Jersey Jazzman

I Need an Ediotr

2012-02-12T19:28:00.000-08:00

Every time I go back to an old post, I find yet another stupid spelling/grammar/syntax error ("reign in costs" instead of "rein in costs").

Forgive me.

Hey, Businessman: Stay Out of My School!

2012-02-12T17:19:00.000-08:00

It's Sunday evening, I can't shake this cough, I'm tired and cranky... so I'm really not up to dissecting this ridiculous interview with the very wealthy and very reformy South Jersey Democratic boss, George Norcross. But I can't let the evening go without commenting on this:

Norcross has sat on Cooper’s board since 1990, taking over the top seat in 2006. It is from that pulpit that he now wants to address public policy.
“I am not speaking in a political capacity,” Norcross says. “I am speaking as chairman of Cooper University Hospital. I have no business talking at length about political issues outside of education reform and Camden. It’s not my issue or goal.”

Excuse me? You think you have any business talking about education?

Norcross is the chairman of a hospital and an very wealthy insurance and benefits executive; he has made money hand over fist through our country's insane, over-priced, and ineffective health system. How does that experience in any way qualify him to say even one word about education?

Has he ever taught? Does he hold any degrees in education? Has he ever done serious education research? Has he run a school? Served on a public school board? Been a member of a PTO, even?

Who does this guy think he is that he has any right to say anything about how education should be run in Camden, or anywhere in the state? What has he ever done to earn the privilege to talk about education being his "passion"?

For that matter: how about you, Bill Gates, or Walton brothers, or Eli Broad, or Koch brothers, or Whitney Tilson, or David Tepper, or Peter Denton, or I don't know how many more of you in the Billionaire Boys Club? What has any of you ever done that gives you the right to dictate education policy? Who are any of you to tell those of us down in the trenches every day how to do our jobs?

I'm a crabby music teacher with a dopey little blog and a smart mouth, but I and millions of my colleagues across this country have more knowledge about what happens in America's schools in our pinkies than any of you will ever learn from your photo-op visits and think-tanky policy briefings. Yes, you've all made a boatload of money - so what? Are you now experts on everything? Are you going to tell scientists how to make cold fusion cars? Are you all gourmet French chefs now? Can you perform brain surgery on each other?

Every one of you needs to back off, and back off now. You have no more right than any other citizen to dictate education policy, and far less right than those of us with training and experience in the field.

Hold us accountable? Absolutely; although you'd better be ready to have the finger pointed back at you and your role in perpetuating this country's despicable income inequality - it has far more to do with the "achievement gap" than tenure or merit pay. And the fact that you want to radically remake America's public schools while isolating your own families from the havoc you are wreaking doesn't much help your case, either.

But that's the point, isn't it? Distract America from the destruction of her middle class and the rise of the oligarchy by placing the blame for all our economic ills on... teachers. Good luck with that. Because no matter what stupid nonsense you manage to get the politicians to pass, we're not backing down from teaching our students how to think.

And a thinking population is not going to put up with this reformy nonsense for much longer. Count on it.

ADDING: How about this?

He believes charters can do just as good a job for far less. But he also believes that suburban voters should be able to choose whether or not to accept a charter.

See how it works? George has lots of money, so he gets a big say. The suburbs have some money, so they get some say. Poor folks in the cities have no money, so they have no say.

Democracy? Meh...

What Is "Teachers Village"?

2012-02-11T09:28:00.000-08:00

Remember the name: Teachers Village. It's a $150 million, mixed-use development that just broke ground with great fanfare in Newark. The idea is that teachers will live in the complex and teach at one of the three charter schools that will occupy the site.

As you might imagine, your taxpayers dollars are funding this experiment:

The project was awarded nearly $40 million in Urban Transit Hub tax credits from the state Economic Development Authority and allocated $60 million in federal New Markets tax credits for the school portion. Other public financing came from the city of Newark, the state Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, and federal Qualified School Construction Bonds, according to an EDA memo. Private financing came from Goldman Sachs, Prudential Financial Corp., TD Bank and New Jersey Community Capital, Beit said. In the early months of the recession, Beit said, Berggruen’s unwavering commitment to the project — Berggruen said he considers his investment "long-term" — brought everyone else together.

$100 million in tax credits; not too shabby. If anyone tries to convince you that billionaires are interested in charter schools solely out of altruism, point them to this project. Why else do you think the biggest Master of the Universe of them all showed up?

A veritable who’s who of real estate developers, corporate leaders and elected officials gathered this morning to celebrate the groundbreaking of Teachers Village in downtown Newark and mark the start of a major project now underway.
The crowd of more than 200 piled into a tent at the site at the corner of Halsey and William streets, two blocks from the Prudential Center. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, whose urban investment group helped finance the project, said projects like Teachers Village are exactly the types of opportunities they look for to support economic growth. World famous architect Richard Meier, who was born in Newark and designed the buildings, said the day was “more than a homecoming, it is a dream come true.” The majority of project investors are from New York, including lead developer Ron Beit of RBH Group. [emphasis mine]

I'm going to have a lot to say about this as I keep digging over the next few weeks. For now:

The apartments in the complex are studios to two-bedrooms that will range from $700 to $1,400 a month. Who do you think will be attracted to this housing: young people just starting out, or older couples with families? So much for experienced teachers working at these charters, although that has always been one of the key points of the charter "movement," hasn't it? Even here in Jersey (thanks, Darcie).
According to my dead tree version of the S-L, there are three charter schools scheduled to take up residence at Teachers Village: Discovery Charter School, TEAM Academy (a K-4 KIPP school), and Great Oaks Charter School. I'll be taking a closer look at all three, but let's see what Bruce Baker has already uncovered about TEAM (my annotation):You can see that roughly 60% of TEAM's students qualify for free lunch (a measure of poverty). That's quite a bit, but far less than most of the other schools in Newark. And, even then, Bruce's model shows the school slightly underperforms expectations when accounting for student characteristics. I'm not saying TEAM is a bad school; far from it. I just wonder why they - and, for that matter, Discovery and Great Oaks - got the space at Teachers Village. What was the criteria? Who made the decision?
The lead developer, Ron Beit, gives great credit to Nicolas Berggruen's "unwavering commitment" to the project. Guess who Berggruen's good buddy in Los Angeles is? Eli Broad. Yes, the same Eli Broad who paid ACTING Commissioner Chris Cerf's old firm $500,000 to write up a plan to convert many of Newark's pubic schools into charters. Everyone OK with that?

This is a big, complicated story, and it's going to take time to unravel it. Stay tuned...

ADDING: Dana Goldstein weighs in:

Newark is not the first city to experiment with workforce housing for teachers, and to combine such projects with a standards-and-accountability school reform agenda. Baltimore’s Miller Court includes 40 teacher apartments, 70 percent of which are rented by Teach for America recruits. In Los Angeles, the Glassell Park complex combines a district pre-school with affordable housing for teachers and other community members.
Another model is an attempt to increase parents’ involvement with their children’s education by co-locating schools with housing reserved for low-income families. Using a mix of public and philanthropic dollars, the Brooklyn Kindergarten Society runs four full-service children’s centers within public housing projects in the neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, and Brownsville. The centers include pre-schools and family support services, and the Society partners with city social service agencies to identify which children living in public housing are most in-need of early academic enrichment.
Of course, this type of project lacks the potential profit-making upsides of market-rate housing for middle-class teachers. [emphasis mine]

Oh, my.

Cerf Nomination Hearing: 2/16/12

2012-02-11T05:56:00.000-08:00

I've been alerted that ACTING NJ Education Commissioner Cerf will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee this coming Thursday, February 16th. Although Cerf has been acting with the full authority of his office for over a year, his formal nomination has been blocked through senatorial courtesy by Senator Ron Rice, who wants him to appear before Rice's Joint Committee on Public Schools.

Cerf is getting around this by claiming he now has two residences. Whatever.

I have to say, I'm actually looking forward to hearing what Cerf has to say as he goes through the process. Because the man has a hell of a lot to answer for. Don't get me wrong; I know the odds are overwhelming that he's going to be nominated. But the plain truth is that this guy has been up to some... stuff over the years, and it's long past time for him to be held to account.

For some background, start with my history of the man's career before the came to New Jersey: The Chris Cerf Story, in four parts:

Part I: His disastrous reign as CEO of Edison Education, a charter school management company, and his subsequent sweetheart stock deal funded by the Florida teachers' pension funds (no, really, it's true).
Part II: His controversial tenure under Joel Klein at the NYC Public Schools, including the investigation which determined he had violated conflict of interest laws; an investigation that was highly redacted when released to the public.
Part III: More on his time in NYC, including his "truth squad," which monitored critics (hi, guys!); and his love affair with charter schools.
Summary: Where I put it all together.

