plan going forward anyway. I mean I didn’t even think it made
sense—the next administration wanted us to file it so we did. I didn’t think it made
sense because to me you have to put forward your vision. And you can't let
someone else put forward a vision that they have that then you're going to take. I
mean, I remember thinking, “Wow, if they accept this, if they get this Race to the
Top grant, a lot of my work will continue because we built in what we were doing
into the Race to the Top grant.” I think we missed it; we were 11th or something I
think, if I remember.
Rick Sinding: How much communication did you have with Christie transition team
about education policy?
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Lucille Davy: As soon as it was clear that Bret Schundler was going to succeed
me, I immediately called him. We brought him in to the department. We wanted
him to know what we were doing. And he and I actually met offsite. We had a
three-hour breakfast. And I went through for him what I thought were going to be
his challenges, the pieces that I knew I would be leaving to him that were
unfinished, that were still a challenge that, maybe we just realized, oh, we better
get on top of this. I tried to give him as best I could because I really wanted him to
succeed. To his credit, I think—he carried out the Race to the Top work that we had
done.
Rick Sinding: Which cost him his job.
Lucille Davy: Which cost him his job. He kept several of my top team in place,
actually. Those people didn't exit, most of them, until after he left. I thought there
was a glimmer of hope there that the policy would continue. We talked earlier about
the fact that my observation was that the states that were doing the best for
children were the ones where there was sustained policy and a continuous
trajectory of implementation. And I thought, “Oh, here's the best hope. There's a
chance here that the good work that we've done will keep moving forward.” So I
was really encouraged by that.
Rick Sinding: Well, again, for those folks who are watching this or reading the
transcript who are not familiar with what happened, Commissioner Schundler was
famously rebuked by the governor after he submitted an application which the
governor did not want to have submitted. They had a big falling out and he left the
cabinet shortly thereafter. So that's the history that followed. So what did you do
after January of—where are we here?
Lucille Davy: 2010
Rick Sinding: 2010
Lucille Davy: So I slept for about two weeks.
Rick Sinding: I’ll bet.
<laughter>
Lucille Davy: Because I was really tired. And then I started thinking about what
would I do next and some people started reaching out to me to ask me what was I
planning to do next. And I talked about wanting to stay in education policy. I really
loved the work that I was doing. And, as I said earlier, I think I had a nice network
of national folks that I had been working with. The work that we were doing on the
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Standards at the national level and the testing, I really wanted to see that work
continue. Bret Schundler was keeping New Jersey in with the Standards. They were
sticking with the tests and so I figured I'd like to find a way to try to help make that
succeed, because that means New Jersey will succeed with that as well. The
executive director of The Hunt Institute reached out to me. Former North Carolina
Governor Jim Hunt had a national education policy institute, called the Intersection
of Policy and Politics. He understood that good education policy made good politics.
Interestingly, I had met him years before because while I was working on Governor
McGreevey's campaign, Governor McGreevey and I went down and spent 48 hours
with Governor Hunt while he was still the governor. He was finishing his term. It
was in the summer of 2000, so Governor Hunt was finishing his term at the end of
2000. We spent two days with him and his team. And we met with his early
childhood—he had a robust early childhood program called Smart Start that he had
put in place and that they were funding. We met with his person who was working
on juvenile justice and education for children who were incarcerated. We met with
the folks who were working on career and tech ed programs. We met with his
education—he called it his Teacher Education Adviser. So he had a teacher working
in the governor's office and he had a teacher education panel or whatever.
McGreevey eventually formed that. Anyway we used a lot of what we learned from
Governor Hunt. He had focused on Standards. He had what he called the ABC's of
Accountability and it was really starting to focus districts on continuous
improvement and accountability for results and outcomes.
Rick Sinding: I'm reminded of the time that Governor Kean invited to New Jersey
a person whom he considered to be his favorite education governor in the country,
a little known guy from Arkansas named Bill Clinton.
Lucille Davy: Exactly.
Rick Sinding: These governors do learn from each other.
Lucille Davy: Well, Hunt and Clinton were also very close because some of their
time overlapped. Governor Hunt had been governor in the '80s, left for two terms
and then came back and did two more terms. And it was in his second set of two
terms where he really zeroed in on education. But I think then Governor Clinton of
Arkansas had helped him in his earlier years. But he had worked with folks around
the country; with Lou Gerstner who was at IBM at that time. They were focused on
the preparation of teachers. Making sure that we were attracting highly qualified
candidates into the profession and then preparing them for success in the
classroom, to educate the populations they were serving.
