Governor Christie has strong opinions. He doesn’t like public schools (even though Néw Jersey public schools regularly place 2nd or 3rd in the nation on NAEP, behind Massachusetts and neck-and-neck with Connecticut.) yet he feels the need to bad-mouth New Jersey’s public schools whenever he has the chance. Christie doesn’t like teachers (he claims they have a four or five month vacation and receive a full-time salary for a part-time job). And he absolutely loathes teacher unions (they insist that their lazy members get paid for working longer school days).
To see Governor Christie at his best, watch the video clip on this post
Instead of telling the world about his state’s excellent public schools, he rants about their terrible teachers and retrograde union.
This man will never be President. Not just because his state’s economy is in trouble, not because of Bridgegate, but because he is a bully and a blowhard.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
Christie and others of his ilk in governors mansion across the country benefit from the destruction of social studies, history, civics, government, finance and an education to become a voting citizen
Decades of bowing down to the God of the multiple choice test has left the country morally and ethically bankrupt
Just look at the Republican field for President
The population would have to be stupid to vote for these people
The Republican field is bereft of intelligence and honesty.
The Democrats have Hillary, who I suppose I’d vote for over any Republican. The thought of her and Bill back in the White House makes me a little sick to my stomach though. You know she’s got axes to grind and if she gets in it’ll be ugly.
So at this time I will support and push for Bernie Sanders. He’s honest and he takes no money from billionaires.
How ’bout Christie screaming at a teacher, “I’M TIRED OF YOU PEOPLE!!”
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/11/exclusive-govchristie-to-teacher-i-am.html
It includes the infamous picture of him screaming and pointing, and his nitwit wife smiling in approval.
Christie is one amongst several governors who have opted to not live in the governor’s mansion and instead stay in his own home. I read that was so his kids could continue at their schools.
While Christie claims that he is not rich, it’s hard to fathom, given his wife is a Wall St investment banker and he lives in a NJ home now valued at $2.27M, with a pool, nestled on 6 acres, in an area where virtually all of the homes have huge lots like that. He has no clue about what “not rich” means. He paid more in annual property taxes than I grossed for each of the past seven years. Maybe that’s why he hates teachers and public education, but I’ve seen a lot higher taxes in other wealthy communities: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/46-Corey-Ln-Mendham-NJ-07945/39443899_zpid/
It depends on your definition of rich, in his mind rich = enough to fill my greed. Power is more important than money to these people anyway.
It’s a 3-way tie between Christie, Cuomo and Walker at this point in the ” A@#jhole of the Year” competition (Arne Duncan is just behind).
It’s only June, so there’s a lot of time for one of them to do something really, really stupid,although it’s hard to imagine what.
Their attempts to break our Unions will be their downfall.
Solidarity my brothers and sisters.
Don’t forget Rauner from Illinois, Pence from Indiana and Snyder from Michigan. And there’s probably many more close contenders for that title.
Spot on. Would love to lock them all in the same room and throw away the key.
This man will never be President. Not just because his state’s economy is in trouble, not because of Bridgegate, but because he is a bully and a blowhard.”
Don’t hold back: tell us what you really think of him!
What do you think of him?
Bully and blowhard is a good start. How about:
Belligerent
Bellicose
Buffoon
Bigoted (not racially, educationally)
Benighted
Barbarous
Biggity
Blundering
Bossy
Boastful
The rest of the alphabet later.
My initial remark was actually to acknowledge how patient Dr. Ravitch usually is with folks of Governor Christie’s ilk. That she chose to characterize him as she did, says a great deal about his ignorance and arrogance, which are not limited to educational issues.
She’s being kind…if you ever knew all the stuff this guy has done, you’d implode–if he keeps insisting that he’s running for prez–at least everyone will find out.
Governor Cuomo gave a speech saying that the pedophiles were in the ranks of teachers and had to be eliminated. The NPR radio station WAMC actually quoted him verbatim on the radio; BATS and others complained to WAMC. But , Christie is much worse. I remember when he was first elected as NJ Governor the daughter of a friend (she was in pharmaceutical finance) would call her dad and excoriate teachers’ pensions. I said to him “she doesn’t realize that your teacher pension helped to pay for her college degrees, and it bought her beautiful prom dresses.” Why she would do this to her dad I don’t know but she would quote Christie; that was my first inkling of what he was doing to attack teachers in NJ and it would reverberate through to Massachusetts.
As a former New York State teacher and former New Jersey resident, I had to go through a similar debate with my New Jersey resident brother, a retired business executive. It is disheartening when the very people that have benefited from public education are willing to buy the “failing schools narrative” or the “unsustainability” of teachers’ pensions stance. These antagonists have forgotten what public education has done for them, and they should be reminded that lots of the problems of teachers’ pensions were created by mismanagement and broken promises of those in charge, not by the teachers themselves.
