This is a column that will raise the rafters, curl your hair, or make you shake with rage. It should.
Bob Braun, who started his own blog after writing for New Jersey’s largest newspaper, “The Star-Ledger,” for 50 years, is furious. This week, when schools start in New Jersey, the children of Newark will get on buses and be distributed to schools across the district. This is Cami Anderson’s “One Newark” plan, and Braun is fearful that children will be lost or harmed. He calls on the ministers (this was published on Saturday) to pray for the safety of the children.
Cami Anderson wants Newark to look like New Orleans, so she must break up any attachments to neighborhood schools, destroy the idea that the school has anything to do with the community. So the children must be dispersed, far from home.
This is Braun’s message to the ministers, to Governor Christie, to Cami Anderson, and to Tom Moran, the chief editorial writer of “The Star-Ledger,” who thinks Cami walks on water. Braun writes:
“While I am not a religious person, I will take a lesson from one of the readings scheduled for services tomorrow, at least in Catholic churches, the denomination in which I was raised. The first reading comes from Jeremiah 20:7-9:
“Whenever I speak, I must cry out…outrage is my message.”
“So where is the outrage in the face of the mistreatment of thousands of Newark children who will be transported all over the city in a transportation plan that won’t be implemented until the first day it will be used? No feasibility tests. No dry runs. No studies to determine whether it will work. Every first day of school in every community is chaotic under the best of circumstances–imagine what it will be like Thursday.
“Where is the outrage? For The Star-Ledger, I wrote about education for nearly 30 years. When some suburban school superintendent tried to alter the district lines of one school to adjust for enrollment changes, the community would rise in anger and often block the plan. In Newark, massive changes and disruptions are about to occur–and, yes, there has been anger and there has been outrage, but no one is listening. No one outside the city cares….
“Let us hope nothing happens to the children of Newark. But also pray for justice if harm does befall even just one of these precious young people. Justice for people like Gov. Chris Christie, who knows how to buy friends, even among clergy, but who does not know how to feel for the city’s children. Justice for people like Cami Anderson who, by my measure of thinking, somehow managed to lose her soul in her strivings for personal ambition. For David Hespe, the education commissioner who, like Pontius Pilate, washed his hands of the problem….
“We know what is about to happen is only happening because the residents of the city are poor, powerless and possess a skin color darker than that of Christie, Hespe, and Anderson. We know this would never happen in a predominantly white suburb.
“I am sorry to have to say this to the people of Newark: To many of your brothers and sisters in New Jersey, you–and your children–simply don’t count very much. They blame you for taxes. They blame you for school failure.
“Christie has all but said that the education of Newark children is not a moral obligation or a civic challenge. Rather he believes it is an expense that he would rather not have the rest of the state pay. He would be just as happy to see everyone in Newark disappear and just leave the gleaming towers owned by his friends standing.
“The “One Newark” plan is a slow means of doing just that. The poor and the needy will be isolated and driven from the city. A chain of privately operated charter schools will be made available for the eventual gentrification of the city. The powerful will allow a small percentage of people of color to attain success but there will be no effort to save the rest from poverty. Their children will be warehoused.”
Here are his words for the chief editorial writer of the state’s largest newspaper:
“I know of at least one colleague who is so blinded in his worship of Cami Anderson that he cannot see she is inept and arrogant and consistently unable to make wise choices. I don’t know why he believes that but, God forgive me, I do resent that he believes I will have contributed to the travesty when “One Newark” fails.
“This colleague, a columnist and chief editorial writer for The Star-Ledger (a newspaper I served for nearly 50 years and deeply loved), contends those who oppose what he admits is an “untested” plan “don’t seem to give a damn about the children.”
“Who would want their own children subjected to an “untested” plan? Why is it okay for Newark children to be used as guinea pigs, but not Montclair or Scotch Plains children? How can someone be so unforgivably blind and indifferent to others? How can a major metropolitan daily print such offensive rot? Where are the editors who exercise reasonable restraint on this man’s hero worship?
“How can a sentient being write such incredibly stupid words? I guess I have to hold with Friedrich Schiller that “Against stupidity, even the gods are invictorious.” Those opponents are parents. If he–or Star-Ledger reporters–would bother to look into what’s happening, they would see the opposition is run, not by unions, not by politicians, but by moms and dads, by people who care about their children.
