Bob Braun writes here about the ongoing privatization of public schools in Newark, under the leadership of Cami Anderson, who was appointed by Governor Chris Christie.

Braun writes that Cami ordered additional cuts to the remaining public schools:

Anderson’s demand that every school in Newark cut their spending plans by anywhere from $200,000 to $700,000 meets her needs–the further degradation of neighborhood schools that would allow further expansion of the privatized sector, meeting the $70 million deficit she ran up through wasteful spending on favored consultants, hopeless legal cases costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the assignment of fully paid teachers to rubber rooms, and creating a pretext for the state’s approval of a seniority waiver that is still sitting on the desk of state education Commissioner David Hespe. If Hespe signs that waiver, seniority is a thing of the past–and so are public employee unions.

Newark’s public schools already have been stripped of virtually every service and amenity that would distinguish them from the educational equivalent of an Apple factory inside China. Attendance counselors. Guidance counselors. Meaningful art and music and other non-testable offerings that create human beings rather than cogs for the machine.

And charters, by the way, are untouched by this. More money to charters, less money to public schools. More failure in public schools, more students sent to charters. The cycle isn’t just vicious–it’s racist and elitist. The people of Newark will have to decide whether it’s every family for itself and to hell with everyone else–the charter game–or whether all Newark’s children are the responsibility of everyone, of every family, in the city and deserve a public school system that serves everyone….

But, of course, more is at stake than employee rights. The Anderson budget cuts, combined with the continued draining away of public funds to privately-operated charter schools, move Newark’s children closer and closer to an educational wasteland in which only a select few will have even a moderately acceptable education, while the vast majority of kids–black, brown, and poor–will be warehoused, prepared only for lives of quiet desperation.

This is no drill. This is a crisis.

But, of course, Christie and Anderson and Cory Booker and their billionaire supporters and enablers will call it reform.