Archives for category: New Jersey
« Older Entries

Jersey City: The Secret to Retaining Teachers!

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
16

Something exciting is happening in Jersey City, New Jersey. As schools adopt the community schools model, teachers are teaching, enjoying it, and not jumping ship. Pay attention!

Joshua Rosario wrote in the Jersey Journal:

We swear on Dumbledore’s Elder wand, no spells were cast to keep teachers from walking out the door of this Jersey City school.

At a time when schools nationwide are struggling to keep and recruit educators, the preK-through-8 Mahatma Gandhi School has retained its staff by using a community-based model that allows them to focus solely on teaching; as well as a Harry Potter-type friendly competition in which students and teachers are split into four teams to accumulate points throughout the year.

Teachers Michelle Duarte and Lindsay Boland said before the school, located at 143 Romaine Ave., transitioned to the community-based model, teachers had to be attendance officers, guidance counselors, therapists, nurses and even act as another parent for students.

“It just comes down to you can teach, you can interact with students and not worry about all the extra stuff that used to get thrown at you in the past,” Duarte, a teacher for 23 years at the school said.

At least 55% of teachers, many of whom take on multiple roles beyond educating their students, are considering leaving the profession earlier than they planned, according to a survey by the National Education Association, one of the largest teacher unions in the country.

“I am not saying that I don’t think about work when I get home … but when I get home I can shut my computer down and not have to type up lesson plans,” said Boland, who has taught at three schools. “I had one of my students tell me he missed school for a week because he had no shoes.”

Superintendent Norma Fernandez and Mahatma Gandhi Principal Peter Mattaliano credit the community-based school model for a 95% retention rate. The community-based model allows the school to give its 1,000 students, of which 62% are considered economically disadvantaged, and their families access to more services than traditional schools can provide.

Out of the 85 teachers at the school, also known as School 23, only five teachers had filed for retirement this past year, Mattaliano said.

While many teachers would pay out of their own pocket to provide a student with shoes, teachers at Mahatma Gandhi can reach out to the school’s community coordinator. The children and their families are not only connected to needed financial help, but the school provides a food pantry, clothing shop and even a full medical clinic that includes visits from a pediatrician and dentist.

“They didn’t even know what a dentist was or owned a toothbrush, which was really alarming and depressing,” said Boland, who teaches first grade. “A lot of times kids tell you there is no food at home, so a few times a week we take some of our students down there and go food shopping.”

School 23 is one of five community-based schools in the district, along with schools 15, 34, 22, 29 (which opens in September) and Snyder High School.

Open the link and read on.

Categories Community Schools, Education Reform, Funding, New Jersey, Teachers and Teaching

NPE Has Lost a Beloved Friend. RIP Darcie Cimarusti

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2023 //
11

The Network for Public Education has lost a beloved friend and ally. Our communications director, Darcie Cimarusti, lost her valiant battle with ovarian cancer. Everyone who worked with her loved her for her spirit, her dedication, her kindness, and her courage.

Carol Burris released the following statement on behalf of the staff and the board:

NPE Mourns the Loss of Former Communications Director Darcie Cimarusti

Mother Crusader.

That is what Darcie Cimarusti called herself, and it was a title she earned again and again.  As a mom, devoted spouse of a teacher, NPE Communications Director, and school board President, Darcie was devoted to public schools.

Darcie began her advocacy work by exposing the fraud and shenanigans of the charter schools that were draining resources from New Jersey public schools. She was delighted when her investigative work led to a story by Mike Winerip in The New York Times. Winerip gave Darcie credit for exposing the machinations and falsehoods put forth by a charter operator in pursuit of a Federal Charter School Program grant. In that article, Winerip characterized applications to the Federal Charter School Programs (CSP) as an invitation to “fiction writing.” Years later, when NPE investigated the CSP program, we came to understand that what Darcie uncovered was not a bug but rather a feature of the CSP.

Last July, even as she was battling ovarian cancer, Darcie did a masterful job of exposing the spread of Hillsdale charter schools in the Answer Sheet of the Washington Post.  That important investigation inspired other reporters to take a closer look at the Barney Charter Schools initiative of the small conservative Christian college.  She always worked behind the scenes connecting the dots between billionaires, charter schools, and profiteers.  Her research was remarkable. As a graphic artist, she created memes, reports, and website designs that brought NPE advocacy messages to life.

On August 3, Darcie peacefully ended her battle with cancer, surrounded by her beautiful daughters, her husband David, her brothers, her father, and her extended family.

NPE President Diane Ravitch worked with Darcie from the beginning days of NPE. “Our dear friend Darcie was a crucial founder of NPE. While she worked hard as a parent and as a member of her local school board, Darcie always made the time to build NPE into a national voice for public schools. As “Mother Crusader,” Darcie spoke out fearlessly for the public schools her twins attended. She was a kind, thoughtful, dedicated, and fearless friend. We will miss her.”

Dear Mother Crusader, we will indeed miss you. We at NPE will ensure that your memory, good work, and legacy live on. Yours was a life well-lived.

Categories Network for Public Education, New Jersey, Personal

Bob Braun Explains the Opposition to Billionaire-Funded “Reform”

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2021 //
14

Bob Braun was an education reporter for 50 years. After he retired from the New Jersey Star-Ledger, he began blogging and paid close and critical attention to the state takeover of Newark. This column, posted in 2014, is as timely now as it was when it first appeared.

