New Jersey: How Chris Christie Allowed Charter Entrepreneurs to Rip Off Taxpayers

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1. drext727 says:

   August 31, 2018 at 9:05 am

   Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:

   I wonder: How much did his bank account grow during this time. A person doesn’t do this “out the generosity of their hearts”. There has to be something in it for him, maybe a nice off-shore bank account in the Caymans or a Swiss bank account.

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2. Chiara says:

   August 31, 2018 at 9:43 am

   There’s a lot of spin in edreformworld.

   They’re all lockstep pushing “porfolio” districts and Cleveland is a portfolio district.

   Ed reformers announced that Cleveland charters score slightly higher than Cleveland public schools. You have to go to p. 11 of a 16 page report to find this:

   “State data show that CMSD enrolls a higher
   percentage of both English language learners
   (19 percent for CMSD vs. 6 percent in charter
   schools) and students with special educational
   needs (22 percent in the district vs. 13 percent
   in charter schools). This difference in student
   populations served may account for some of
   the variation in academic performance.”

   I don’t mind that they promote charter and private schools over public schools. They’re charter and voucher advocates- one would expect them to promote the schools they’re paid to promote.

   I mind that they present slick, sophisticated marketing as “science”.

   They don’t have a shred of proof that the “portfolio” plan improves public school systems, yet they are pushing it in FORTY cities. That’s not science. It’s a belief.

   Click to access Alliance-Report-Design_FINAL.compressed_0-2.pdf

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   • ciedie aech says:

     August 31, 2018 at 2:17 pm

     YES, it is not science….and it’s a very lucrative profit plan for those who understand how to play the game.

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3. Chiara says:

   August 31, 2018 at 9:50 am

   I think this is good news:

   http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180828/ohios-new-education-plan-moves-away-from-testing

   Ohio released a plan for public schools. This is the first effort I’ve seen in a decade to improve PUBLIC schools in this state.

   Now, the plan may be just noise and it may be a bad plan, but it is heartening that SOMEONE is Columbus is doing SOME work to support or improve the schools that 85% of kids attend after a decade of chasing “choice” and neglecting what was approaching a whole generation of public school students.

   Public schools are on the front page, and for something other than testing our kids, closing our schools, or cutting funding! It’s a miracle 🙂

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4. retired teacher says:

   August 31, 2018 at 10:02 am

   “The real losers are the children of Newark–both the children who attended Lady Liberty kept alive with public money and the children whose conventional public schools were robbed of funds to meet the financial demands of privatized charter schools and their corporate, profit-making investors.”

   This is a very complex, crooked scheme to keep public money flowing into corporate pockets. When the collapse hits, all the sold off assets go to the corporation, not the people of New Jersey that have been financing this fiasco.

   The only good news is that at least in New Jersey funding for charters has dried up. Let’s hope they run out of steam and disappear, but we know the charter lobby is waiting in the wings looking for the next big scheme. This is always be true unless we regulate charters and hold them accountable.

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5. Joe says:

   August 31, 2018 at 10:05 am

   Christie was a disaster and a malignancy upon the NJ public education system. He was the anti-education governor, he never passed up an opportunity to bash the REAL public schools, their teachers and especially the NJEA. From the way Christie pontificated, one would have thought that NJ had the worst schools in the US which is in stark contrast to the reality. He should have been bragging about how good and how well rated NJ schools were and are. He stirred up so much ill feeling towards public school teachers: the teachers had too generous pensions, the pensions were bankrupting NJ, the teachers had too generous health benefits, teachers have too generous workplace protections (LIFO, tenure, seniority), etc. In other words, Christie wanted to decimate teacher pensions, health benefits, LIFO, seniority and tenure. Phew, good riddance and thank goodness he’s “gone.”

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   • Abigail Shure says:

     August 31, 2018 at 10:31 am

     The movement to crush workers’ rights reaches far beyond New Jersey. Trump has denied raises to federal employees.

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     • Joe says:

       August 31, 2018 at 11:05 am

       Ofcooooooooourse! (via Cenk Uyghur) “It is unacceptable that after last year signing a Republican tax bill that gave away tens of billions in corporate tax cuts and added more than $1 trillion to the national debt, President Trump cites the need for government belt-tightening in his decision to slash a planned pay increase,” Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, said in a statement.
       Since Trump rewarded the rich and the corporations with a trillion dollar tax cut and gave billions more to the military, unionized federal workers must be punished. Trumpism and GOP 101., create huge, vast, massive deficits as an excuse to make cuts in the function of government and in the social programs.

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