States have literally been using money that should have gone to pensions to fund state business for years. Illinois taxes have been artificially low for decades because of this maneuver. Now teachers are supposed to pay because the state stole pension funds? Perhaps term limits aren’t such a bad idea. Politicians would have no reason to avoid tough decisions if they were limited in the number of terms they could serve.
Obviously he feels comfortable doing it because he knows his constituents.
I think Christie is upset because his state spends more on education than Mississippi and others.
Yes. My family hates teachers but can not come to grips their relatives are teachers. Family picnics are a weird, surreal world of Kasich-loving government workers, anti-teacher rants as they then ask how are the kids, and Social Security recipients complaining about socialism. America has lost its collective sanity. I blame reality TV and Google.
for retired teacher’s comment above
He’s upset because it’s money he wants to give to his wealthy buddies to gain more power and control.
“Why Does Governor Christie Tell Lies About Teachers?”
For the same reason he breathes.
he can’t help himself.
In fact, I’d be willing to bet that in Christie’s “brain” (if you will allow me the license to call it that) , the same neurons control both due to a crossing of the wires somewhere along the way.
When Christie says “my name is Chris Christie, he’s telling the truth. At this point, anyone that believes anything else he says is a Knit Wit.
“This man will never be President.”
God, I hope you’re right!
I’m not so hopeful.
Unfortunately, he seems to possess all the necessary qualities.
“The horror… the horror… ”
In New Jersey, a small number of delegates take two days work to attend the New Jersey state teachers union’s NJEA convention every fall—not every teacher in the state, just a few hundred delegates. To facilitate this, the delegates take off two days work, then arrange for qualified substitutes, leave lesson plans, etc.
That doesn’t sound too unreasonable, right?
Well, check out this link: (make sure to hit the expand icon next to the volume, to see it full frame)
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid616303324001?bctid=665566293001
In the 2010 video, Christie takes this one grain of truth—some teachers taking two days off for for the NJEA convention—and extrapolates that to all New Jersey teachers as a way of condemning them as lazy, selfish, who care more about “having a party” than they do about their students… that they also have all this time off for vacations, instead of helping their students…
.. and he’s telling all of this… TO A CROWD OF STUDENTS ???!!!! At the very beginning of the video, he even tell the kids that they need to “stand up” to their teachers.
Christie bloviates to kids that if their teachers “cared more about all of you learning, they’d be in school, baby. That’s right. They wouldn’t be down there having a party, which is all this (NJEA convention) is. It’s a party!”
Comments that are not on video include Christie further trashing their teachers, by telling the students present that their teachers belong to “greedy teachers’ union”, and that’s why they don’t have enough supplies in their classroom—not that Christie just cut $1.3 billion from the state’s education budget, so he could pay for tax breaks to the rich.
See this link for the quote about “greedy teachers union” causing no school supplies:
https://www.njea.org/news/2010-11-09/njea-christie-irresponsible-and-out-of-control
Watching this shows how Christie would make a good Iago in a production of Shakespeare’s OTHELLO—a full-figured version of the Venetian villain, to be sure. Much like Iago’s verbal evil turns Othello against his loyal wife Desdemona—“I shall pour the poison into his ear so that she repels him”—Christie endeavors to get these students to find their teachers equally repellant, and then turn on them as the Moor did on his love.
There’s a Latin phrase ‘in loco parentis” to describe teachers. This means “in place of the parents”, as in, other than the parents, these adults are the most important people in the kids lives. Especially with kids from distressed home lives, teachers can take on a quasi-parental roll. Indeed, they are with kids seven hours or more every day, sometimes spending more time with them than those childrens’ parents, if those parents work long hours.
Therefore, what Christie is doing is beyond despicable. He’s poisoning these children’s minds against their teachers to advance his own selfish political interests, and the interests of money-motivated corporate reformers. It’s child abuse.
To the parents out there, here’s a thought hypothetical experiment:
How would you like it if some politician or authority figure started talking to your children like this when you were not there to defend yourself (or punch the fat creep in the mouth)? Think of this person going a group of siblings:
“You mom and dad are so lazy and selfish! They don’t care about you, only about themselves. They care more about leaving you for two days to go to a party… and they’re always taking vacations away from you… you don’t have any nice things because your parents are greedy… because they’re horrible… ”
Just think of how, in the hypothetical scenario above, that would undermine those siblings’ relationship with their parents, how it would create a void between parent and child, and cause a resentment that ruptures that relationship… and leads to them not respecting or following those hypothetical parents’ authority.