Bob Braun: It’s Not Reform, It’s Hijacking

Let’s get this straight. Those of us opposed to the structural changes to public education embraced by crusaders ranging from the billionaire Koch brothers and the Walton Family Foundation to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—along with Governor Chris Christie and Microsoft founder Bill Gates—are not opposed to the reform of public schools. We oppose their destruction.

We do not oppose making schools more accountable, equitable and effective—but we do oppose wrecking a 200-year-old institution—public education—that is still successful in New Jersey.

Public schools give students from all backgrounds a common heritage and a chance to compete against privileged kids from private schools. We don’t want schools replaced by the elitists’ dream of privately managed, publicly funded charter schools, which can be money makers for closely aligned for-profit entities.

We oppose eliminating tenure and find laughable the idea embodied in Teach for America (TFA), an organization that recruits new college graduates for short stays in urban schools, that effective classroom instructors can be trained in weeks if they’re eager and want breaks on student loans—breaks that come with TFA participation. We oppose breaking teacher unions, reducing education to the pursuit of better test scores and using test results to fire teachers. We want our teachers to be well trained, experienced, secure, supervised, supported and well paid. We want our kids to graduate from high school more than “college and career ready”—a favorite slogan of the reformers. We want them to graduate knowing garbage when they see it—to understand mortgages, for example, rather than just solving trigonometry problems.

Don’t call it reform, call it hijacking. A radical, top-down change in governance based on a business model championed by billionaires like Eli Broad, the entrepreneur whose foundation underwrites training programs for school leaders, including superintendents—among them, Christopher Cerf, New Jersey’s education commissioner from late 2010 until this past February. The Broad Foundation seeks to apply to public institutions, like schools, the notion of “creative destruction” popularized for businesses by economists Joseph Schumpeter and Clayton Christensen. In a memo forced into public view by New Jersey’s Education Law Center, leaders of the Broad Superintendents Academy wrote that they seek to train leaders willing to “challenge and disrupt the status quo.”

Sorry, but it’s neither clever nor wise to disrupt schools, especially urban schools. Irresponsible, distant billionaires cause unrest in communities like Newark, a place they’ll likely never get closer to than making a plane connection at its airport. These tycoons say they want to improve learning—to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. I don’t buy that. The gap is caused by poverty and racial isolation, not public schools. They want reform that doesn’t raise taxes and won’t end racial segregation. So they promote charter schools that segregate and pay for them with tax funds sucked from public schools. Bruce Baker, a professor at Rutgers Graduate School of Education, calls it “revenue neutral and nonintegrative” reform. What that means, Baker says, is “don’t raise our taxes and don’t let poor black and brown kids access better-resourced suburban schools.”

School reform once meant equity and integration. Now it’s called choice. Not the choice that would allow Newark kids to take a bus 15 minutes to Millburn. Not the choice that would allow the dispersion of disadvantage so the poorest attend the same schools as the most advantaged. It’s choice limited to a district. And choice limited to families who win a lottery for charter-school admission. “We’re letting poor parents fight it out among themselves for scrap—it’s Hunger Games,” says Baker.

Charters segregate. In Newark, where there are 13 charter schools, children with the greatest needs—special education kids, English-language learners, the poorest children—are stranded in asset-starved neighborhood schools. Disadvantage is concentrated, public schools close, and resources shift to charters. In Hoboken, three charter schools educate 31 percent of the city’s children, but enroll 51 percent of all white children and only 6 percent of youngsters eligible for free lunches.

Such skimming of the more able students lets proponents like Christie claim that charters outperform public schools. But charters serve a different population. In his devastating send-up of Newark’s North Star Schools, titled “Deconstructing the Cycle of Reformy Awesomeness,” Baker describes how charters achieve high test scores and graduation rates by shedding underperforming students. Half the kids—including 80 percent of African-American boys—dropped or were pushed out.

Charters are not the solution. “Overall, charters do not outperform comparable public schools and they serve a different population,” says Stan Karp, an editor at Rethinking Schools, an advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education. He adds, “Nowhere have charters produced a template for district-wide equity and system-wide improvement.”

Many suburbs have resisted charters, but state-run urban districts like Newark cannot. In Newark, Christie joined with then Mayor Cory Booker, a devotee of privatization, to bring in Broad Academy graduates Chris Cerf to be state schools chief and Cami Anderson to be Newark superintendent. They were awarded a pledge of $100 million from Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg to support school reform in Newark.

Suburbs cannot escape other reforms, including federal insistence on relentless, time-consuming annual testing to measure student achievement and teacher performance. While states can opt out of testing, the price in lost federal revenues can be high. Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a national political action committee, applauds these changes as “bursting the dam” of resistance from unions to test-based evaluation and merit pay.

The coalition of foundations, non-governmental organizations and financial institutions promoting privatization is an opaque, multi-billion dollar, alternative governance structure. They include the Broad and Walton foundations; the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation; the Charter School Growth Fund and the NewSchools Venture Fund (a pair of nonprofit investment operations overseen largely by leaders of for-profit financial firms); the training and support organizations New Leaders for New Schools, the New Teacher Project and America Achieves; as well as the advocacy groups Stand for Children and Education Reform Now.

At its most recent summit of education reformers—including Newark’s Anderson—the NewSchools Venture offered workshops on “How Disruptive Can We Be?” and a seminar on charter schools that was advertised this way: “Charter schools are being brought into the center of reform strategies, not just to provide new options for some students, but to transform an entire public education system, based on a diverse portfolio of autonomous school operators.”