“Yes, Mr. Editorial Writer, black mothers and fathers proud are about their kids, worried about them, wanting the best for them, working in ways you could never understand to help them. Just because they don’t live in the suburbs where you live, just because they don’t look like you, just because they can’t live on one job but need two or three to survive, doesn’t mean they d0n’t love their children. Please, you and your newspaper are abandoning the city and you haven’t cared about it for decades anyway (I know, I was there)–so why don’t you just shut up?
“Please, just shut up.”
Bob Braun is New Jersey’s Jeremiah. Outrage is his message. He will not be silent in the face of injustice. He will not curry favor with the powerful. He is angry. And, unlike those who are playing games with the lives of the children of Newark, his conscience is clear.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In addition to all the valid points made by Bob Braun about the wholesale shuffling of Newark students, we should remember the disruptive, distracting effect of this shuffling on each child. Many adults whose families needed to relocate during their school years can tell you about the anxiety and loss they experienced as they left their neighborhood schools. It is cruel to use Newark’s children as pawns in this iteration of the ongoing attack on public education.
It’s so weird that this one person is drafting and putting in NJ public education law. I still can’t get my head around that.
It doesn’t align with anything I learned about US law or governance norms, ever, anywhere. Who provides oversight? Who checks her work? Could she do anything at all with the schools in that city, as an experiment? I hope she’s a good and honorable person is all I can say. They seem to be relying completely on her intrinsic integrity and good intentions, particularly because the main news source seems to be completely captured.
Just nuts. The emergency manager in Detroit was national news, yet this is just business as usual under Governor Christie. At least in Detroit there’s a bankruptcy court – SOME outside entity, although the court doesn’t monitor the EAA there.
What, schools are not the local expression of stakeholder-participatory-pedagogy and democracy? What about the increased costs to the district of all the busing miles and maintenance in distributing “homogeneously” the students across the district?
Sad times in America!!!
“Over the past couple of years, a raucous debate has emerged over the Common Core, content standards in English and mathematics adopted by states nationwide. The debate has been marked by acrimony rather than analysis, but there is hope that both sides want a reset. We — one Core advocate, one opponent — want to assist by laying out the facts on which we think everyone should agree.”
I hate to let them “re-start” the debate over the Common Core because it sets a bad precedent. We shouldn’t have public “debates” AFTER the federal and state government has adopted policy that affects tens of millions of children and their schools.
They shouldn’t be rewarded for completely ignoring and side-stepping that process. I know why they did it. It was easier to keep “us” out of the loop until after the first round of tests were in the can and there were too many sunk costs to back up or reconsider but this is a really bad precedent to set. I don’t even object to the Common Core (although I think public schools will be further harmed by yet another unfunded mandate, as a practical matter) but I do have some appreciation for process. I value that. I’m not really willing to just discard it for “efficiency” and “what works”. I can’t help but compare this to the health care law, which was debated endlessly in Congress, all the “stakeholders” were brought in and accommodated, it went to courts, states balked over many and various provisions, and on and on. A huge pain in the neck, granted, and the “what works” people were probably very frustrated but they didn’t just blithely SKIP debate and then launch a PR campaign to get around the fact that they sidestepped process.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/1/restarting-the-common-core-debate/#ixzz3C9sRW32H
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Can intelligent people not recognize that Cami Anderson is mentally ill. People who know her personally recognize that she has a Psychopathic/Sadistic Personality and is getting intense pleasure from causing suffering to massive numbers of children. She belongs in a psych ward. She ranks up there with Dr Josef Mengele. Wake up parents and intelligent people in Newark ! You are silent bystanders to this horrific child abuse!
headline should read…
One Newark is DONE in Newark.
Educators are taking back education.
Is no one in the civil rights arena or Ted Olson or David Boies willing to get an injunction to stop this on behalf of the students for this egregious violation of their civil rights for fair treatment?
Where’s the New Jersey Attorney General or the Federal Attorney General?
Is everybody willing to just throw these children away?
This phrase jumped out at me: “To many of your brothers and sisters in New Jersey, you–and your children–simply don’t count very much. They blame you for taxes. They blame you for school failure.”
Newark students aren’t just put on the bus… they are thrown UNDER the bus.