The Education Law Center, an independent organization that advocates for the children of New Jersey, obtained a copy of a proposal that the Chris Christie administration made to the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles.
The plan calls for aggressive state intervention in the state’s lowest performing schools. Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf wants to set up an “achievement district” for the low-performing schools. These schools would likely be closed and handed over to private managers as charter schools. The state plan calls for eliminating collective bargaining in these schools.
The amount requested was $7.6 million, of which the Broad Foundation has thus far supplied $1.6 million.
This should not be a difficult sell for Cerf. He is a “graduate” of the Broad Foundation’s unaccredited Superintendent’s Academy. And the chairman of the board of the foundation is his former boss, Joel Klein.
It’s somewhat strange that people like Cerf (and Arne Duncan, for that matter) think that a school gets “reformed” or “turned around” by firing the staff, closing the school, and handing it off to a charter operator. Cerf is a smart enough guy, and he surely knows that charters on average don’t produce better results than the public schools they replace unless they push out the low-performing kids.
One of the news stories says that Cerf wants to use New Orleans “recovery school district” as a model for New Jersey, but I wonder if he knows that 79% of the charters in New Orleans were graded either D or F by the state, and that New Orleans ranked 69th of 70 districts in the entire state.
How long can this shell game go on?
I understand that the people in the Abbott districts (the poorest cities where the lowest-performing schools are) may be accustomed to getting pushed around by the state, but how will the people of New Jersey feel about Christie and Cerf bringing in a raft of charter school operators to privatize what used to be their public schools?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Chris Cristie, like many Republicans, main goal is to break the teacher union; it has nothing to do with education. He has no real interest in helping underperforming schools or struggling students.
If the charters are not allowed to screen for the kids, but must accept those already assigned to that school, i bet there will be few takers. it’s. just. too. hard.
Maybe they can go off on him ‘Jersey Style’. You know, Chris is so fond of going off on people ‘Jersey Style’. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
I thought the conservatives were small government advocates. The state taking property from a local areas school district is hardly that.
I was thinking the same thing. But if it means making a profit even if it’s from children’s education, they’ll interfere.
How long can this shell game go on? As long as it takes for parents and teachers to do something to stop it.
Cerf was going to visit our district (Abbott), but cancelled. He must really be interested in what is happening in these districts. Let him teach in a classroom for a week and see what we are dealing with.
They are pulling back from the suburbs for the moment because they didn’t expect the strength of the resistance. But they’ll be back; count on it:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/08/njdoe-coup-detat-continues.html
I can hear the Imperial March from Star Wars in my head, JJ.
I happen to be enrolled in the NJEA Summer Leadership Conference which opens this weekend. In addition to our session topic, we have one elective session, and I plan on going to the workshop that discusses charter schools in NJ. Can’t wait to experience this. Thank you for your incredible work on researching the plight of NJ public education. Thanks to your blog, I will enter this session armed, but I will certainly behave.
It looks like Christie will get what he wants anyway. Before he leaves his friends will have made inroads in NJ education and taken millions from unwary taxpayers and leave the poor,inner cities a wasteland. I don’t trust the teachers’ union either. They are out to protect their jobs. I only hope some politician can make the charters and private schools transparent so taxpayers can see the profits that these schools make. I hope that they work under the same rules as public schools. As a retired teacher I know changes have to be made in the accountablity of teachers. But that change can be made in the leadership. All teachers are evaluated each year and the problem comes from poor evaluation. If school leadership evaluates correctly and fairly then there would be no problem. Start changes from that point.
We cannot just follow Christie blindly. We must ask for constant accountability.
@Bill Donovan: I don’t understand why you don’t trust the unions? Are you a retired public school teacher? Didn’t you belong to the NJEA? The NJEA is out to protect teacher rights, where’s the problem with that? Why do changes have to be made to the accountability of teachers? Do you think that NJ teachers are that bad? If you are a retired public school teacher who did belong to the NJEA, you are now benefiting from all that the NJEA fought for.
If you are a teacher then you know there are some teachers that shouldn’t be there and some that should have retired. When the union has to protect the good and the bad, there is something wrong. This goes for any union. Plus, the union officials should not make the money they do. There is a point that the unions become just like the politicians they are fighting.
Whoa, Bill. You are making one assumption after another.
“When the union has to protect the good and the bad, there is something wrong.”
No union protects “bad teachers.” Unions protect the rights of their members to due process. If a district cannot prove that a truly “bad teacher” is guilty of professional misconduct in the process of an investigative hearing, then the district is actually protecting the “bad teacher,” not the union. Districts have a right to prove a case–unions only protect a teacher from getting railroaded when there IS no case.
“Plus, the union officials should not make the money they do. ”
Who are you to put a price on what union officials SHOULD make?
Be very careful how you interpret reality. Your comments are border-line union-ignorant.
The new buzz word for reforming failing schools must be put them in an group and call the grouping an ” achievement zone”. These groups could be public or charter. Have them operate like the reform in New Orleans and the Recovery School District (RSD). We know from many who have followed that creation just how successful it has been! Success? What a joke. Why would anybody propose a reform design like that of the RSD and charters in New Orleans?
http://theadvocate.com/news/2678137-123/school-achievement-zone-proposed-for
Achievement Zone—it’s doing the same thing over and over. They take some low performing schools in Baton Rouge, ironically in the poorest and most violent and least educated zip code, and the RSD runs them for a year and then gives them over to charter groups. That is how the RSD administrator explained the plan to us at a community meeting with Denise Marcelle, a Metro Council member who represents a lot of the area. I know. I was there.