Why is school privatization such a draw for investors? Is it just philanthropy? No, there is also profit to be made from the $650 billion spent annually on public schools. Some charter school operations are profit making, including nearly two-thirds of charter school operators in Michigan and many in Florida—and Christie has been pressing to allow profit-making charters in New Jersey. Salaries for operators of charter school chains can run as high as $500,000 a year. The New Markets Tax Credit, pushed by charter supporter Bill Clinton when he was president, allows lenders to reap higher interest rates. Then there are rents paid by charter schools to charter-related profit-making companies like Newark’s Pink Hula Hoop (started by TEAM Academy board members); legal fees; and the sale of goods and services.

The costs of this movement: urban schools stratified. It’s an apartheid system, with the neediest warehoused in neglected public schools and a few lucky lottery winners in pampered charters. It is stratification on top of a system already stratified by all-white suburban districts and $35,000-plus private schools.

More costs: unconscionable amounts of time, energy and resources devoted to test preparation. The brightest young people, says Baker, will leave teaching to short-stay amateurs rather than endure the unpredictability of evaluations that rate a teacher “irreplaceable” one year and “ineffective” the next.

New Jersey ranks at the top nationwide in educational achievement, reports Education Week. We are second in “chance for success,” third in K-12 achievement and fifth in high school graduation. These statistics include urban schools; if properly funded, they succeed. Look at Elizabeth: good schools, no charters. Christie left it unmolested and provided millions in construction funds kept from other cities—perhaps because the school board endorsed him.

New Jersey is not the basket case Christie says it is. Urban schools are not failure factories. We don’t need a hostile takeover by Wall Street.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Disruption, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Hoax, New Jersey, Newark, Segregation

Jersey Jazzman: Trump Gets Debate Help from Chris Christie

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2020 //
17

Trump, we all know, has an aggressive personality and explodes with invective at any setback or slight. So, who helped prepare him for his disastrous debate performance? Chris Christie, who left office in New Jersey as the nation’s least popular Governor. Christie was short-tempered, angry, and domineering. Like Trump. He had hoped that Trump would give him a big job, but Jared Kushner nixed that because prosecutor Christie put his father Charles Kilushner in prison.

Jersey Jazzman watched Christie’s tenure in office with horror. He writes here about Christie and Trump and about Trump as a negative role model:

As an educator, I want to make sure we acknowledge that the massive damage Trump has done to our country includes his corrupting influence on American children. Every day, teachers go into our schools and try to instill important values in our students: respect, honesty, integrity, civility, modesty, empathy. Donald Trump’s whole life, however, has been a wholesale rejection of every personal characteristic a citizen in a democracy should strive to embody.

Donald Trump can’t even lift himself to the level of behavior expected in an elementary school. His preening, whining, blustering foolishness would never be tolerated in a second grader. His inability to accept responsibility for his actions would earn him a conference in the principal’s office with his parents. His casual disregard for the truth would result in a string of Ns (“Needs Improvement”) on his report card.

We’ve had many bad presidents in my lifetime; not one, however, has been so craven, so boorish, so full of contempt for others that they didn’t have some positive attribute that a teacher could point to. But not this man — there isn’t a single quality in the leader of our nation that an American student should emulate.

The fact that a man of such low character holds high office makes it that much more difficult for teachers to convince their students that the hard work of making yourself into a better person is worth the effort. Kids need role models; foremost among those role models should be the president. Yet every time he opens his mouth, he demonstrates to our children how not to behave.

Second: for eight long, exhausting years, I watched as Chris Christie drove my beloved state into the ground. He was nearly as repulsive as Trump: he mocked women, denigrated teachers, pushed policies that were demonstrably harmful, indulged himself while others suffered, and just generally acted like a horse’s ass.

Christie was the most unpopular governor in American when he finally left office. Amazingly, someone thought that was the perfect guy to put on TV. And, true to form, last night he came to Donald Trump’s defense

As an educator, I want to make sure we acknowledge that the massive damage Trump has done to our country includes his corrupting influence on American children. Every day, teachers go into our schools and try to instill important values in our students: respect, honesty, integrity, civility, modesty, empathy. Donald Trump’s whole life, however, has been a wholesale rejection of every personal characteristic a citizen in a democracy should strive to embody.

Donald Trump can’t even lift himself to the level of behavior expected in an elementary school. His preening, whining, blustering foolishness would never be tolerated in a second grader. His inability to accept responsibility for his actions would earn him a conference in the principal’s office with his parents. His casual disregard for the truth would result in a string of Ns (“Needs Improvement”) on his report card.

We’ve had many bad presidents in my lifetime; not one, however, has been so craven, so boorish, so full of contempt for others that they didn’t have some positive attribute that a teacher could point to. But not this man — there isn’t a single quality in the leader of our nation that an American student should emulate.

The fact that a man of such low character holds high office makes it that much more difficult for teachers to convince their students that the hard work of making yourself into a better person is worth the effort. Kids need role models; foremost among those role models should be the president. Yet every time he opens his mouth, he demonstrates to our children how not to behave.

Second: for eight long, exhausting years, I watched as Chris Christie drove my beloved state into the ground. He was nearly as repulsive as Trump: he mocked women, denigrated teachers, pushed policies that were demonstrably harmful, indulged himself while others suffered, and just generally acted like a horse’s ass.

Christie was the most unpopular governor in American when he finally left office. Amazingly, someone thought that was the perfect guy to put on TV. And, true to form, last night he came to Donald Trump’s defense.