Understand this this is only a look at Cerf's career before he came to New Jersey. Since then, we've had the following debacles:

Paying consultants to reorganize the DOE who have strong ties to the standardized test industry.
The secret charter school review panel, whose members have strong ties to the Black Ministers Council, which got all five of its charters approved.
When the Star-Ledger reported Cerf's old firm, Global Education Advisors, was hired to consult on bringing loads of new charter schools into Newark, he asked the paper not to print the story.
His shifting stories about the connections between Newark Mayor Cory Booker; Cerf's brother, Randy; Global Education Advisors; and Eli Broad, the California billionaire who both funded the GEA report and Cerf's training at the Broad Superintendents Academy.
Cerf's hacktastick report about charter school performance, and the long-delayed follow-up report (341 days!) which is supposed to take student characteristics into account.
Deputy Commissioner Smarick's conflict of interest in working at the NJ DOE and serving on the board of the very reformy 50 CAN.
Mark Zuckerberg gave a $100 million grant money for Newark's schools; one-third of the money spent so far has gone to folks with ties to Booker and Cerf.

And, recapping from yesterday, there's

The teacher evaluation task force with ONE working teacher.
The crashing "pilot program" for teacher evaluations.
The children of Paterson promised the moon but getting mooned.
The mess in Jersey City.
The mess in Newark (here's more).
The mess in Cherry Hill and Voorhees.
The mess in Highland Park.
The mess in Teaneck.
The freeze in school rebuilding and construction.

Looking at all this, I'd suggest the Judiciary Committee schedule a week of hearings - there's quite a bit to cover.

And cover it they must. New Jersey's schools are some of the best in the world, but Cerf wants to radically upend how all of them are run; not some of them, all of them. Before he's allowed free reign to do so, he has to be held accountable for his actions up to this point.

I hope the ACTING Commissioner is forthcoming in all of his answers. But if he isn't, he needs to be pressed, and he should not be confirmed until he addresses the many controversies swirling around him.

Union Bashing: A Substitute For Leadership

2012-02-10T04:37:00.000-08:00

Apparently, it's open season on teachers unions here in New Jersey. Gov. Chris Christie worked up his best imitation at outrage over an admittedly dumb but clearly off-hand and meaningless remark by the Executive Director of the NJEA:

But Christie called Giordano’s comment outrageous and said if Giordano didn’t resign, Barbara Keshishian, president of the education association, should fire him.
"I cannot express how disgusted I am by that statement by the head of the largest teachers union in our state," he said at a press conference in Westfield, "but I also have to tell you I’m not the least bit surprised because I think it so succinctly captures what their real position is."
Then the governor took a personal swipe: "As Vince drives out of the palace on State Street in his big luxury car and his $500,000 salary. I’m sure life’s really fair for him, and if Vince’s kids were in a failing school district he could afford to send them to any school in New Jersey that could help them succeed."

Yes, multi-millionaire Chris Christie - whose wife makes $500,000 a year working part-time on Wall Street, who sends his own kids to an expensive private school even though he lives in a great public school district, and who lives like this:

is just appalled at Giordano's salary. Sure.

Then ACTING Education Commissioner Chris Cerf joined in the smear-fest:

The NJEA’s position, quite explicitly, is that our African American children are doing better than many other states’ African American children. I take great offense at this perspective. The NJEA believes the right question is whether poor children or children of color are performing better than children within the same demographic group elsewhere. I believe that the right question is whether we are giving every child an equal opportunity in education regardless of birth circumstances – that is, not in comparison to their demographic peers, but to all children.

What the NJEA willfully refuses to admit is that being honest about where we can do better is not an attack on our teachers. We have some of the best, hardest working teachers in the country. But I have yet to meet a teacher who tells me that it is OK to allow tens of thousands of our children to fail each year. And I have yet to meet a teacher who tells me that they’re as good as they’ll ever be and have no room for improvement.

And I had yet to meet an state education commissioner who makes nice with a teachers union when speaking at their convention then stabs them in the back mere months later - that is, until I met Cerf.

What are we to make of all this?

1) Let's get this off the table first: there is something simply galling about a couple of rich white guys running around claiming the mantle of defenders of poor, minority children against a teachers union whose members will never make anywhere close to the dough they have raked in over the years.

NJEA works to get teachers decent salaries, benefits, and workplace protections even as this governor slashes our pensions, jacks up health insurance contributions (while doing nothing to rein in costs), and holds school budgets hostage while demanding pay freezes. Yet Christie lives a live of opulence that would make Midas blush:

Governor, until the day comes when you get out of your state-funded helicopter, drag your butt down to a school, and do the work of the angels, you can spare me the piety about how you are the true champion of this state's children.

2) Every time these two take a bat to the NJEA, they always couch their words by saying how much they love teachers. Leave aside the fact that Christie has attacked teachers - not the NJEA, but teachers - over and over again. Leave aside the economic hits the teaching corps has had to take while New Jersey's millionaires get tax gifts.

What strikes me is how utterly patronizing their attitude is. Do they think teachers are so stupid that we couldn't change our leadership if we wanted to? Do they think we are incapable of demanding accountability from our unions? Do they think we are so naive as to believe we could get good executives to run the NJEA for less than six-figures?

I've said it before and taken heat for it, but I'll say it again: this is a result of straight up sexism. Christie never goes after the cops or the firefighters or even the CWA workers like he goes after teachers, and the reason is clear: he is comfortable verbally abusing women. He did it to Valerie Huttle and Loretta Weinberg and Marie Corfield without the slightest hesitation. Is it such a stretch to believe that he thinks that a profession with a majority of women is a profession that is full of bubble-heads that can be easily duped by their union?

Yes, I know what I'm saying is controversial; it's also correct.

3) It takes an serious amount of hutzpah to whine and moan about how the union is screwing up education when both Christie and Cerf have such a track record of absolute failure:

The Race To The Top debacle.
The teacher evaluation task force with ONE working teacher.
The crashing "pilot program" for teacher evaluations.
The children of Paterson promised the moon but getting mooned.
The mess in Jersey City.
The mess in Newark (here's more).
The mess in Cherry Hill and Voorhees.
The mess in Highland Park.
The mess in Teaneck.
The schlocky charter report.
The long-overdue real charter report (promised 440 days ago!).
The school aid disasters.
The freeze in school rebuilding and construction.

And that's only the stuff off the top of my head; add your own below.

No one should be surprised by this, especially since Chris Cerf came to town. His tenure at Edison was an educational and financial disaster. He was in New York City, working directly for both Joel Klein and Mike Bloomberg, during the entire testing scandal. And we never got a full account of his own scandal at Tweed.

The fact is that each of these "champions for poor children" was a one-man school wrecking crew even before they teamed up; together, they are a reformy force of incompetence the likes of which this state has never seen. They would be well advised to start fixing their own mistakes before trying to affix any blame to unions.

Although that really is the point of all this, isn't it?

4) As I've said before: I am getting damn sick and tired of these guys constantly bad-mouthing our kids. And don't fool yourself; that is exactly what they are doing.

Do they think kids are inoculated from their constant harping on the "failure" of our schools? Do they think the kids don't hear the constant refrain from Trenton about how much they suck?

There are amazing things happening in public schools everywhere - that includes the poorest neighborhoods of the poorest cities. Unlike Cerf's Edison schools, New Jersey public schools have actually made remarkable strides in educating children who are poor, who are minorities, and who have special needs. Much of that success comes from a policy of providing resources where needed; a policy this governor hopes to dismantle.

Cerf was apparently a teacher in a private school for a few years. I hope he did a better job of tempering criticism with praise in the classroom than he does in front of a microphone. Because every good teacher knows you have to have both.

Where are the visits to great public schools? Not for photo-ops, but to actually listen to the teachers and the principals there about what need to be done. Where is the recognition of the terrific kids doing amazing things every day in our state? Not for photo-ops, but to really listen to the children and their teachers and their parents to find out how we can replicate their success.

They aren't there. What we get instead is this:

Lots of visits to charter schools that segregate kids who are poor and who have special needs. Welcome to Chris Christie's vision of NJ's education future.

You two Chrises, take a little advice from this teacher: stop the overheated rhetoric about the NJEA, quit taking advice from people who don't know anything about schools, and start actually listening to teachers, to parents, and to the kids. You'll find very few of them care a whit about what kind of car union officials drive. You'll find the vast majority of them are doing their jobs.

It's you guys who are dropping the ball.

ADDING: Nerd alert: I'll try to get to this over the weekend, but Cerf's assertions about the NAEP are especially mendacious. If you want to see where I'm going, start with this: do we really want New Jersey to be West Virginia?

Who Started This War?

2012-02-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

Who do you think?