Trouble is, most of them have ALREADY BEEN RUN BY CHARTER GROUPS AND HAVE FAILED. The one that ran Prescott and Glen Oaks middle, Advance Baton Rouge, had the stupidity the first year of the charters of mixing two groups of overage middle schoolers from rival schools and neighborhoods in the school cafeteria. The staff retreated to a locked office when the fight started.
Oh, and they are also mixing middle and high school kids at their latest victim—Istrouma High School, which was not previously a charter or RSD school. Real good. hot-to-trot 13 year old girls in the same school with hormone ridden 16 year old boys. But they care about kids getting a quality education. The quality schools are not only careful not to mix younger and older teens, but also have 9th grade academies to keep the freshmen in a more protected and nurturing environment for an extra year. That is what the A and B schools in Livingston and Ascension parishes and the City of Zachary do. Seems like the RSD would want to copy the successful systems if they cared about the kids!
I don’t think Bobby wants quality public schools for the masses. I think he wants to keep poor people a little dumb so they will vote conservative and so there are plenty of workers who are best suited for the drudge work of the booming hospitality industry. Kind of reminds me of BRAVE NEW WORLD with the different classes of people programmed for different levels of intelligence. If you are from zip code 70805, the Achievement Zone, you are an Epsilon.
If he doesn’t know you need to tell him. He may actually not. If you want to put a petition on Care2 or Change.org I am sure a lot of people who follow you would sign it. I would.
This sounds very eerily the same as what Gov Rick Snyder has already done here in Michigan. The Educational Achievement Authority (EAA) is set to operate the lowest performing 5% of Michigan schools starting in the 12-13 school year. Here is a quote from the michigan.gov website explaining the EAA ” It (EAA) will first apply to underperforming schools in Detroit in the 2012-2013 school year and then be expanded to cover the entire state.” Is this not a state takeover?
http://michigan.gov/eaa/
Oh, the irony. There was a near-scandal when Christie created an obstacle for then NJ Department of Education Commissioner Brent Schundler’s completion and submission of the RttT application thus preventing New Jersey from getting a “piece of the RttT pie.” Christie was criticized for this, but thank goodness New Jersey never got involved.
I never thought I would thank Chris Christie for anything related to education before.
Diane,
New Jersey’s low-income communities are not accepting this. They and the rest of NJ’s public education supporters are fighting disenfranchisement and public education privatization. We now have more than 9,000 members who consistently and loudly advocate for public education in our State with many positive results, and we are continuing to grow rapidly.
The public education privatization and destruction plan put forward by Cerf to the Broad Foundation is very similar to what the US DOE agreed to allow NJ to pursue as part of the No Child Left Behind waiver.
The Obama Administration needs to be called out for granting Cerf the right to disenfranchise low income communities of color while privatizing and destroying their public schools.
As the Education Law Center made clear in their letter to the US DOE last year, there was no input from New Jersey residents on the very incomplete and faulty waiver proposal. Yet the US DOE granted the waiver.
Our subsequent efforts to make the US DOE aware of the waiver’s shortcomings have also largely fallen on deaf ears.
Why is the Obama Administration allowing this destruction of our State’s great public schools and disenfranchisement of our communities of color?
Here are the supporting details for the role of US DOE in supporting NJ DOE’s attack on our low-income communities of color:
“Under the guise of accountability, the State has singled out public schools serving predominately Black and Latino students in poor neighborhoods for disparate treatment in its most extreme form – closing the schools altogether,” said David Sciarra, [Education Law Center’s] Executive Director. “Equally alarming is the State’s decision to financially reward schools in affluent communities with very few at-risk students and students with special needs.”
“NJDOE has constructed a perverse system of school punishment and rewards that will do nothing to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for the most at-risk students in our state,” Mr. Sciarra concluded. “The new system is a throwback to the days when State policies worked to reinforce the intense racial and socio-economic segregation in New Jersey’s public schools.”
Source: http://www.edlawcenter.org/news/archives/other-issues/njdoe-intent-on-closing-schools-serving-students-of-color1.html
Here is more on the Education Law Center’s letter to the US DOE, pointing out the many problems with the NJ DOE’s No Child Left Behind waiver application:
http://www.edlawcenter.org/news/archives/other-issues/elc-calls-on-njdoe-to-defer-and-revamp-nclb-waiver-application.html
These concerns articulated by the Education Law Center were completely ignored by the US DOE, which granted the waiver.
The US DOE even refused to defer NJ’s application a couple of months until the next waiver application cycle.
The US DOE is clearly complicit in the disenfranchisement of New Jersey’s low-income communities of color and the destruction of their public schools.
Jersey City has just hired a Broad-influenced superintendent, Marcia V. Lyles, but some local folks are protesting. Here’s a discussion on a local discussion board:
http://jclist.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=27594&forum=11&post_id=296850