Categories New Jersey, Trump

Darcie Cimarusti: How Charters in New Jersey Double-Dipped into Federal CARES Funding

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2020 //
9

Darcie Cimarusti is a school board member in New Jersey and Communications Director of the Network for Public Education. Her telling of charter school greed in New Jersey reminded me of the song called “On That Great Come and Get It Day” from “Finian’s Rainbow.” No “Come and Get It Day” for public schools, onLy for politically connected charter schools. And for those who believe that charters play by the same rules as public schools, take a look at those salaries for charter principal. A sweet deal.

She writes here with meticulous documentation about how some charters in New Jersey took a generous portion of Paycheck Protection Program funds, whose ostensible purpose was to help small businesses survive the economic shutdown caused by the pandemic. The charters that grabbed big bucks were never in danger of losing their funding. Thirty years ago, the original goal of charter schools was to demonstrate that they could achieve better results at less cost and be more accountable. Their new goal seems to be to scoop up as much money as they can.

New Jersey’s charter schools walk a constant tightrope. Although publicly funded by state and local tax dollars reallocated from under-funded public school districts, charters are privately managed by appointed boards and are often less accountable to the public.

In recent years, there has been no more striking example of this tenuous balancing act than the charter sector’s “double dip” into Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding. The charter sector flexed their lobbying muscle and ensured charter schools were eligible both for 100% forgivable loans as nonprofit entities through the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and for grants as Local Education Agencies (LEA) through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund that also funded local public schools. PPP forgivable loans, which were meant to help struggling small businesses pay their employees, were slyly used by charter schools and their management organizations, even though the charters had maintained their dedicated funding stream of tax dollars.

Although the Trump Administration originally refused to reveal where and how the PPP funds were distributed, once the list of recipients was released, The Network for Public Education (NPE) began working to ascertain how much funding was given to charter schools and the management organizations that run them.

NPE compared ProPublica’s database, which provides loan amounts in ranges, with lists of charter schools provided by individual states and identified between $925 million and $2.2 billion in PPP loans to charters and CMOs.

As part of NPE’s investigation, I compared New Jersey’s list of charter schools with ProPublica’s database of loans and created a list of New Jersey charter schools and charter management organizations (CMOs) that received PPP forgivable loans.

The New Jersey Double Dippers

In total, between $25.6 and $61.8 million in PPP forgivable loans were awarded to New Jersey charter schools and their CMOS. Thirty-seven New Jersey charters schools received between $27.9 and $65.1 million, and four CMOs received an additional $2.65 to $6.7 million.

Charter schools also received an additional $10,084,128 in ESSER grant funds, with amounts as low as $4,410 to Ridge and Valley Charter School and as high as $1,229,935 to Mastery Schools of Camden, a group of Renaissance charter schools.

Many of New Jersey’s CMOs Took a Triple Dip Out of CARES Funding

Four Charter Management Organizations that run nine charter schools that took PPP forgivable loans, also accessed forgivable loans for themselves.

iLearn is a CMO that operates a chain of charter schools alleged to be affiliated with the Turkish Gulen movement. The CMO received a forgivable loan of between $350,000 and $1 million and the four New Jersey schools received PPP forgivable loans totalling $6 to $14 million. Only three charter schools in New Jersey received PPP forgivable loans worth $2 to $4 million, and two were iLearn schools. With the addition of just over $1.4 million in ESSER grants, the iLearn chain brought in between $7.4 and $15.4 million in federal subsidies – more than any other chain in the state. According to the most recently available 990s, iLearn had a healthy fund balance of $1.3 million and individual iLearn schools had fund balances as high as $1.3 million as well.

KIPP New Jersey, the CMO that oversees KIPP schools in Camden and Newark, received a $2 to $5 million forgivable loan – the largest of any CMO in the state. According to their 2017 form 990, the organization had an almost $12 million fund balance and CEO Ryan Hill earned a handsome $265,341 salary. KIPP Cooper Norcross also received a $2 to $5 million PPP forgivable loan, in addition to over $1 million in ESSER grant funds.

College Achieve Public Schools, a small CMO managing three locations, received $150,000 to $350,000 in forgivable loans. Additionally, the Asbury Park and Paterson charter school locations each received $350,000 to $1 million, and the Plainfield location received $1 to $2 million in forgivable loans. In total, College Achieve received $1.85 to $4.35 million in PPP forgivable loans, and the three schools banked another $751,735 in ESSER grant funds. College Achieve served less than 1,300 students in the 2017-18 school year, yet CEO Mike Piscal took home over $251,000 in compensation. Two other employees made over $200,000 as well, with one earning $265,397 and the other $230,998. An NJ Advance Media analysis of state data found that in 2017-18 the average superintendent salary was $155,631 and only 30 superintendents in the state earned over $200,000.

Philip’s Education Partners, a CMO that manages two charters – one in Newark and one in Paterson – received a $150,000 to $350,000 forgivable loan. The Paterson location got $350,000 to $1 million, and another $147,251 in ESSER grant funds. The Newark location didn’t receive PPP money, but did get $187,343 in ESSER grants. In total Philip’s Education Partners and its schools took in $500,000 to $1.35 million in PPP forgivable loans and another $334,594 in ESSER grants. The two schools served just over 500 students in the 2017-18 school year but CEO Miguel Brito made a staggering $410,205, over $100,000 more than any other school leader in the state.

