Bob Braun reported it first, and Jersey Jazzman tells the rest of the story: The hot rumor in New Jersey is that Cami Anderson will resign as the state-appointed Superintendent of the Newark Public Schools and be replaced by Chris Cerf, who most recently worked for Joel Klein at Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify and before that was State Superintendent for New Jersey (who appointed Cami Anderson). It is a tight little circle.
Why would Cerf leave Murdoch’s Amplify? Murdoch’s $1 billion investment earned only $15 million in the first quarter. Amplify is cutting costs and laying off employees, and apparently Cerf lost his chair in the game of musical chairs.
Bob Braun writes:
Rumors of her impending resignation have been echoing throughout the school system for the last few weeks–sparked primarily by her apparent decision to empty her office. Employees at 2 Cedar Street have said her office has been empty for days. Cerf’s departure from Amplify Insight fed the rumors.
Still, there has been no confirmation from Trenton and the last word from Gov. Chris Christie on the subject of Newark is that he is not “changing my opinion.”
In the last few days, Anderson also has caved in on significant decisions–to make both East Side High School and Weequahic High School, both iconic institutions in the city, so-called “turnaround” schools.
The sources who reported Anderson’s resignation and Cerf’s appointment say they expect a formal announcement Monday or Tuesday. The Newark school board is expected to meet Tuesday night at a regular monthly meeting. Anderson has not attended a public session of the board since January, 2014.
No one can say for sure if this will happen, if Cami will resign, if Cerf will be appointed, or if it will make any difference in the state’s determination to charterize the entire district.
Newark matters for the nation because it has been under state control for 20 years. Privatizers latched on it as a source of fun and profit. Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift disappeared into the pockets of consultants and entrepreneurs. Cory Booker ascended to the Senate.
Newark is a symbol of the corporate reformers’ belief that school districts in urban areas are different: They cannot govern themselves; they must be controlled by the mayor, the governor, an emergency manager, or handed over to entrepreneurs.
At the annual conference of the Network for Public Education, Jitu Brown of Journey for Justice called this neocolonialism. In her book Charter Schools, Race and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, Kristen Buras describes the process of privatization thus: First the state (controlled by the white majority) underfunds the majority-black district; political leaders condemn the district as failed and corrupt; then the state determines that it must take charge of the district (in this case, New Orleans); the state changes the rules for declaring “crisis” and “failure,” and turns large numbers of public schools into charter schools, run by white entrepreneurs; the white leadership hires black spokesmen to celebrate the success of privatization; as control shifts from the black majority in the district to white entrepreneurs and privatizers in the state capitol, hundreds of millions of dollars flow freely to the new charter schools to prove that privatization works. With control of the state department of education, the corporate reformers own the data, and no one has independent data to challenge their claims. And that is what Jitu Brown calls “neocolonialism.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is one method of management. First you bring in the “turnaround” person and that person takes all the ill-will and once the trajectory is set that person leaves and the next manager comes in with “now that we got everything we wanted the die is cast and we must all work towards cooperation and collaboration”
I’m not recommending it, but it is a recognized method. It isn’t described like that because it’s always described from the point of view of managers, but obviously the dissenters see it differently.
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Chiara: your comments on the rheephorm version of the “dance of the lemons” is critical to keeping things in perspective.
From the POV of the heavyweights in corporate education reform, this sort of burn-and-churn is absolutely essential. One of its key elements: deflect/avoid/diffuse responsibility. It’s a rheephorm twofer: they start applying a wrecking ball to public education but, as the catastrophes & failures & even corruption start undoing their attempts to garner more and more $tudent $ucce$$, they then have a tantrum of faux outrage at the results so they bring in a second team and if necessary a third team or even a fourth. Same old putrid wine, slightly new bottles.
Los Angeles Unified School District offers, unfortunately, an excellent example. Just about every key player and beneficiary of the “education reform” establishment is still in place, but John Deasy, who received so much love from edupreneurs and educrats and edubullies during his 3 1/2 years as Supt., was thrown under the bus because of iPads and MISIS and so much else—and the lesson some rheephormsters have drawn from, and are touting, regarding this? Time to get going with rheeal rheephorm because public school figures like John Deasy are just so incompetent and wasteful and dishonest blahblahblah.
Thankfully for those of us on Planet Reality, there are blogs like this and a whole lot of other activities to dampen and shut down the Rheeality Distortion Fields that the leaders and enforcers of the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement inflict on themselves.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” THE WIZARD OF OZ.
One of the many differences between the vast majority of us and the “thought leaders” spouting rheephormista slogans and selling points: the former realize that the wizard has been outed and exposed, and the rest of the movie proves just that point; the latter stop the movie at that point and repeat to themselves, over and over again, “if you tell a big lie often enough everybody will believe it.”
😎
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Krazy…not quite accurate to say Deasy was “thrown under the bus” when Broad hired him as both Supt. in Residence at the creepy Academy…and also to work with Ben Austin to institute nationwide lawsuits against teachers and their unions…like Vergara.
Did you know that Cerf is also a product of the Broad Academy, class of 2004?
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“The ideas of cultural destruction, forced assimilation, and military regimen were popularized by….” Like they say, what’s old is new.
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Out of the frying pan into the fire?
Time will tell.
If one has two inept, ignorant people to choose from, MAYBE there is a difference but usually not much.
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Ha ha! I’ve been saying that Cami might be replacing Deborah Gist in Rhode Island for a while now — she has the same connections to Governor Raimondo that Stefan Pryor did (friendly with senator Corey Booker, who was college roomies with her corporate reform husband Andy Moffit). Raimondo appointed Pryor to a state level position she created for him after he was run out of his old job as commissioner of education in Connecticut.
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Cerf is a serial failure – Edison, Bloomberg’s DOE, Christie’s Doe and Murdoch’s Amplify – who somehow always lands on his feet (and on the throats of teachers and students).
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