Here in Jersey, our governor spends taxpayer money to set up photo-ops so he can call for the resignation of union officials who make admittedly dumb but off-handed and meaningless remarks.

No, really - he does:

Because we all know the biggest problem facing American education today is union officials driving around in cars that are way too big. Nice work focusing on the big issues, Chris.

Here's the NJEA's Steve Wollmer in response:

Watch NJEA Communications Director Responds to Christie Comments on PBS. See more from WNJT.

Nicely said, and good on him for taking the high road. But just in case you're curious about Mary Pat Christie's salary...

Oh, my.

Reformy Language

2012-02-09T04:11:00.000-08:00

Chris Christie, 3/24/10:

Language matters, ladies and gentlemen. Language is a window into attitude.

I couldn't agree more. Take, for example, ACTING NJ Education Commissioner Chris Cerf, this past week:

Cerf also reiterated his longstanding opposition to allowing voters in a school district to decide whether or not to approve a charter school, even though a bill that would require just that passed an Assembly committee last week.
“I’ve never met the situation where monopolists, given the chance to vote for competition would do that, ever,” Cerf said. “The people who tend to be good at organizing people to vote would be against mucking around with the current system.”

"Monopolists." Do you ever hear educators talking about "monopolists"? Not likely; the folks who talk about "monopolies" are businesspeople. Which is why ACTING Commissioner Cerf says things like:

"This is a $650 billion sector, second only to health care."

Again - does this sound like an educator to you? Remember:

Chris Cerf has spent his life in the business of education. His language betrays his world view.

Some other highlights from this interview:

Cerf noted that teachers currently get pay raises only based on “steps and lanes” in contracts — steps for longevity and lanes for additional education beyond a bachelor’s degree.
But research shows that teachers do not necessarily get better over time or with advanced degrees, Cerf said.

Actually, there is quite a bit of research that shows experience certainly does matter; at the very least, it matters more than many other arbitrary measures proposed by test-crazed corporate reformers. But even leaving that aside: what evidence is there that abandoning step-wise contracts leads to better student performance? Because I sure haven't seen it.

It's like Cerf is saying "Hey, let's try this unproven thing over here!" Why? Why would we upend the implicit contract with teachers simply because Cerf has a hunch that it might work? Why are we screwing around with one of the best school systems in the world simply because Cerf wants to roll the dice?

School districts should be able to offer different pay to teachers for a variety of reasons, Cerf said.
“If I want to pay more money to a teacher to work in a high-challenge school, I ought to be able to do that,” Cerf said. “If … a great teacher has been recruited for another school district, (the district) ought to be able to pay a retention bonus.
“Let everything else work out at the bargaining table. If they want to do performance bonuses … I just want this profession to have the opportunity to use compensation as a management tool,” Cerf added.

But teachers DON'T want to do performance bonuses; at least, they don't want to do them based on stupid, arbitrary nonsense like test scores. Why are you forcing the issue? We know it won't work.

And the notion of paying teachers retention bonuses is hysterical. Does Cerf really want to have individual contracts for teachers? Does he want schools to go down the road of professional sports?

Yeah, that'll keep taxes low...

Regarding layoffs, Cerf said it is illegal for a school board to keep teachers based on their ability, and must instead lay off according to seniority. He said changing that law — called “last in, first out” — will be a huge cultural shift within local education.
“The system is decrepit and it’s not working,” Cerf said.

Wrong, wrong, WRONG! NJ is one of the best school systems in the world; it is NOT "decrepit" in the least! Why would you want to impose a "huge cultural shift" on some of the best schools in the nation when they are doing such a great job educating kids?

I can't understand why our ACTING Commissioner takes an active interest in portraying our great public schools as failing. Why is he so hellbent on dismissing the great work our students do every day? Why does he so blithely dismiss the outstanding work of our teachers? Why can't he acknowledge the great work of our educators?

It's disturbing.

Democracy for Paterson? Meh...

2012-02-08T05:01:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted from Blue Jersey.

Like a father reluctant to hand over the keys to his 17-year-old, ACTING Education Commissioner Chris Cerf says the people of Paterson just aren't ready to run their own schools yet:

The state’s top education official brushed aside an ambitious proposal from the school board Monday that sought to end state control of the district by the fall.

Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf said the city should manage its own schools, but such a rapid transition would not be in the best interest of the district’s students.

[...]

Under state control, the board can act only as an advisory body to the superintendent.

Board member Jonathan Hodges expressed concern about low scores reflecting poorly on the board when the state is ultimately in control of the schools.

Cerf acknowledged the state’s failure, saying “the state did not effectively discharge its duty to the children of Paterson.” [emphasis mine]

Got that? Cerf says the state has done a poor job of running Paterson's schools, but he still doesn't want to give up control. Apparently, there are ambitious new plans for the city's schools under the Christie administration.

Well, how's that going?

Six months later, there's little evidence of headway in this pilot project in Paterson, which has struggled for decades to improve its ailing school system. The governor has poured enormous political energy into talking about the moral imperative to help children stuck in failing districts, and taxpayers statewide spend billions of dollars a year in school aid for poor cities.

But much like Christie's agenda for tenure reform, weakening teachers' seniority rights and vouchers, this Harlem Children's Zone initiative has not gained much visible traction.

The governor's office has yet to appoint an advisory group for the project. This month, Creighton Drury, who was spearheading the effort at the New Jersey Community Development Corp., left for a job in New York City. And officials from the state and the Paterson non-profit say there is no blueprint yet for moving forward.

Bob Guarasci, chief executive officer of the Paterson non-profit, said his team had two phone calls and two meetings with liaisons from the governor's office since the press conference last summer. He said he is working on a strategic plan.

"I don't want to rush this," Guarasci said last week. "To anyone who says this is little more than a photo op because six months later nothing has been done, I squarely take the blame because I want to make sure it's done right. … Those who want to see the Harlem Children's Zone model in full bloom here in this neighborhood have to understand it takes time."

Meanwhile, at the Harlem Children's Zone, spokesman Marty Lipp said the agency's $24,000 consulting contract with New Jersey expired Dec. 31. Lipp said the two-year contract, which predated Christie's time as governor, focused on giving advice and training to representatives of Newark and Camden at first, then expanded to cover Paterson. "Now our involvement is in limbo," Lipp said.

An update on the Harlem Children's Zone project was scratched off the state Board of Education agenda this month. The governor's choice to lead the initiative, acting Secretary of Higher Education Rochelle Hendricks, did not answer requests for comment. Christie's spokesman, Kevin Roberts, called back instead to say work was happening behind the scenes.
[emphasis mine]

Hey, I thought Geoffrey "Superman" Canada was faster than a speeding bullet! What's the holdup? Especially since Christie has talked about the urgency of fixing Paterson's schools before:

What's our answer for those families -- that you're confined to failure, that we're not gonna do anything to help you or be patient and wait until we fix the public schools what they've been waiting in some of these districts like Newark and Patterson for over 20 years for these schools to be fixed and then not being fixed. To me, I can't allow children and their families to have to wait more time for them to get a good education. And so, again, none of these things where you're talking about vouchers, Interdistrict school choice, or charter schools are by themselves a single silver bullet solution to the problem, combined, they help to create a competitive atmosphere that will hopefully allow the public schools in these failing districts to have an additional motivation for being able to improve because if they don't, they run the real risk of losing students which they don't want to do.

Apparently, a sense of urgency is confined to vouchers and only certain charters. Here's a thought: maybe actually involving the community would help get things rolling. Too bad they've been shut out since back when Christie first announced the project:

One new development was the inclusion of Paterson Mayor Jeffrey Jones at the press conference. In January, after Christie first announced the program, Jones told the Wall Street Journal he had “no idea” about it and was “taken aback.”
Today, he said he still wants more details but is hopeful.
“I don’t know enough details on where this is headed,” he said. “If in fact there’s going to be a higher level approach to thinking about looking at resources that might have been dedicated to these sort of challenges, putting them together in a pool, if you will, and focusing on priorities within a community that has a plan, I support that.”
Other Paterson public officials weren’t so happy. Board of Education member Jonathan Hodges stood outside the press conference with about 20 protestors, holding a sign that read “Christie: Don’t use black and brown children for photo ops.” Hodges said the school board didn’t hear Christie would be in town until late Tuesday night, and weren’t invited to the event.
“For this program to be successful, it requires community engagement,” said Hodges. “Having a photo op and a press conference, that’s not community engagement. It won’t help make a successful program.”

Amen. Once again, however, we see the top-down, autocratic approach of Christie's administration: the state retains control, promises are made that never seem to get fulfilled, and the community is left standing out in the cold.

It's happening in Newark and in Jersey City and in Cherry Hill and all over the state. And it has to stop.