Philip’s Academy Newark was the first private to charter school conversion in New Jersey and in many ways seems to continue to operate more like a private school than a public school. The former St. Phillips Academy, founded by an Episcopal church, was flush with $5 million in gifts and grants when it was awarded charter status. With the new-found steady stream of tax dollars, Brito said the cash on hand would “go into capital projects rather than operating expenses.” The CMO ended the 2017-18 fiscal year with over $21 million in net assets, and employed a “Chief Philanthropy Officer” earning a six-figure salary.

Charters Have a Dedicated Funding Stream, So Why Accept PPP Loans?

The examples above demonstrate that PPP forgivable loans went to CMOs and schools with healthy fund balances and enough cash on hand to pay exorbitant salaries.

Investigations in other states have uncovered recordings of board discussions related to the acceptance of PPP loans. For example, a Utah Military Academy charter school board member stated that the PPP money could supplant funds budgeted to pay salaries, and the already allocated dollars could “go into our accounts to help flush up our funds.”

One board member objected, stating that the money was meant for businesses struggling to keep their employees, and that the charter’s “funding wasn’t cut at all,” but her colleagues shot back “We’re a business,” and, “We’re a nonprofit.”

A review of New Jersey charter school minutes led to a frustrating discovery. New Jersey regulations state that charter schools must post board minutes on their websites to comply with the Open Public Meetings Act, yet only fourteen of the thirty-seven schools that received PPP loans had up-to-date minutes that were detailed enough to contain resolutions accepting the PPP loans. Many websites have no minutes at all, and the majority of the minutes that are accessible are, by and large, sparse on details. This leaves the public mostly in the dark regarding how and why most New Jersey charter schools decided to apply for and accept PPP loans.

Minutes of the May 20 meeting of the Achieve Community Charter School show that the board of trustees voted unanimously to accept a PPP loan, and the board resolution explained that the charter would “not be able to conduct its annual gala” which could lead to a reduction in staff.

A handful of other charter schools, all under contract with School Business Office LLC, a for-profit provider of school business management services that took its own $150,000 to $350,000 forgivable loan, passed virtually identical resolutions that cited a list of “examples of economic uncertainty” impacting K-12 districts as a whole, as the reason to accept the loans.

The resolutions also cited a possible “reduction in State Charter Aid.” As a result of COVID-19 Governor Murphy reduced state aid to schools by $335 million, which will likely result in a decrease in per-pupil charter funding next year. However, charter schools suffered no uncertainty or reduction in aid that school districts didn’t also suffer, and school districts weren’t eligible for PPP loans to fill their budget gaps.

Paterson superintendent Eileen Shafer has been clear that district students “get scraps” after state funds allotted to the district are redirected to charters. The perpetually beleaguered school district, facing a $16.4 million reduction in state funding due to the coronavirus pandemic, resorted to asking the public for donations to provide students with laptops to bridge the digital divide.

It seems the simplest answer as to why charter schools and their CMOs applied for and accepted PPP loans is that they could. The national charter lobby ensured that charters were eligible both as nonprofits and as LEAs, and many of New Jersey’s charter schools were willing to take the funds meant to save small businesses and nonprofits from the ravages of the COVID-19 economy.

Now that this information is public, charters and their CMOs should return PPP loans, so that the money can be redistributed to New Jersey’s small businesses that have truly been harmed by the pandemic. For those that don’t, the state should deduct the amount they received from any future relief provided to schools through the CARES Act.

Either charters are public schools or private entities – they can’t have it both ways.

Categories Charter Schools, Funding, New Jersey

Juan Gonzalez: The Struggle to Save a Public School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from Corporate Clutches

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2020 //
4

Juan Gonzalez is a veteran journalist who wrote a regular column for the “New York Daily News” for many years. He retired from the “News” but frequently appears on “Democracy Now” as co-host with Amy Goodman. Gonzalez is renowned as an investigative reporter and champion of justice. He wrote this post for the blog.


New Brunswick, New Jersey Community Fights to Save a Public School
From Corporate Hospital Industry Expansion

A plan by the political and financial elite of Central New Jersey to demolish a downtown New Brunswick public school this summer so that one of the state’s largest hospital chains can embark on a $750-million expansion has provoked repeated street protests since January, drawn hundreds of angry parents and community residents to public meetings and has already spawned two lawsuits – even in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown.

​The fight to save the Lincoln Annex Public School has emerged as a classic David-and-Goliath battle. On one side are New Brunswick’s low-income Latino residents. More than 50 per cent of the city’s population is Hispanic. Most are immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and many reside in rented houses surrounding the downtown business district. They have garnered support from a dozen Rutgers student organizations and the Rutgers faculty union, AAUP-AFT.

Arrayed against that community alliance is a group of powerful and entrenched institutions that have long pursued a policy of gentrifying the city. They include Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, the Rutgers Cancer Institute, the New Brunswick Development Corp. (DEVCO), and the Middlesex County Democratic Party machine, led by Mayor James Cahill, who has ruled New Brunswick for nearly 30 years.
​​​
​Last June, RWJ/Barnabas Health, Rutgers and several major state politicians announced plans to build a new 12-story $750-million cancer research and treatment pavilion. At the time, however, they didn’t specify the exact location of the new building, even though internal emails later obtained by parent advocates show they had already decided where. Within months, some local media began reporting that talks were underway behind the scene for the city’s Board of Education to sell a public middle school across the street from RWJ, so that the school could be demolished and the cancer pavilion erected there.