Rick Sinding: So what did you end up doing with The Hunt Institute?
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Lucille Davy: I became a senior adviser at The Hunt Institute and I worked on
education policy with other organizations, other educational organizations around
the country; with states, so some of the work that I did was actually going into
states that were trying to implement different tests systems. Getting into PARCC
and Smarter Balanced, elevating their Standards. When I was the commissioner,
we had also raised high school graduation requirements and a lot of states were
looking at doing that so I was working with states on that. I did a lot around the
Core Curriculum Standards, spent a lot of time helping states defend—and this was
when all the politics was getting wrapped up into the Standards—helping educators
defend. Because at the end of the day, it turned out teachers really, really liked the
Standards. They liked the idea that there was a clear game plan. They liked the
idea that they were well thought out, that teachers had given input, that teachers
had reviewed them, and they saw the value in that. I actually worked with educator
groups in some of the states. We sponsored forums. I would bring speakers in to
talk about Standards. We would bring principals or teachers. In some cases, we
brought state legislators together. I worked with the National Conference of State
Legislatures who represented all the legislators in the country and spoke at many
meetings for them. I worked with the National Governors Association on initiatives
as they were beginning to educate governors and their policy advisers on some
these education policy issues. I helped with a lot of that, spoke at a lot of their
meetings. I did a lot of policy research myself just to keep up with where we were
headed.
Rick Sinding: So you caught up on your sleep pretty quickly and then hit the
ground running. <laughter>
Lucille Davy: I did and got right back into it and then basically just circled the
country many, many times. I did a lot of traveling to help other states. There were
four of us that were senior advisers at The Hunt Institute and we all did that. We
worked with other states and we worked with these partners and I did that until
2017, actually. The election in 2016 and the change in the department and what
looked like a change in the focus of how education policy at the national level was
going. I mean, I think people were beginning to understand where the feds had
erred and they were trying to pull back a little bit, and then places where they were
doing some good and really trying to support that. I wasn't a big fan of the ESSA,
the Every Student Succeeds Act or whatever. That was the next iteration of No
Child Left Behind that everybody was clamoring for, but I wasn't a huge fan of all
the parts of it. I was worried that there was too much opportunity if the feds
weren't on top of it for states to slide back again. And as it turns out, it was pretty
clear that that's what was going to happen. The feds have, I think, decided to take
another hands-off approach and to kind of step back and to leave it to the states.
That just, I think, takes us back to pre-2000, like the '90s, when a child's
educational experience and opportunity was solely dependent on where they lived.
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Because nobody was there to make sure that all children got those good
opportunities and good educational experiences. No Child Left Behind—a lot of
people didn't like that it shined a light. But it really did show us as a nation that
there were lots of children who were not getting the education that they deserved,
that they needed, that this country needed them to get in order for this country to
succeed.
Rick Sinding: Are you comfortable today that in New Jersey students who have
been left behind in generations past have a better opportunity than they used to
have, because of changes that took place under your tenure?
Lucille Davy: I think that they do. I think there's still more work to be done.
Certainly when I was there, we knew there was a lot of work that still had to be
done but progress has been made. I think having more funding focusing on early
childhood—that early experience, it's a game changer. It changes everything else
that follows. When a child gets to kindergarten at the starting line, instead of 30
feet behind, the child has a much better chance of finishing the race. And I feel
even better now because I think the legislature has recognized that they need to go
back to having a funding formula that works, that provides equitable resources.
There's a huge push by this governor now on early childhood that is really
encouraging. And the whole country has woken up to this. There isn't a state in the
nation that isn't looking at early childhood, because there's enough research and
there's enough evidence that proves that that investment is the thing. You just reap
dividends for children all the way through. And that if you don't do it, it's very, very
difficult for anybody to help those children catch up. If you go to kindergarten and
no one has ever read a book to you and you don't know the colors, and you don't
know any letters, and you don't know any sounds and you don't even know what
numbers are, you're really far behind. And that really becomes a huge hill for a child
to climb, especially a child who comes from a family that doesn't have the resources
to help support them, or is in a district that doesn't have the resources to support
them the way they need to be. So early childhood is, I mean that's the place to be
and the country is there as a whole. So I feel good about this on a national level
and I also feel really good about it on a state level, because I think we're headed in
the right direction.
Rick Sinding: One final question that has nothing to do with education. You served
under Governor McGreevey, acting-Governor—well, now because of the law change
he's actually called Governor Codey—and Governor Corzine. Can you compare and
contrast the management style, the leadership style, the gubernatorial style of each
of those three individuals?
