lucille davy interview rick sinding: hello. i’m rick...

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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Lucille Davy Interview (June 26, 2019) page 2 of 48


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


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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


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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




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




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




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




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




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




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




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?”




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


http://governors.rutgers.edu/video-library/individual-interviews/interview-with-heather-howard/



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




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.




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




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


http://governors.rutgers.edu/video-library/individual-interviews/interview-with-heather-howard/



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




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.


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—


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




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,




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.




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




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.


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>




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.


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




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




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




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




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




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?




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.


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




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




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."




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




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




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




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




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.




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




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.




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?




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?




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




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?




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.




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




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.




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.


lucille davy interview rick sinding: hello. i’m rick...

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