​Lincoln Annex School has an enrollment of 760 children, more than 94% of them Hispanic and more than 80% from economically disadvantaged families. Many parents of the students are not eligible voters and therefore have very little political influence. The school, however, was only opened in September of 2016, after the city purchased the former St. Peter’s elementary and high school, and completely renovated the site at a cost to taxpayers of $22 million. As a result, Lincoln Annex is in far better condition than other schools in the district, and it happens to be one of the city’s best performing schools, with an excellent gifted and talented program.

​Throughout the fall and winter, hundreds of parents and residents began attending the monthly school board meetings to ask if it was true that the city was about to sell their school. At each meeting, the BOE members insisted these were just rumors, or informal discussions, that nothing was on the table. Not until early February did Mayor Cahill officially acknowledge the school would be sold and demolished by this summer. He immediately launched a public relations campaign, claiming “cancer can’t wait,” and he labeled opponents of the plan as somehow opposed to cancer treatment.

​The plan is to relocate the Lincoln Annex students in September to a “swing space” the school district leases on the outskirts of town, nearly two miles from the current Lincoln Annex. The building is actually a warehouse in an industrial park that was converted into classrooms. The students would attend that “swing space” for at least three years until a replacement school is built. Given the notorious delays in school construction, it could likely be much longer. The last school population that was relocated there, the Redshaw School, ended up with pupils spending 10 years in the facility due to such delays.

​Robert Wood Johnson and its developer, DEVCO, have promised to pay for the new school. Initially, they mentioned $25 million. But as community opposition grew, they upped the offer to $50 million, then to $55 million. Still, the students would have to be bused to the “swing space” for years while the new school is built, disrupting their education.

​To make matters worse, Mayor Cahill initially proposed a vacant brownfield site also on the outskirts of town for the new replacement school. The Coalition to Defend Lincoln Annex, the alliance of community groups that formed, soon obtained state environmental records that revealed the site was hopelessly contaminated with heavy metals and carcinogenic chemicals, which the city and its private owners had not been able to remediate after 10 years of effort. Once the group made that information public, the city came up with a new site, one closer to the current Lincoln Annex, but one that is still a contaminated brownfield site. The extent of that contamination is not known because of delays in state responses to freedom of information requests since the COVID-19 lockdown.

​All the while, parents and community residents mounted numerous protests – at Board of Education meetings, at meetings of the Rutgers Board of Governors, at City Council meetings and at Planning Board meetings, but officials continued to ignore the public pressure and bulldoze ahead. As many as 200 people showed up to the Feb. 25 board of education meeting, all in opposition.

​Even the Catholic Church was drawn into the fray. When the Diocese of Metuchen sold the site to the Board of Education in 2013, it specifically included a deed restriction that the property had to be used as a “public school or for public administrative purposes” for fifty years. The parents, most of whom are Catholic, began to ask Bishop James Checchio to invoke the deed restriction and prevent the sale. They even appealed to Cardinal Joseph Tobin in Newark and to Pope Francis for help. Church leaders have declined to meet, but the bishop keeps issuing statements that he wishes to reach some kind of agreement with all parties.

​Faced with such overwhelming uproar, the New Brunswick Board of Education has resorted to limiting public testimony, ousting people from meetings, conducting official business in private, and otherwise violating state regulations on how to close or erect new public schools.

​Even after the coronavirus pandemic erupted, city officials kept moving forward with their plans, holding all meetings in telephonic conversations that further limited public participation. Initially, they claimed that the new school would not cost taxpayers a penny because Robert Wood Johnson would pay for the whole project. But then early this month, the Middlesex County Freeholders suddenly voted out of the blue to provide $25 million for the new cancer pavilion.

​At one point, members of the Coalition attempted to seek help from New Jersey’s non-profit Educational Law Center, which famously spearheaded the historic Abbott v. Burke decision thirty years ago that mandated the equalizing of state funding for public schools. But the center never responded. Only later did Coalition members learn that David Sciarra, the civil rights attorney who heads the law center, is also on the board of directors of DEVCO, the non-profit developer that is sponsoring this project!

​The Coalition eventually went outside of New Jersey, to a New York based Hispanic civil rights law firm, LatinoJustice/PRLDEF. Last week LatinoJustice filed two key actions. One is a complaint in Middlesex County Superior Court on behalf of parents and residents to enforce the deed restriction against a sale and raising key issues of violations of due process in the decision to sell the school. The other is a complaint to New Jersey Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet, asking him to reject the Long-Range Facilities Plan that New Brunswick submitted a few weeks ago to the state, which must approve any school district’s amendments to its school facilities.

​The degree of wealth and power confronting this parent-community coalition is breath-taking. Twenty executives of the the non-profit RWJ hospital and its parent chain received more than $1 million in compensation in 2018, a review of their IRS 990 tax form shows, topped by RWJ/BarnabasHealth’s CEO Barry Ostrowsky’s $4.9 million, northern regional president Thomas Biga’s $3.5 million, and RWJ President John Gantner’s $2.1 million. Dr. Steven Libutti, director of the Rutgers Cancer Institute, was paid $1.1 million; Christopher Paladino, the chief executive of DEVCO, received nearly $700,000. All of this raises serious issues about how public education policy is being driven by corporate interests, how public officials are seizing on the COVID-19 pandemic, in shock doctrine style, to push through their agenda without public accountability, and why a supposed “sanctuary city” like New Brunswick is running rough-shod over the interests of its immigrant community.
​Meanwhile, parents and community leaders have repeatedly said they will continue to resist the sale of Lincoln Annex.