Lucille Davy: I would say all three very different, in their own way. I loved working
for every one of them. I have to admit I have worked for people in the past who I
Lucille Davy Interview (June 26, 2019) page 47 of 48
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didn't really respect or care for. I loved all three of them and I thought they were all
really dedicated public servants. They cared about the citizens of the state. They
especially cared about the children. Jim McGreevey came to the table with that
education background that made him, I think, uniquely positioned to understand
education policy. Governor Codey understood, because of his wife, what the real
everyday experience was. Because it's easy when you sit in the ivory tower to say
do this, this, this and this. It's much more difficult, because you're not delivering
that stuff. It's what happens in every single classroom, in every school building
across the state, that delivers the policy and Governor Codey understood that
really, really well. Governor Corzine, I think, had a really big vision and understood
what the state needed to do to advance, especially from an economic perspective,
to continue to be competitive. The one thing that he would always say to me—and I
respected this so much—whenever I went to him on anything, whatever policy,
whatever decision we were making, he would just always say to me, "Is this what's
best for children?" And most times, I was only there because it was, but he always
asked me that question. Or if I went to him with two different options he would say
to me, "Which one is best for children?" And that's the way we would proceed.
At one point in time we did something that was, I think, politically very difficult. We
professionalized the county superintendent offices. They had been, in the past,
more like paper collectors and they were kind of political plum jobs. Legislators
would recommend somebody for the job or whatever. And when we put the Quality
Accountability Continuum in place, QSAC, the evaluation for districts in place, I said
to the governor, "If we're going to do this and we want to really help districts
improve, then we need leadership at the state office level." At the county office
level. The state has to provide leadership in the county for those districts and the
only way to do that is to have someone who's been a highly successful
superintendent as the county superintendent, who can lead other superintendents.
And he agreed with me. He got it. And those people had to be appointed, because
we built it into the QSAC law. They had to be appointed at the state level and they
had to go through advice and consent. And we had some counties where people
wouldn't sign off because they had somebody else they wanted and they were
people who weren't qualified to do the job.
Rick Sinding: Did you write the qualifications into the law, as well?
Lucille Davy: We did not write the qualifications. Well, I don't think we wrote them
into the law. They may have been in regulation. But I mean, we had a job
description. It wasn't like we just picked out the people we liked. We wanted people
with a track record. And, by the way, he interviewed all of them. He personally
interviewed them because his neck was on the line. I mean, this was changing a job
pretty dramatically.
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Rick Sinding: Did you eventually get 21 qualified people?
Lucille Davy: We got 21. They were not all—some of them we wound up putting in
as acting because he said to me he was not going to capitulate. He agreed that we
needed to have highly qualified, highly experienced leaders in those positions
because of what we were going to ask them to do. We were putting a lot of weight
on their shoulders. Because the state hadn't been providing that kind of support to
districts. We just didn't have the capacity to do that, especially at the county level.
So I gave him a lot of credit. But he always said, "Is this what's best for children?"
And I just had the utmost respect for that. It was the reason why it was so easy to
come to work every single day despite the challenges, and there were a lot of
challenges. There were nights I drove home at 11:30 from some meeting I was at
or some hearing I was at. And I would get up and go back in the next morning and
be exhausted, but I always felt that he was supporting the work I was doing, that
he cared immensely about the work that I was doing. And so I never wanted to
disappoint him. I always wanted to deliver on what he was expecting of me and the
team that I led.
And, by the way, I don't take credit for any of the work that we did, myself. I did it
with a really strong team of people and I think I talked earlier about—I kept those
people who were at the department and they stuck with me. Most of my senior
team was with me the entire time I was there. They were really talented, highly
skilled, lifetime education professionals who were government workers. They cared
so much about children, about education, and about the state. And it was because
of them—having a team like that, that made all the difference in the world. And
having their years of experience, I think, also helped us because it's really easy to
come in and say, "I'm going to knock everything down and start all over again." But
it is really hard to do things right and to do things when you only have a short
period of time. Four years, even, goes by very, very quickly.
Rick Sinding: It sure does. Well, this time has gone by quickly as well.
Lucille Davy: Thank you.
Rick Sinding: I really thank you for coming in and sharing your thoughts. And I
can safely say that your Twitter account is correct, you are an education policy
wonk.
<laughter>
Lucille Davy: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
Rick Sinding: Thank you.
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