ADDING: By my rough calculations, nearly 80% of the children of Paterson are eligible for free lunch (the best metric we have to judge student poverty), according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Does everyone agree that doing something about endemic childhood poverty will probably help raise test scores more than anything else?

Then why aren't we doing something about it?

Charter Schools=Low Teacher Pay

2012-02-07T04:15:00.000-08:00

Some of you may be wondering why, as a teacher, I spend so much time questioning the orthodoxy surrounding charters schools. Part of it is that I really can't stand the mendacity surrounding so much of the hype around charters. Part of it is that charter-mania feeds into a notion that everything is just fine for poor kids with the exception of their greedy, disinterested teachers.

But, I must confess, part of it is that charters often seem to be a clear threat to teacher pay, benefits, and workplace protections. Take our friend Amir Khan and his Regis Academy Charter School. Khan, for example, is very scared of the Tenured Boogeyman:

Also, he said there will be no tenure for teachers and that he believes in merit pay.
“They do bad [sic] we let them go,” Khan said.

Well, it's going to be kind of difficult to get around tenure, as it's a part of state law. Maybe the founder of a "public" school should know such things. Like he should know that merit pay has never worked in schools and even the business world is starting to back away from it.

But what about salaries? Surely charter schools are looking to retain the best talent with good pay, yes?

Here's the Regis Academy application for a charter. Budgeted teacher salaries are on page 2-118. The cost? $50,000 for each teacher.

Now, in the world of reforminess, I'm sure many people would go on and on about how awesome that salary is, and teachers get (unpaid) summers off, and super-duper health care, and just be grateful you have a job, and blah, blah, blah...

But here are a few facts:

- The median salary for a NJ teacher in 2008-09 was $57,467.

- Regis Academy will serve students from Cherry Hill, Voorhees, Lawnside, and Somerdale. Median salaries and median years of experience in these districts are:

Cherry Hill: $56,044, 8 yrs.
Lawnside: $59,000, 18 yrs.
Somerdale: $52,924, 11 yrs.
Voorhees: $81,175, 17 yrs.

- The average salary for a NJ teacher in 2008-09 was $63,154.

We can't quite compare median salaries between Regis's future teachers and the sending districts' teachers, because we don't know how Regis will decide to distribute their payroll. But it's certainly worth noting that the average salary will be over $13,000 less at Regis than the salary for the rest of the state. And two of Regis's sending districts have higher median salaries than the rest of the state.

I think we have more than enough evidence to reasonably suspect that Regis is not going to pay its teachers well in comparison to its sending public districts. Does anyone think Regis will be attracting an experienced faculty with this kind of inducement? Or is it more likely we'll see a young, constantly churning staff?

That may keep the Tenured Boogeyman at bay, but is it best for the students?

Yarrgh! My tenury teeth will eat your school! But charters give me cavities!

"Rigorous" Charter Reviews?

2012-02-06T04:21:00.000-08:00

When the charter for Regis Academy in Cherry Hill was approved, ACTING NJ DOE Commissioner Chris Cerf assured us it had to be one of the very best of the best:

“The most important bar that any applicant must clear is demonstrating that the school has a very high likelihood of providing an excellent education to its students,” said Acting Commissioner Cerf. “Through our rigorous review process, we became confident that these four schools will offer students a great education on day one of the school year. The Department will work with applicants who were not approved in this round but demonstrated potential to continue to develop their application for consideration in future rounds. It has been our experience that with additional guidance and time to plan, applicants who were not approved have been able to resubmit successful applications.” [emphasis mine]

Wow, sounds tough. Except that when the Cherry Hill school district looked at the application - after filing a freedom of information-type (OPRA) request - it turns out things weren't quite as "rigorous" as Cerf led us to believe:

In Cherry Hill, as in many suburban school districts, funding for public education comes primarily from local property taxes. Yet our local taxpayers have had no say in whether a charter school can open in our district. The decision to approve the Regis application rested entirely with the Acting Commissioner of Education.

In attempting to determine why this charter was approved, we filed an OPRA request for the application review sheets; the DOE denied our OPRA request, but later released the review sheets to our solicitor as part of the official record on appeal. Here’s what we found: Three reviewers reviewed the application, giving scores of “Meets the Standard,” “Approaches the Standard,” or “Does Not Meet the Standard” in 14 categories. Three reviewers, 14 categories, for a total of 42 indicators. Regis’s application was deemed to meet the standard in just 20 of the 42 possible indicators. That’s a score of 47.6%. Shouldn’t a charter school application be subject to at least the 80% standard that school districts must achieve in the NJQSAC review? [emphasis mine]

Sorry, Cherry Hill: it appears the rules aren't the same when you've got good political connections.

Hey, I've got an idea: maybe if you got some of your board members to sit behind Chris Christie at his next ~~taxpayer-funded political rally~~ town hall - you know, like Regis's founder, Amir Khan - you could submit substandard reports too!

I'm sure it's just a happy accident that Regis's clearly deficient application to open a charter in a town that neither wants nor needs it got approved while others did not. Nothing to see here folks; move along...

"Nobody Could Have Imagined..."

2012-02-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

I wrote about Chris Christie's broken pension promises to public workers earlier this week. One of my terrific commenters points us to a piece by Bob Herbert all the way back in 1995:

Now many of the gains made over a quarter of a century are in danger of slipping away because the current Governor, Christine Todd Whitman, has chosen to finance her political ambitions with a popular buy-now, pay-later economic policy that will place a financial stranglehold on future generations of New Jerseyans.

This is best illustrated by Mrs. Whitman's decision to withhold billions of dollars that should be going into the public employee pension funds over the next few years, and using the bulk of that money to balance the state budget. Then, with an audacity that dazzles her supporters and even draws grudging admiration from opponents, Mrs. Whitman smiles and characterizes the withheld funds as savings.

Of course, they are not "savings" -- not in any sense of the word. The pension obligations at some point will come due and future generations will have to meet them.

Not only will the money have to be made up, but future taxpayers will be deprived of the income that the money -- if properly invested now -- would be expected to generate.

[...]

Mrs. Whitman and the long-term interests of New Jersey appear to be at odds. The Governor won election by promising tax cuts, and any further advances in her career will be powered by her ability to "deliver" on that promise. Like most politicians, her eyes are on the short term: today's budget, tomorrow's election. It requires courage to look beyond Election Day to the long-term interests of constituents.

Gosh, who does that remind me of?

Full Disclosure From This Professional Blogger

2012-02-05T08:14:00.000-08:00

In the past, I've said I haven't made "one damn dime" off of this blog. Well, I started putting up the ads a while ago, and now I'm making just about that.

So, every few months, I'll be taking Mrs. Jazzman out to dinner as a penance for making her listen to my rants while I type this tuff at the kitchen table. This is thanks to all of you who drop by and click through and leave comments and retweet and like me on Facebook.

I really do appreciate it. I promise you, I will not let the massive fame that comes from being a teacher-blogger go to my head - isn't that right, Merit Pay Fairy and Tenured Boogeyman?

Yo, Jazzman - how's about buyin' me a new tiara?

Yarrgh! I could use a new night-light...

The Tenure Boogeyman!

2012-02-05T07:47:00.000-08:00

One of our recurring cast of characters here at the Jazzman has been the Merit Pay Fairy:

Yo, whassup?

The Merit Pay Fairy lives in the minds of corporate reformers, who believe the Fairy can magically wipe away the "achievement gap" with a mere wave of her wand. Don't bother trying to explain to these corporate reformers that the Merit Pay Fairy doesn't exist; like Linus in the pumpkin patch, they fervently wait for the Fairy to show up. And they get very cross and stamp their little feet when she disappoints them again and again.

Well, I think it's time we add another character to our little friends' imaginary, reformy lives. Boys and girls, meet the Tenured Boogeyman!

Yarggh! I'm going to eat your school!

Scary, huh? Yes, the Tenured Boogeyman hides under the beds of good little corporate reformers like Michelle Rhee and Chris Christie. He lurks in the closets of superintendents like Jeanine Caffrey of Perth Amboy and Cami Anderson of Newark. He's big and he's mean and he's... uh...

Huh, that's funny: he's no where to be seen in high-performing, low-poverty school districts. I mean, they all have tenure, and unions, and step guides, and no Merit Pay Fairies, and all the other evils of modern education. But they somehow manage to be among the best schools in the nation, let alone the world.

How could that possibly be? After all, "even the liberal" (sigh...) Star-Ledger says:

It is hard to imagine a law that could do more damage to poor children in urban districts than the tenure law. It ensures that bad teachers stay in place, inflicting lasting damage on one classroom full of kids after another, year after year.

AHHHHH!!!!! Run, run, RUN! The Tenured Boogeyman is coming! It's "lasting" damage! All those "bad" teachers with jobs for life...

Wait a minute: didn't I read somewhere that Newark has actually been able to get rid of "bad" teachers before?