​For more information, follow Defend Lincoln Annex on facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Defendamos-Lincoln-Annex-110326327234225/
​

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Inequity, Injustice, New Jersey

Happy Decade of Blogging, Jersey Jazzman!

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2020 //
9

Jersey Jazzman (aka Mark Weber) just celebrated his first 10 years as a blogger.

He explains that he started blogging because he was so outraged by Chris Christie’s constant attacks on teachers, unions, and public schools.

Along the way, he decided that he needed to upgrade his skills and analytical ability, so he earned a doctorate at Rutgers University.

It has been my pleasure to post many of JJ’s blogs, which have been consistently honest, thoughtful, and rigorous (in the best sense of the word).

By telling the truth, JJ became a leader of the Resistance.

Happy BlogDecadeDay, JJ!

Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Resistance

Keith E. Benson: What Reformers Are Really Doing in Camden and Other Urban Districts

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2020 //
5

Keith E. Benson is president of the Camden (New Jersey) Education Association. In his view, the underlying goal of the charter industry is gentrification, and he worries about its long-term implications for his community and its families.

He writes:

Admittedly [my] fight for Camden’s public schools is personal. Both my grandmothers were teachers, numerous aunts, and two of my uncles were employees of the District where I, myself, taught before becoming president of the city’s teacher union in 2017. My daughter goes to school here and has since she was three. My wife went to school here until her freshman year of high school, and she grew up here. We all live here now. Because of such deep and intimate connections I have with this public school district and city, anything that threatens the sustainability is triggering.

The planned dismantling of our public-school system coupled with a massive redevelopment effort dubbed “Camden Rising”, reduces merely existing here in the future to a tenuous proposition for many working class and poor residents. For generations of Camden’s current residents, and new arrivals here from Latin America, this city is one of the last affordable places in New Jersey folks can reside. Redevelopment after all, is not singularly about buildings and urban spaces, but also demographics. Municipal redevelopment always has a human cost; and those often left footing the bill through rising rents and displacement are typically those who can least afford it.

The deliberate dismantling of urban school districts as witnessed in Chicago, Philadelphia , Atlanta, Newark, NYC and other urban localities is central to remaking cities and courting new potential residents. As covered in Education Reform and Gentrification in the Age of #CamdenRising, what is taking place in Camden now, is no different than what we’ve seen unfold across America. If places that were once affordable for the impoverished and working class, cease to be affordable, what happens to them? Where do they go? How do they fare? As such I have developed a disdain for anything that threatens the tenuous sense of tranquility and order those at the margins may have – with residential housing, and the right to exist in their domicile being central to that sense of order. As such, I recognize the dismantling of urban school systems as more than simply a takeover of buildings and upending of staff, but as central to neoliberal cities’ efforts to separate from vulnerable populations they deem undesirable.

Which brings me to Reason Number 1 as to the Problems I have with the Education Reform Community: Their Committed Ignorance that Urban Education Reform aka “School Choice”, through Dismantling Public Schools is More Subversive than Simply Improving Educational Trajectories for Students of Color.

To be clear, I am making a distinction between parents who send their children to charter schools, and the platformed (Black) Education Reform Proponents. I recognize that parents in many cases are trying to do what they believe is best aligned with their living situation, and for their child. This critique is NOT for them. (In fact, to be clear, it is my position that it is a parent’s responsibility to do what they deem best for their child, including deciding what school is a good fit for them.)

The Education Reform establishment however, refuses speak to, and remains unconcerned about, the connection between low income housing, rental rates and the dismantling of urban public schools low income housing, rental rates and the dismantling of urban public schools. Worse yet, while occupying ample space on the internet, social media, and in top newspaper’s Op/Ed columns, they also never make such connections known to the largely ignorant (and trusting) public while advocating for the destruction of urban schools; never mention the connection between real estate prices and the establishing of charter schools; and never mention how the existence of urban schools labeled “failing” frustrates development in keeping rent and taxes low, while keeping potential gentrifiers out. In Reformers’ advocacy, urban schools have no connection to neighborhood affordability worth mentioning, future availability of affordable housing for students and their parents. As such, they have actively chosen to keep their focus on the “quality schools” talking point. They are willfully deceptive, or negligently myopic in focusing solely on schools as if students’ output is not impacted by the housing uncertainty which initiates greater student mobility, family transience, and increasing student homelessness. increasing student homelessness.

It is my contention that if Education Reformers really cared about school quality, they’d recognize that schools are indicators of larger urban policy priorities. Schools are building charged with educating observant children who arrive with experiences and awareness that may not prioritize learning content as their first concern. Afterall, what is more fundamental to anyone’s sense of security and normalcy than their right to a secure space to sleep and call “home”? My suspicion is not that allies of the reform movement aren’t aware of this, it’s that they don’t care because all along, it was never really about the kids and their learning in the first place.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, New Jersey, Privatization

Education Law Center Challenges Charter Expansion in New Jersey

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2020 //
4

The Education Law Center is suing in New Jersey Supreme Court to challenge the negative effects of charter schools on public schools in Newark.

ELC is asking the court to review the fiscal impact and segregating effects of charters on public schools. The bottom line is whether the state can afford to support two different school systems.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has granted a petition filed by Education Law Center (ELC) to review the State Commissioner of Education’s 2016 decision approving an enrollment increase of 8500 students in KIPP, Uncommon and other charter operators’ schools in the Newark Public School (NPS) district.

