Mark Weber, veteran teacher in New Jersey now studying for his doctorate at Rutgers, has yet another revelation of Chris Christie’s determination to place charter schools even though the community doesn’t want them.
Clifton, New Jersey, said no. That doesn’t matter. Clifton has been persistently underfunded. That doesn’t matter.
Worse, this is a charter school with serious legal and ethical issues.
Wouldn’t you know the contested charter is a Gulen school?
“More than $30 million in long-term, low-interest loans have been granted by the state to benefit the Paterson science and technology charter despite its continuing financial and academic troubles:
“In 2014, a Wall Street ratings agency downgraded the bonds issued for its expansion to junk status because the school’s revenues had fallen. Last year, Wall Street lowered its overall outlook on the bonds to “negative.”
“Tracking tax dollars spent by the schools can be difficult because of loopholes in state law:
ILearn, which is set to add a fifth charter to its chain this year, declined to answer routine requests for information about its payroll, saying that as a private contractor it is not subject to the state Open Public Records law.
“State officials said it is unclear if such charter-management organizations fall under the law, even though charters draw their funding directly from the tax-funded budgets of regular public schools. [emphasis mine]
“Is anyone seriously suggesting the Clifton BOE ought to just accept all this? That they don’t have a fiduciary responsibility to their constituents to make sure Passaic A&S and iLearn are using revenues appropriately — especially when the town’s public schools are being short-changed by the very state administration that forced them to fund this charter school?”
To make matters even more sordid, it turns out that being a charter regulator is a stepping stone to a lucrative job in the charter industry.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“ILearn, which is set to add a fifth charter to its chain this year, declined to answer routine requests for information about its payroll, saying that as a private contractor it is not subject to the state Open Public Records law.”
This is another example of the truth that charter schools are not really public. Operators of schools work under contracts and the authorizers of these contracts are usually several steps removed from public oversight.
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LAura,
My reaction too.
Charters are government contractors, not public schools.
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Why…..is almost nothing being said about the Bridgegate lawyer chosen to be in charge of the FBI? That seems more significant and worrisome than anything about Jim Comey. What if Chris Christie’s Bridgegate boy gets into a disagreement with Mueller?
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This Christie’s legacy. Why would you force a community to open a charter school of questionable value as you simultaneously cripple the public schools’ ability to serve young people well? There is no logical explanation for it other than when profit is involved, service and responsibility to the next generation goes out the window. This monetization of education needs to stop because it is causing too much damage and makes no sense. Corruption follows the money, especially when the laws are written to give corporations access to public funds without accountability. Politicians can be bought. This system is failing our young people, and the vengeful, small-minded Christie is the poster boy for privatization failure!
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Good question, retired teacher. It’s about payback … money and perks. The fact that we have to defend our great public schools is totally sick.
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Why did no one ever think of using your word before? We need to quit talking about the privatization….and start referring to it as monetization.
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I think of it almost like cause and effect. When a public function is monetized, the result is privatization in order to extract profit from it. As we can see from Diane’s posts, results, evidence and reason no longer matter. It is simply about schemes for corporations and the wealthy to skim from the common good. In other words, it is a mass redistribution of wealth from the working and middle class to the wealthy.
I can’t wait to hear Ryan’s justification for trying to privatize Medicare. What the elderly people want is more “choice?” Under his plan, they will have the choice to go broke and die in order to enrich health care companies and Big Pharma.
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All should read the article!
From it:
“Let me bring this back to the local level:
Here’s Clifton, NJ, a city school system that is being screwed over by the state, which refuses to follow its own law and give the schools what they need. That same state then forces the community to fork over millions of dollars to a charter school whose operations and governance are far from transparent. The charter doesn’t take its fair share of special needs students; spends money on administration and plant costs rather than instruction and support; and free-rides on teacher salaries.”
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“ILearn, which is set to add a fifth charter to its chain this year, declined to answer routine requests for information about its payroll, saying that as a private contractor it is not subject to the state Open Public Records law.
“State officials said it is unclear if such charter-management organizations fall under the law, even though charters draw their funding directly from the tax-funded budgets of regular public schools. [emphasis mine]”
This is exactly what happened in Ohio. And Michigan. And Pennsylvania. They draw a distinction between “the charter” and the “management organization” even though the management organization IS the school, in any real sense. “The charter” is just a name and a contract.
They had 15 years of experience with charter fraud when they went into NJ. Why didn’t they learn anything?
NJ will be Ohio in another 15.
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In this March 2017 article http://www.northjersey.com/story/news/passaic/clifton/2017/03/08/clifton-students-march-protest-states-school-funding-formula/98812412/
hundreds of Clifton students protest the underfunding of the district: only 1/3 of the allotted $75million/yr has been received for 9 yrs running, leaving them $450million in arrears, w/outdated textbooks & underpaid teachers. Councilman Hatala says Clifton has historically been shortchanged because because they are an anomaly: hi property-values vs mid-to-low incomes [sounds to me like gentrification is knocking at the door!].
As a NewJerseyan, I would like to know: by what legal right does the state BOEd mandate that despite their failure to fund Clifton pubsch district per the state funding formula, Clifton citizens must pony up an addl $2mill/yr to continue funding a financially-shaky Turkish Gulen charter school that feeds off the same school-tax trough, but refuses admission to the most-expensive-to-educate SpEd kids whom the district is mandated to educate?
Thanks to Jersey Jazzman for his straightforward graphs that paint this picture.
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