Yep:

Still, most agreed that the small numbers of tenure charges filed with the state are really only a fraction of the cases of low-performing teachers for whom the formal filing is a last resort, a vast majority of them eased out of the classroom as the complaints mount.
'You don’t see these statistics, but I would say that hundreds of teachers who receive the first tenure charges resign,” said Eugene Liss, general counsel to the Newark Teachers Union. "Maybe the case didn’t go all the way to Trenton, but many who sit with us, they end up leaving the profession."
Newark has a system in which teachers receiving unsatisfactory ratings are required to undergo additional training through Seton Hall University. Last year, it was 90 teachers, all but 12 of whom returned to the classroom, he said. Those 12 all resigned, none by tenure charges. [emphasis mine]

So Anderson is whining about 100 members out of a certificated staff of 3933 in the entire district (yes, "certificated" is a real word). That's around 2.5%. And more than 10% of those "bad" teachers were counseled out without a tenure hearing in a single year.

And the money: $8.5 million in a budget of nearly $1 billion; less than 1%. Not peanuts by any means, but still...

This is the big crisis? This is the law that's doing such damage? Come on; even if all the myths about tenure were true, this would not be nearly the problem Moran says it is.

And those myths definitely are not true. Tenure has never been shown to have an effect on teacher performance. Tenure is needed to prevent corruption in places like Elizabeth. Districts win tenure cases over teachers 3-to-1. And there's no reason tenure hearings can't be streamlined and made far less expensive; even the unions are for that.

The sad truth is when corporate reformers worry about tenure, they are distracting themselves from much bigger problems: poverty, racism, economic insecurity, lack of pubic infrastructure, immigrant assimilation, lack of school funding stability, inequity, and a host of other issues that aren't nearly as easy to fix as this small tenure problem.

That's not to say tenure shouldn't be fixed, and that the law shouldn't be improved; it should. But, many times, children work themselves up about the Boogeyman simply because they don't want to go to bed; they make a big deal about a little fear to distract themselves from what really needs to be done. Sure, turn on the night-light - but shut your eyes and go to sleep.

Yes, let's improve tenure - but let's get serious about what really needs to be done to improve the lives of children.

A Small Breakthrough at the Star-Ledger

2012-02-05T06:35:00.000-08:00

Tom Moran's paper finally seems to get it about charter schools:

Superintendent Cami Anderson’s plan to lift student performance in Newark is packed with promising ideas, but two items deserve special attention because they hold lessons for the entire state.
One is her approach to charter schools. Unlike many superintendents, Anderson welcomes help from charters and is impressed by the concrete gains some of them have made. She intends to help the movement expand.
But not unless the charters play ball. Anderson wants them to take on their fair share of low-performing students and to follow the same rules the regular schools do when it comes to expulsions. They also need to collect data showing not just how students perform, but also how much progress they make each year. [emphasis mine]

Those of us who have been hammering at this for the last year or so deserve to take about half a victory lap for finally getting this point into the conversation. Any claim of charter successes must be tempered by the acknowledgment that these charters often serve different student populations than neighboring public schools.

(By the way - I deliberately choose to use the terms "charter" and "public" when describing these schools. A charter may use public funds, but it is not a public school. Argue in the comments if you must.)

Unfortunately, Moran still suffers from delusions about whether "successful" charters are replicable:

The aim is to make sure all kids in Newark benefit from the boom in good charter schools — not just the kids with the most active parents. Charters will be expected to solicit other families as well, and to make it easier for them to enroll.
That’s a sensible blueprint to guide the growth of the charters statewide, because there is no doubt some charters are achieving remarkable success. To stifle the movement, as more turf-conscious superintendents are trying to do, would be a tragic mistake. [emphasis mine]

I'm sorry - was there a "boom" in great performing charters that I missed? Is the state - or, for that matter, the nation - suddenly awash in charters that get better results for poor, minority, LEP, and special needs children? Because I sure as hell haven't seen it.

Let's take Newark itself. Here's a chart made by the invaluable Bruce Baker that I'll explain as best as I can (you should really click through and read Bruce himself):

What Baker has done is both sophisticated and important: he's created a statistical model to "predict" how well a school should do on test scores, based on how many poor, non-English speaking, and minority students a school has (gender also factors in). These are the schools in the Newark district: the red schools are scheduled for closure under Anderson's latest plan, the blue are the other public schools, and the green are charters (Baker describes this as a "quick and dirty" analysis; I wouldn't necessarily base any conclusions about individual schools on this, but it does illustrate a larger point).

If a school is above the line, that means it is "beating the odds" - its students are performing at a higher level than we would expect, given the characteristics of the student body. If a school is below the line, it's not doing as well as we would think.

Do the charters, as a whole, appear to be doing any better than the public schools; in other words, do we have many green dots over the line, and very few under it? How about the publics? And the schools scheduled for closing?

I see no reason to believe that there is a "boom" in good charter schools: far from it. Yet Moran says slowing the growth of charters would be a "tragic mistake." Why? Where's the tragedy? It seems to me that's it's far more tragic to close two public schools that are beating the odds than to pretend that mediocre charters are working miracles.

What Baker has done is exactly the sort of analysis we need across the state before we continue to expand charters. ACTING Commissioner Cerf promised us he would do that analysis as "soon as is humanly possible." How long ago was that again?

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.7is7.com/otto/countdown.html?year=2011&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;month=3&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;date=7&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;hrs=0&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ts=24&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;tz=local&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;min=0&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;sec=0&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;show=d&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;mode=t&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;cdir=up&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;fgcolor=%23000000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;title=Time%20Elapsed%20Since%20Cerf%20Promised%20the%20Charter%20School%20Report"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Time Elapsed Since Cerf Promised the Charter School Report&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

335 days, and yet Anderson and Moran press ahead with charter expansion. Talk about leaping before looking.

There should be a moratorium on all new charter schools until the Cerf Charter Report is released.

I'll get to Anderson, Moran, and tenure in a bit...

ADDING: NJ Parents has more.

Jesus Wants Your Kid's Teacher To Be Broke

2012-02-04T09:22:00.000-08:00

It was only a matter of time before one of them tried this:

A Republican State Senator from Alabama claimed this week that keeping teacher salaries low is actually an order from the Christian deity figure, imparted in ancient texts written by Jewish tribesmen thousands of years ago.
Speaking at a prayer breakfast recently, Alabama state Senator Shadrack McGill praised giving pay raises to politicians, saying that it helps to prevent bribery. Then he shifted gears and went in the opposite direction with regards to teachers, arguing against a bill that would increase their salaries.
“Teachers need to make the money that they need to make,” he said, according to Alabama newspaper The Times-Journal. “There needs to be a balance there. If you double what you’re paying education, you know what’s going to happen? I’ve heard the comment many times, ‘Well, the quality of education’s going to go up.’ That’s never proven to happen, guys.

“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach. To go and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK?”
He continued: “And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn’t matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity. “If you don’t keep that in balance, you’re going to attract people who are not called, who don’t need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance.”
McGill voted in favor of a 67 percent pay raise for lawmakers in 2007.
Alabama ranks 31st in the nation in average teacher salaries, although the state did see an 11 percent increase in teacher pay from 2007-2009. The state’s Republicans have adopted so-called “right to work” laws that forbid public employees from collectively bargaining for better wages and benefits.

Wow, how hysterically funny! What a rube! Why, no one up here in the smart, sophisticated Northeast would ever say something that obnoxious!

Right?

Our governor just can't understand why, after two years of relentless teacher bashing, broken promises, and slashed salaries, anybody wouldn't want to go into public service:

I think for those people who are feeling discouraged right now, because they're going to have to pay a percentage of their health insurance premium, or they're going to have to pay one or two points more towards a lifetime pension, then I would suggest to you respectfully that those people have completely lost touch with reality, and probably didn't have the passion to begin with.

OK, Christie thankfully left Jesus out of it. But you tell me how what he says here is at all substantially different from this Alabama nutjob.

It isn't. Both are justifications to screw over public workers - specifically teachers - by turning their lack of greed and love of their jobs into rationalizations for shoving them out of the middle class.

And it's just as disgusting to see this mendacity and greed practiced by a man who votes himself a huge pay raise as it is to see it practiced by a man who lives like this:

Chez Christie

Just another dad at his kid's baseball game...

Nice. I suppose if you took all this away, Christie would still be "passionate" about being a corporate tool...

Geez Ruiz!

2012-02-03T04:47:00.000-08:00

I only have time right now for a quick word about this new tenure bill from NJ Sen. Theresa Ruiz, as I have to run off to my job and conquer poverty, bad parenting, homelessness, racism, English-language deficiencies, autism, behavioral and cognitive disabilities, underfunding of schools...