Here’s the NJEA’s response to this abomination:
https://www.njea.org/news/2010-11-09/njea-christie-irresponsible-and-out-of-control
——————–
NJEA article:
“(NJEA President) Keshishian said NJEA members were angered by Christie’s comments to Trenton students, in which he said it was the ‘greedy teachers union’ – and not his $1.3 billion in state aid cuts – that was responsible for the lack of supplies in their classrooms.
“She cited a news article showing that teachers spend between $500 and $1,000 of their own money each year on school supplies.
“ ‘So much for ‘greedy teachers,’ Keshishian said.
” … ”
” ‘This governor’s comments are irresponsible and out of control,’ Keshishian said. ‘Not only is he lying to students about the obvious impact of his massive cuts to public schools, but it is inconceivable that a governor would use such language with students in order to advance a political agenda. It’s one thing to disagree over policy issues, but demeaning teachers in front of their students is totally unacceptable behavior by the state’s chief executive. It raises serious questions about his character.’ ”
————————
To quote Kurtz from APOCALYPSE NOW, “The horror… the horror… “
There are overt bullies, and then there are smooth operators who are well-connected and know how to join bandwagons
Tripped on this
CLINTON RECEIVED $225K FOR SPEECH FROM JEB BUSH-AFFILIATED ACADEMIC PARTNERSHIPS: Lee Fang reporting for the Intercept: “Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton received nearly a quarter of a million dollars last year for a speaking engagement on behalf of Academic Partnerships, a for-profit education company in which Jeb Bush held an ownership stake and on whose board he served. Clinton’s newly filed personal financial disclosure shows that she was paid $225,500 on March 24, 2014 by Academic Partnerships. At the invitation-only event in Dallas, Texas, Clinton reportedly said, “today a student doesn’t need to travel to Cambridge, Mass., or Cambridge, England, to get a world-class education.” Academic Partnerships assists universities in converting their academic degree programs into online versions that can be taken by students around the world.”
That message came from http://younginvincibles.org/2016-millennial-memo-may-27-2015/
Clinton carefully walks the noncommittal line in an interview with the NEA.http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/06/hillarys-nea-audition.html
I couldn’t finish watching.
Is there anything more dangerous than a true believer?
Why does anyone tell lies about teachers and education?
It could not be because of money could it????
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
…because he is a fat mouthed fat lying turd. To call him a turd is insulting to turds. He and Cami Anderson have broken the law many times over, sold public property to crony/TFA related charters (pink hula hoop), lied about attendance, lied about a child who died of meningitis, brought a recent lawsuit against “a trespasser” regarding that death and the conditions of a particular school, tried to fire many teachers illegally and smeared their reputations and careers, and placed teachers in rubber rooms while hiring TFA scabs. In Newark on Broad Street, “Teachers Village” is being built – but for TFA teachers and will also house 3 charter schools. Who will send their kids to those 3 charters? I cannot imagine the “One Newark App” is going to send poor black kids to those schools, and on the other hand, I cannot imagine executives and lawyers working in Newark are going to want to send their kids there either. Chris Christie is a lying, thieving pig, who collects a full time salary while governing NJ part time, badly I might add, He trots around the USA saying how bad NJ is….and that is his presidential platform? Amazing. He should be indicted for more than “Bridgegate” – he has done everything within his power to undermine public education, close schools, fire teachers, ruin teachers’ careers, and make life in NJ uninhabitable by all but the wealthy. When he goes to jail, I will smile.
Chris Christie is a Tony Soprano wannabe, but without empathy for the ducks in his pool.
Christie the Lying Crook alleges that teachers are lazy and work a part time job with 4 or 5 months off a year.
Here’s the reality I know about because I did it for thirty years.
Teachers work 40 weeks a year with students and usually start work a week or more earlier to attend meetings that focus on how to increase test scores, plan lessons and get the room ready. That leaves 11 weeks to equal the 4 or 5 months Christi the Lying Crook alleges teachers don’t work.
How did Christie the Lying Crook cram 16 to 20+ weeks into 11?
Let’s see how this lazy teacher writing this comment slid through thirty years of teaching and got away with all that paid vacation time.
Wait, the district where I taught stopped paying us in July and didn’t start again until September. I understand some districts take the same average salary and spread it out over 12 months so those teachers earn less each month. The district where I worked only paid us for the 10 months we worked. The first week when we came back early was free because I don’t think that time counted for the first full month check where we were actually working with students.
Oh, and lest I forget, I usually taught summer school or spent my summer doing landscape work or construction to earn money so I could pay the bills. I knew teachers who worked summers teaching adults and teens how to drive. I knew teachers who worked at Disneyland during the busy theme park’s summer months.