In accepting In Re Team Academy Charter School, the Supreme Court will now decide several consequential issues raised by the State’s push to rapidly grow charter school enrollments in NPS over the last decade. Under former Governor Chris Christie, Newark charter enrollments grew 320% from 4,559 in 2009, to 19,152 in 2020. NPS payments to charter schools increased from $63 million in 2009, or 7% of the NPS operating budget, to $265 million in 2020, or 26% of the budget.

The legal issues before the NJ Supreme Court in Team Academy implicate the Commissioner’s failure to comply with the Court’s 2000 Palisades Charter ruling imposing an affirmative obligation under the New Jersey Constitution to carefully evaluate the impact of charter school applications in two interrelated areas:

  • The education resources available to NPS students from the loss of funding that will occur from increasing charter school enrollments;
  • The segregation of NPS students by disability, English language proficiency and race.

The Team Academy appeal addresses the obligation of charter authorizers to protect the constitutional rights of public school students when faced with overwhelming and unrefuted evidence that expanding charters will deprive district students of essential education resources and intensify persistent patterns of student segregation in the resident district.           

In 2016, ELC, on behalf of NPS students, submitted detailed evidence to the Commissioner opposing the charter school expansion. ELC’s evidence showed that, if the expansion was approved, NPS would continue to lose funding from its budget, causing further cuts to essential teachers, support staff and programs, including for English language learners (ELL) and students with disabilities. ELC also documented that the expansion would increase the concentration of more costly to educate students with disabilities and ELLs in Newark district schools and worsen the entrenched isolation of Black and Latino students in the already intensely segregated district.

After the Commissioner ignored this evidence and approved the applications, ELC appealed. The Appellate Division upheld the decision, relying on the failure of the NPS superintendent, hired by the State, to object to the expansion. At the time the charter applications were decided by the State, NPS was under State control.

Because NPS students are in the class of plaintiff school children in the landmark Abbott v. Burke school funding litigation, the Supreme Court will also decide whether the Commissioner bears a heightened burden when reviewing charter applications in those districts. Abbott district students remain the subject of continuing Abbott orders to remedy the State’s longstanding violation of their right to a constitutional thorough and efficient education.

Michael Stein of the Pashman Stein Walder Hayden law firm is serving as pro bono co-counsel on this appeal, along with ELC Executive Director David Sciarra, lead counsel for the Abbott v. Burke school children.

Argument before the NJ Supreme Court is expected in the fall.

Press Contact:

Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequity, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

Jersey Jazzman: Sorry, Jersey Charters, You Can’t Have It Both Ways

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2020 //
4

Jersey Jazzman notes that charters in his state are on the horns of a dilemma: on one hand, public school advocates are suing to block charter expansion, because they drain away public school funding: on the other hand, charters want to join a lawsuit that would allow them to share in a settlement intended to provide equity for public schools in impoverished districts. JJ is a very smart guy but he doesn’t seem to understand that what matters most is not consistency but being in the right place when the money spigot is turned on. Charters are public when that’s where the money is; charters are not public when it suits them to avoid mandates.

He writes:

This was a long time coming: the Christie administration happily encouraged the expansion of charter schools without seriously thinking about appropriate oversight, regulation, and funding of the sector. Now the state has to contend with a system that imposes fiscal burdens on school districts that host charter schools, even as those districts have no meaningful say on charter school proliferation.

The fact – which I have validated empirically – is that charter school expansion is not a revenue-neutral policy. As school districts lose students to charters, they are unable to adjust immediately to enrollment declines, because districts have fixed costs like buildings and personnel that can’t be quickly scaled back. 


But charter operators appear to be unconcerned with this reality; repeatedly, they have demanded they get everything they think they are owed, even when school districts are facing serious financial pressures. During Christie’s time, this meant charter budgets weren’t touched, even as host districts’ were slashed…

As Bruce Baker and Gary Miron pointed out years ago, charter school regulations like New Jersey’s lead to an absurd situation: the public pays for school buildings that many times used to be owned by a school district – in other words, the public – but wind up in private hands. Sometimes those hands are nonprofits aligned with the charter school; sometimes they are for-profit companies, paying off their mortgages with funds the charters receive in per pupil payments from hosting school districts.

In either case, the public is paying for a building that the public will never own. And in most cases, these are buildings that are paid for, at least in part, with local funds, even though the state is the entity that gets to decide whether charters will be granted or renewed.

This lunacy is at the heart of the serious conflicts of interest, lack of transparency, and just generally bad policymaking that surrounds New Jersey’s charter school facilities…

The legal status of charter schools has always been open to debate, but it’s clear at this point that they are not government actors. As such, they can claim immunity from oversight regulations that other governmental entities, such as school boards, must abide by. Why, then, should the taxpayers simply turn over revenues for charter facilities when they won’t even know who, if anyone, is profiting off of this system?

There are a lot of aspects of charter school policy we can debate, but this one if clear: If the public pays for a school building — including a charter school building — the public should own the building. If New Jersey’s charter schools want more funding for their facilities, the price to be paid is that those facilities stay in public hands, with public oversight and complete transparency.

If you think I’m wrong, I’d love to hear your argument. But it seems clear to me that New Jersey’s charter schools can’t have it both ways: if you want public funding, you can’t have privately owned buildings.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, New Jersey, Newark
« Older Entries