Get my point? A huge body of research shows teachers account for 10-15% of test-based measures of student learning; the largest factors that determine a student's test scores occur out of school.

Yet Ruiz and other reformy types pat themselves on the back while focusing solely on teachers. It's like having the transmission fall out of your car, and then bragging about how you fixed it by inflating the tires. Yes, it's important to inflate the tires, but that's not the real problem.

Further, this bill assumes we can separate teachers into four classes of "effectiveness" when there is no evidence that we can (this is one of Matt DiCarlo's best posts about teacher evaluations - read the entire thing, I'm begging you!). And then there's the problem of how only 10-20% of teachers can be assessed with test scores anyway (and then read this one by Bruce Baker! Please! I'm talking to you, NJ pundits...)

But the details seem not to concern Ruiz:

The controversial stuff: The whole push for tenure reform has gotten caught in the debate over how to measure whether a teacher's students have progressed, and how much those measurements should count in the evaluation. Christie has sought that student test scores, where applicable, count as much as 45 percent of the overall evaluation. Ruiz is more general in her provisions, listing a broad array of criteria, including that they be “partially based on multiple objective measures of student learning.“ Still, the district's evaluation methods would need approval of the state commissioner, and if not approved, a state evaluation model could be applied to a district.

In other words: Senator Ruiz cannot be bothered with pesky details. It's more important that we do something, because it's all for the ~~voters~~ kids.

Swell. More later after I finish saving America...

The Continuing Mendacity of Chris Cerf

2012-02-03T04:12:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, the ACTING NJ Commissioner of Education was in rare form:

After decades of frustratingly slow progress and expensive programs, the achievement gap between black, Hispanic or economically disadvantaged students in New Jersey has narrowed on key benchmark tests.
Statewide results released Wednesday also show improvement in 31 select low-income school districts – such as Camden, Newark and Asbury Park -- that annually receive billions of dollars, and more than half of the state local education aid.
State education officials, however, disputed the notion that the performance between groups had gotten much closer. They contend that across all grades, sizable differences remain.
“We approach these results today with both confidence and humility,” Acting Education Commissioner Christopher J. Cerf said today in a statement. “Overall, New Jersey students continue to perform at extremely high levels overall, and with few exceptions the statewide numbers continue to inch upwards. However, we have a persistent achievement gap … It is a disgraceful legacy in New Jersey.” [emphasis mine]

As I've said before: anyone who talks so much about the "achievement gap" is probably selling snake oil. As Howard Wainer writes:

But focusing on the difference blinds us to what has been a remarkable success in education over the past 20 years. Although the direction and size of student improvements are considered across many subject areas and many age groups, I will describe just one -- 4th grade mathematics. In the figure, the dots represent the average scores for all states that are available for NAEP's 4th grade mathematics test (with New Jersey's dot labeled for emphasis). These are shown broken down by race (black and white students) as well as by year (1992 and 2011). We can see that there have been steep gains for both racial groups over this period (somewhat steeper gains for blacks than for whites). Of course we can also see the all-too-familiar gap between the performance of black and white students, but here comes Achilles. New Jersey's black students performed as well in 2011 as New Jersey's white students did in 1992. Given the consequential differences in wealth between these two groups, which has always been inextricably connected with student performance, reaching this mark is an accomplishment worthy of applause, not criticism.

The last thing that we see is that the performance of New Jersey's students was among the very best of all states in both years and for both ethnic groups. [emphasis mine]

Not good enough for you? Check out this post from Bruce Baker. Or this post by yours truly. It all comes down to the same thing:

New Jersey's school's are some of the best in the nation. Our poor and minority kids do better than average; our not-poor and white kids do WAY better than average. Could our poor kids and minority kids do better still? Of course; but the notion that we should judge our success in terms of closing the gap is ridiculous when we are a state that achievement massive success in spite of chronic urban poverty.

What does Cerf's incessant repetition of this easily disputed argument about the achievement gap say about him? Is he deliberately misleading the public about student achievement in this state? Or is he just clueless?

Because it's got to be one of the two; or maybe both...

Another Broken Christie Promise

2012-02-02T03:44:00.000-08:00

Remember when Chris Christie told all of us public workers here in New Jersey that we had no choice but to accept his ~~broken promises~~ reforms?

“What this legislation will do will be simply to save the pension system for all of those retirees and public workers who are counting on it,” Christie said. “The only way to do that is to control spending -- there is no magic wand. But affordability comes at a price: There are choices to be made and sacrifices to share." [emphasis mine]

We teachers and cops and firefighters and social workers and nurses and DPW workers and everyone else has to "sacrifice," or our pensions were going to disappear. Straight-shootin' Chris was just telling us saps the truth we had been denied for so long:

At a town hall-style meeting in Camden County, Christie Tuesday said the state has to make its pension plans "more solvent and more honest," and argued the changes are necessary to protect pensions for workers before the system collapses.
"I’m saving their pension, that’s what I’m doing to the mid-career public employee," Christie said. "There may be some public employees right now who don’t like me because I’m prescribing tough medicine. But when the pension system gets well in a decade, I’m going to be their favorite governor. I’ll wait to get the thank-you notes then." [emphasis mine]

Sure, we'd be paying another 2% of our paychecks into the system, and the state wouldn't be making full payments on its share for another seven years, and he was breaking an explicit contract (which has led to the inevitable lawsuits - no wonder he wants to change the court, and fast), and he was eliminating cost of living increases for many elderly who had worked hard their whole lives for that benefit... but he was going to save the pension! Wouldn't you rather have half a loaf than no loaf? Wasn't it worth it?

Wasn't it?

New Jersey’s ability to move toward full pension contributions will be “challenging” and may conflict with goals such as controlling property-tax growth and funding schools and infrastructure, Fitch Ratings said.
Governor Chris Christie’s budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30 funds only 14 percent of the pension payment recommended by actuaries, even after his benefit changes enacted last year, Fitch said in a report today. Pension demands will rise if the state fails to achieve its 8.25 percent assumed return on investments, the company said.
New Jersey’s pension funds, with $67.2 billion of assets, returned 1.7 percent last year as gains from debt, private- equity and real estate investments tempered losses from global stocks. The funds have an annualized 10-year return of 5.1 percent, according to reports released last week by the treasury’s investment division.
The state’s estimated pension-funding deficit fell to $36.3 billion from $53.9 billion after passage of Christie’s benefits plan. The gap then swelled $5.5 billion to $41.8 billion for the 12 months through June after Christie skipped a pension payment. [emphasis mine]

Does anyone believe the funds are going to beat 8.25% any time soon?

Chris Christie broke explicit promises to public workers and retirees, and he broke his campaign promises. And his entire rationale - that he was "saving" the pensions - is now exposed as a complete farce. Saving the pensions requires that the state make its contributions; Christie is clearly blowing that off until he's out of office.

As I've said, pensions save taxpayers money. But a new generation of workers interested in public service are looking at the way this man blithely broke a contract with public workers. Do you think they will trust government pension promises after this?

This man is a human train wreck. He is a political and fiscal Godzilla, wreaking destruction across the state that will take decades to clean up. What's worse, he does so while a compliant, ill-informed, and often just plain stupid press cheers from the side.

This state is in for a bad few years, and it will all be on the head of Christie and the people who refused to hold him to account. Hunker down.

Newsflash: Evangelicals Evangelize!

2012-02-01T16:47:00.000-08:00

New Jersey is giving a lot of churchmen the chance to run their own charter schools. Is there anyone so naive that they think these schools will be completely scrubbed free of religion?

Because - and I know this may come as a shock - religious leaders tend to want to proselytize for their religions:

In prior meetings, Ortis had been a nappy-looking homeless drug user, down on his luck. He was a layoff victim plummeting deep into destitution after Tent City/Transitional Park off of Federal Street closed in May 2010.
Ortis has said he was “sold a dream” with The Nehemiah Group’s $200,000 Tent City closure. He claims it didn’t provide necessary services and tried to impose religious views. When it shut down, it put Ortis and about 40 homeless people back on the streets. But Ortis slowly started a resurrection to inspire others. [emphasis mine]

The Nehemiah Group is a venture of Pastor Amir Khan, who was recently given permission by the state to start a charter school in a town that doesn't want it and already has great public schools.

I don't know if Ortis's claim that Nehemiah didn't provide services is true. I absolutely believe, however, that the group brought their religious views into their work with the people who were in Tent City. I would be amazed if they didn't; that's what all deeply religious people do, not just evangelicals.

And there's nothing wrong with that! It's perfectly acceptable for religious people to openly live their faith. It's fine that evangelicals want to convert people, as long as they respect others' wishes. This is religious life in America; it's part of the plurality that makes our country great. I applaud Pastor Khan's work in Tent City, I respect his religious beliefs, and I have no problem with how he brings those to his work.

