After Governor Christie announced his intention to take control of the public schools of Camden, this school board member resigned in protest.
The state has controlled three other impoverished urban districts, some for more than 20 years, without improving them. Paterson, for 24 years; Jersey City for 22 years; and Newark for 18 years.
Based solely on performance, one must say that state control in New Jersey is a total abject failure.
If performance matters, then some other state should take over Camden’s public schools, because the NJ Department of Education has an unbroken record of poor performance. It deserves an F.
Jersey Jazzman: The Selling Out of Camden’s Schools: Part I
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-selling-out-of-camdens-schools-part.html
What’s sad is don’t we need someone like this to stand up within the system and say, “enough is enough?”
Agreed- it was not an easy decision and I asked myself this question many times. But I felt that I could no longer participate in something so far removed from my beliefs on what works in education. Standing up within the system had begun to feel too much like enabling it.
Here’s a question: has ANY school taken over by the state yielded better results than the school they replaced? The theory behind closing schools was that some kind of replicable new model would emerge… You’d think after 20+ years of this model that someone somewhere would have found some model that could be replicated… If not, it might suggest that something else is at play… Hm-m-m-m… what might that be?