The fact is that I worked 60 to 100 hours a week because of all the work I took home. When we had two weeks off around the New Year, I took work home so I could catch up on my correcting and then spend time planning lessons and work on my final exam for the first semester that focused on what was taught in the class—not a rigged test that were used to rank teachers, fired them and close schools.
>At 60 hours, I worked 2,400 hours in one school year.
>At 100 hours, I worked close to 4,000 hours
> And I wasn’t adding in the time I worked the week we had to report early before the kids arrived or the days I worked correcting papers and planning lessons during the winter and spring breaks.
Here’s a real shocker. According to the OECD, in the United States, the average annual hours actually worked per worker are 1,788 hours, but to Christie the Lying Crook, 2,400 to 4000 hours worked is a part time job while 1,788 hours equal a full time job.
http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS
Let’s see the average hours teachers work in the U.S. compared to the other OECD nations.
This number is only based on the hours teachers are in the classroom teaching and doesn’t include the hours outside of the classroom correcting papers, attending meetings, doing grades, working on lesson plans, calling parents, etc.
Yes, most teachers are too busy in the classroom teaching and have to make all those parent phone calls before school, at lunch (try to eat with one hand while holding the phone with the other and talking to parents—we only had about 35 minutes for lunch) or after school or after returning home. I know. That’s how I did it for thirty years, and I know a teacher who still has about 10 years to go. He says he has to make and document so many phone calls every night that he doesn’t have time to correct student work so he hired a retired teacher he knows and trusts to correct that work for him and pays that retired teacher $25 an hour out of his own pocket.
The reason for the phone calls is to beg parents to get their kids to study at home is so the Common Core Crap test scores go up and the schools won’t be punished by elected fools like Christie the Lying Crook.
The OECD shows that U.S. teachers spend more time in the classroom teaching than all but two of 38 countries I counted on the list. We hear a lot about how great Finland’s schools are. Look at the chart on the far right to discover how many hours Finland’s teachers are teaching. it’s about half of U.S. teachers who are in the #3 rank for teaching more than any other developed country.
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/9612041ec027.pdf?expires=1434164480&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=3D8AEFDC05EFF21D6A026EAB87D0994E
Is anyone boiling tar and saving feathers for Christi the Lying Crook?
For politicians seeking favor (less from the public, more from potential donors), it is in vogue to paint public workers/teachers/schools as some burdensome failure. But politicians stumping for reform and privatization of public systems are like desperate adolescents vying to belong to the popular group: same narrative, same donor/backers, same agenda, same suit, same haircut…standing out as a leader bringing something new becomes difficult. So there are a handful who allow the most foolish things to come out of their mouths in order to come out of their mouths in the hopes of standing out as either down-home folksy (think Palin), or straight-shootin honest (think Christie). The problem with Christie is he is confusing arrogant, enabled narcissism with a healthy dose of rude #%!!-holery with straight-shootin. In this day and age of the NAEP proven “failing school”, you’d think he would be publicly praising NJ test scores and the teachers that make it happen. But he can’t. The hole he has dug for his own personal outhouse is too deep.
It’s one thing for them to spew venom to adults. As far as I know, Christie is the only one who does it to kids (perhaps Eva M. does, too.)
Well, check out this link: (make sure to hit the expand icon next to the volume, to see it full frame)
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid616303324001?bctid=665566293001
In the 2010 video, Christie takes this one grain of truth—some teachers taking two days off for for the NJEA convention—and extrapolates that to all New Jersey teachers as a way of condemning them as lazy, selfish, who care more about “having a party” than they do about their students… that they also have all this time off for vacations, instead of helping their students…
.. and he’s telling all of this… TO A CROWD OF STUDENTS ???!!!! At the very beginning of the video, he even tell the kids that they need to “stand up” to their teachers.
Christie bloviates to kids that if their teachers “cared more about all of you learning, they’d be in school, baby. That’s right. They wouldn’t be down there having a party, which is all this (NJEA convention) is. It’s a party!”
Comments that are not on video include Christie further trashing their teachers, by telling the students present that their teachers belong to “greedy teachers’ union”, and that’s why they don’t have enough supplies in their classroom—not that Christie just cut $1.3 billion from the state’s education budget, so he could pay for tax breaks to the rich.
See this link for the quote about “greedy teachers union” causing no school supplies:
https://www.njea.org/news/2010-11-09/njea-christie-irresponsible-and-out-of-control
A bully, a blowhard, and other choice Yiddish words I’m too polite to use on your blog. The best we can hope for is a perp walk due to one of his many sleazy (felonious) actions.
Name it: PATHOLOGICAL Sociopath.
This man looks like an ex-Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara–a.k.a. anti-Chinese/Korean nationalist bully–on Languaroid that automatically translates his xenophobic/racist Japanese rant into English language.
He’s a bully.