But it's simply absurd to think the man can turn this on and off like a light switch when he enters the doors of his charter school. The notion that there will not be a religious atmosphere in a school founded by a pastor and his wife and run in their church is simply ridiculous. I feel silly even having to make the argument, because it's so obvious.

Khan admits:

But the opening of the larger charter school is essential to the church's plan to buy the land from the diocese, he said.
"We were anticipating the charter school to get additional income to carry us," he said. [emphasis mine]

This conflict of interest should have been enough to disqualify the school right from the start. But I believe it's just as problematic that we're being asked to believe that this school is being founded by a man of God, will be run in his church, but will somehow remain secular. It's a problem with all of the charters that have been supported by the Black Ministers Council. It's a problem with the Hebrew immersion charters (what are they going to be reading in the original Hebrew - Shakespeare?).

In their zeal to push charters, Chris Christie and ACTING Commissioner Cerf are asking us to suspend common sense. No thanks.

How To Get Chris Christie to Visit Your Charter!

2012-02-01T04:02:00.000-08:00

Bruce Baker has an important post about charter school student populations. It turns out that different charter schools have wildly different percentages of students who live in poverty, don't speak English as their first language, or are classified as needing special education services.

Worse, it seems that many of the schools touted as "successes" actually have fewer of these children with special needs in their student bodies:

The schools with bars pointing downward have fewer of the kids with special needs; the ones with upward pointing bars have more of those kids. You can see there's a wide variation; you can also see that schools like Robert Treat, Learning Community, and Elysian - which charter cheerleaders point to as "successes" - serve a different population than the schools at the right of the graph.

Now, I've been following the Christie reform circus for a while; it struck me that I had never heard of some of these schools, while others are very well known. And part of the reason is that our governor loves to have photo-ops at schools, but only at certain, select ones.

Which ones? Well, to illustrate, I modified the professor's graph a little:

Here's what I found with the Google machine:

Learning Community: 8/31/09

Trenton Community: 2/24/11

Elysian: 9/30/10

Robert Treat: 1/18/11

If you know of more, tell me in the comments, and I'll change the graph. At first glance, it would appear that the best way to get the governor to pay a visit to your charter is to figure out a way to keep as many poor, special ed, and non-English-speaking kids out of your school as possible.

I don't know about you, but I think Christie needs to spend some time at the schools to the right. Even the middle would be helpful.

Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard!

2012-01-31T04:00:00.000-08:00

I've been at this edu-blogging thing for nearly two years; I'd like to believe I have a fairly good handle on the reformy scene here in Jersey. I'd like to think that I know the players, the connections, the whole tomato pie...

So it's more than a little embarrassing to admit I had no idea that Excellent Education for Everyone (E3) - the big dog in education reforminess before B4K hit town - has a new President and CEO: Christy Davis Jackson.

Some of you long-time NJ politicos are saying: "Wait a minute - the Christy Davis Jackson?"

Yep:

Excellent Education for Everyone (E3), which has been devoting itself to the passage of the Opportunity Scholarship Act, has just announced that it has a new President and CEO: Christy Davis Jackson, Esq. Ms. Davis Jackson will fill the shoes of the late Dan Gaby, E3’s much beloved chief executive.

Ms. Davis Jackson served as Chief of Staff to Wynona Lipman (a former Essex County Senator), was Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s State Director, and managed Jon Corzine’s senatorial campaign. She is married to Reverend Reginald Jackson, who served on E3’s Board. Rev. Jackson has resigned to avoid any conflict with his wife’s new role.

From the press release:

Ms. Davis Jackson said she views the CEO position at E3 as “… a unique opportunity to bring broad-based support to E3’s education reform proposals, including parental school choice, high academic standards, a revised and improved school funding formula, and proper treatment of teachers - - including tenure reform, performance based pay, and protection from political pressures.” She went on to say that she looked forward to the challenge of getting all stakeholders in New Jersey public education to focus on the needs of children as their first priority.

Correction: E3's press release refers to “E3’s long time CEO, Dan Gaby.” In fact, Dan Gaby was E3’s Executive Director (see this tribute in PolitickerNJ). After Gaby’s death two years ago, Derrell Bradford succeeded him as E3’s Executive Director. Bradford is now Executive Director of B4K.

This post is from the very reformy blogger Laura Waters, who also serves as the President of the Lawrence Township BOE. I Googled the you-know-what out of this story, and this is the ONLY report I could find about Jackson's appointment. Was this not released to the mainstream press? Did it only get sent out to reformy types like Waters?

Because the Jackson family has quite a colorful past:

- She was right in the middle of the scandal at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; a scandal that helped Chris Christie build his corruption fighting creds back in 2005 before he ran for governor.

- Her husband, Reverend Reginald Jackson, was at the center of a controversy when Corzine gave him $87,000 in donations; Jackson turned around and endorsed his failed gubernatorial reelection bid.

- Hillary Clinton turned down Davis Jackson's money in 2008 when she ran in the presidential primary.

- Reginald Jackson, as president of the Black Ministers council of NJ, has had a great influence on the education policies of New Jersey.

Now Davis Jackson takes over as the CEO of the biggest voucher pusher in the state. And - if we believe Waters (who is many things but not, as far as I have ever seen, a liar) - her appointment is announced without so much as an acknowledgment of Derrell Bradford as her predecessor. Hmm....

I'm just stunned Davis Jackson's appointment has garnered so little attention. Voucher legislation is closer to passing than it has ever been; no group has pushed for this harder the E3. How does the group get a new CEO with a past like Christy Davis Jackson's with so little notice?

ADDING: Oh, my...

Christie's Lies: Golden Oldies

2012-01-30T15:21:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted about this in a while:

Christie joined with Democratic leaders last year to shift a greater share of the pension burden to public workers and to end cost-of-living increases for current and future retirees. The legislation helped drive down the state’s unfunded pension liability from $53.9 billion to $36.3 billion when the administration revised its figures for fiscal 2010, according to the actuarial reports made public on Tuesday. [emphasis mine]

Remember, Chris Christie said this during his campaign inn his famous "Open Letter to Teachers":

* I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor. In fact, in order to ensure your retirement savings are safe, I believe we must prioritize the protection of pension fund dollars and investigate the cause of Jon Corzine’s large investment losses to our pension system. Currently there is a $34 billion deficit in the State’s pension fund, which threatens the retirement and lifeline of so many teachers. We must do better for our teachers, future teachers and retirees. As Governor, I will work to close unfunded liabilities and make sure our state lives up to its promises, unlike Jon Corzine. I will not raid your pension fund to cover budgetary shortfalls like previous governors of both parties have done. One of the changes I will bring to Trenton is responsible management, investment, and oversight of state pension dollars. [emphasis mine]

That particular lie has not aged well, has it? The report continues:

But the reports also show the hole in the pension fund climbed to $41.8 billion — an increase of $5.5 billion — by the end of fiscal 2011, the result of Christie following in the tradition of his recent predecessors and skipping the state’s pension payment. [emphasis mine]

OK, wait a minute. The reporter here, Jarrett Renshaw, owes a better explanation than that:

Say what you want about Jon Corzine, but as this chart shows, he made pension payments. Continuing:

The state should be paying about $3.3 billion into the pension fund this year, but will kick in about $468 million. And in the budget for fiscal 2013, the state will only pay about $900 million of its $3 billion bill, records show.
As part of a measure that passed in 2010, the state will increase its payments by one-seventh each year over the next seven years.
Experts have compared this with a homeowner who takes out a mortgage and makes only partial payments for seven years. Then, after those seven years, the missed payments are added and the homeowner is saddled with a much bigger mortgage and higher monthly payments.

So teachers, cops, firefighters, state workers - we're all paying more into the pension. Christie told us it was the only way to "save" it. But he's not meeting his responsibilities, so these extra payments are in further jeopardy. All so millionaires and corporations can get tax cuts.

I've offered a deal before, and it still stands: I'll get out of the pension system right now. Give me all my money back, with interest. Then pay me the amount the state was supposed to kick in for the rest of my career. I'll take my own chances with investing it; I can't do any worse than Whitney Tilson.

Of course, Chris Christie will never, ever take me up on this deal, because he needs my payments to meet current obligations and continue to give huge tax gifts to the wealthy. I and my fellow public workers are bailing him and his masters out, yet he says we are the problem.

By 2018, state taxpayers will begin paying more than $5 billion a year for pensions, about 10 times higher than the payment being made in the budget for fiscal 2012, which ends on June 30, according to administration estimates.

By 2018, President Christie will have either moved on to destroying the finances of the entire country, or he'll be lobbying for Wall Street. Either way, he'll be long gone, and someone else will be cleaning up this mess. It won't be pretty.

Big Questions About Charter Applications in NJ

2012-01-30T04:20:00.000-08:00

So I'm still left wondering how exactly Pastor Amir Khan got his charter school approved when the community clearly doesn't want it. To help figure out this mystery, I made a timeline of the events that led up to the approval:

January, 2010: Pastor Amir Khan and his wife, Aughtney Khan, are featured in a video produced by the Star-Ledger that shows the couple demonstrating against same-sex marriage legislation (2:47):

May, 2010: The Attorney General of New Jersey, Paula Dow (a Christie appointee), praises Khan's Nehemiah Group for their program reintegrating ex-offenders back into the community.

September, 2010: Khan signs a lease-purchase agreement with the Diocese of Camden for the former Holy Rosary Church complex in Cherry Hill. He moves Solid Rock Worship Center to the complex and opens a private school.

October, 2010: Khan submits an application for the Regis Academy Charter School in Camden. The application is supported by the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey and its president, Rev. Reginald Jackson.

October, 2010: The Voorhees, Cherry Hill, Lawnside, and Somerdale school districts are notified that am application for a charter school has been submitted to their districts.

January, 2011: Regis Academy is not approved in the round released this month (although Jackson claims all five supported by the BMC were approved, in contradiction to earlier reports).

March, 2011: The BMC holds a workshop during its annual conference for "churches that would like to start charter schools." Attending the conference that day are Gov. Chris Christie and ACTING Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf.

April, 2010: Neighbors of Solid Rock in the Ashland section of Cherry Hill complain about a rash of burglaries connected to a man living at the center.

May, 2011: The Cherry Hill School District and the other three districts are informed that a charter school application has been resubmitted to open in the town. Cherry Hill and Voorhees file responses stating the charter is unnecessary in the high-performing districts.

May 2, 2011: Holy Eucharist Parish files a civil action against Solid Rock Worship Center for failing to make payments toward the $2.9 million lease-own agreement.

UPDATED: Week of May 15, 2011 (approx.): Amir Khan releases a video urging viewers to contact the NJ Assembly Education Committee and express disapproval of a bill that would require local approval of charter schools. Khan states on that coming Sunday he will ask his congregation to turn on their phones during services and contact state legislators.

May 24, 2011: Khan appears behind Chris Christie at a town hall in Cherry Hill.

June, 2011: Holy Eucharist and Solid Rock settle out of court "at the last minute." No indication is given in the report as to why Holy Eucharist settled the lawsuit.

September 14, 2011: Christie visits Joseph D. Sharpe School in Cherry Hill:

Sharp Principal Robert Homer said he was contacted Monday by Cherry Hill Superintendent Maureen Reusche about Christie’s visit.

“Dr. Reusche had spoken with the Camden County Commissioner of Education, who was evidently impressed with how quickly the Cherry Hill district had moved forward with the CCS,” Homer said.

“Sharp has been at the forefront introducing the new standards, and that’s why we were chosen.”

September 30, 2011: The NJ Department of Education announces that the application for Regis Academy Charter School has been approved. This headline of the press release, however, says:

Christie Administration Expands High Quality Educational Options with Approval of Four Additional New Charter Schools Scheduled to Open in 2012

Note the "Christie Administration" is credited, and not the NJDOE.

October 1, 2011: In an interview with the Star-Ledger, ACTING Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf says:

Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf said the four schools approved would help expand the option for New Jersey students, especially those in failing districts. He said the applications denied were all vetted using "disciplined" critieria.
"The very first bar that a charter applicant must clear is that the school has a high likelihood of providing an excellent education," Cerf said. "We are confident that all of the schools we approve will be successful."
For the first time, the state followed guidelines set by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers in deciding which applications to approve and deny, Cerf said.

October, 2011: Khan admits, in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer's James Osborne:

But the opening of the larger charter school is essential to the church's plan to buy the land from the diocese, he said.
"We were anticipating the charter school to get additional income to carry us," he said. [emphasis mine]

November, 2011: Khan confesses to Osborne:

"I could sell a bikini to an Eskimo," Khan once boasted.

January 19, 2012: At a town hall in Voorhees, Gov. Christie denies knowing Amir Khan:

Easy - pretend he doesn't know who is running the charters:

About an hour into a session that had been cordial and laced with applause, Cherry Hill resident Alan Erlich interrupted Christie as the governor was answering a question about the school, Regis Academy. Emotions quickly escalated.
“I don’t have a solution for every problem,” Christie said to Erlich immediately after the interruption. “You had an opportunity to speak before. Here’s the bottom line: I don’t have a solution for everything.”
But after Erlich charged the charter school’s approval was a favor for a Christie supporter, the governor denied the claim.
“Who are you talking about?” asked Christie, who went on to say he does not know Amir Khan, a pastor who is organizing the school at a church complex in the Ashland area. “I haven’t given one friend a charter school.” [emphasis mine]
There was only one problem with Christie's statement that he doesn't know Khan: Khan was sitting right behind him!

After reviewing the events, I'm left with these questions:

- Why didn't anyone from the NJ DOE or the National Association of Charter School Authorizers think it was a conflict of interest for Regis Academy, whose "Lead Founder" is Amir Khan, to pay nearly half a million dollars in rent a year to Solid Rock Worship Center, whose pastor is Amir Khan? Isn't there potential for serious problems in the future arising from this conflict?

- Why was Khan's application rejected in the first round but accepted in the second? What changed? Did he attend the BMC's 2011 conference? Did he meet with Gov.Christie or his staff at the event?

- Is it acceptable to the Christie Administration that towns are forced to give money to charter schools when their lead founders admit their other endeavors are dependent on getting rent from that same charter? When Khan admitted his plan was to close his private school once the charter opened?

- Why did the Catholic diocese suddenly settle out of court in June of 2011 with Solid Rock? Why didn't they just seize the property? What changed?

- Did Khan meet with Christie or his staff in May of 2011 at the Cherry Hill town hall?

- Khan made videos asking his parishioners to contact legislators to defeat a bill that would give towns control over charter approvals; I'm not sure when he published them, because they were removed soon after this story broke. When was he calling for this legislation to be defeated? During the application process?

Who will demand the answers to these questions? And how many other charters that we don't know about have similar questions swirling around them?

Bad IQ Tests

2012-01-29T18:09:00.000-08:00

As a general rule, it's a bad idea to judge someone's intelligence based on grammar and spelling mistakes on a Facebook page. Or in the comments section of a website. People just don't treat those forums the same way they do formal writing situations like letters or essays. And they shouldn't treat them the same way; life's too short.

In fact, I think making a big deal out of silly writing mistakes in comment sections says more about the intelligence of the person pointing out the errors than it does the error maker. Just calm down, OK?

Internet Grammar/Spelling Police Force

Reformy Astroturf

2012-01-29T06:30:00.000-08:00

Time for another edition of "Spot The Pattern"! Can you find the pattern in these reformy stories?

Chicago:

I can't embed the video (click the link to watch it), but protesters, shipped in by bus, are paid to demand a "failing" public school in the Windy City be closed. The protesters wind up being bussed back to a church center run by a pastor. As they disembark, the reporter asks several to name the school; they can't.

New York:

9^th and 10^th graders at Renaissance Charter High School made the following video as an assignment. They did such a good job that it received a mention in theNew York Times.

I suppose this is an example of the innovative teaching that goes on in charter schools. Of course, it is easy for students to make something like this when the school has proper video equipment. As you watch the video, ask yourself what the students might have actually learned from this project. Yes, maybe they got experience being in front of a camera. They also probably got a taste for what it means to be behind the camera. Finally, they most likely used editing equipment to take all of their raw footage and weave it into a comprehensive piece.
Public school children are perfectly capable of doing the same thing; all they need is the equipment. Of course, in the age of budget cuts that starve public schools, it is unlikely many of them would even have this equipment.
The students did a good job on the video. It is not their fault that their teachers required them to shill for Governor Cuomo. While some teachers might be impressed with something like this, I do not see the educational value at all. The only thing the students of Renaissance Charter High School learned from this video is how propaganda works.

New Jersey:

This past week, pro-voucher forces in New Jersey bussed kids in from local Catholic schools to rally in support of a school voucher bill.

Chris Christie condemned that rally; he thinks it is wrong to take kids out of school for a protest:

"The schools did a lousy job in really permitting all these students to walk out in the middle of the school day. Their parents send them there not to protest. They send them there to learn. And I have no problem with students protesting. They have absolutely every right to exercise their first amendment rights. But they should exercise their first amendment rights either before school or right after school."
Good for the governor! Children should never be used as political pawns...

Oops! Oh, is my face red! See, this is a quote from last year. He wasn't complaining about a pro-voucher rally where kids - many of whom did not know why they were there - were bussed in by adults. No, he was complaining about spontaneous high school student walk-outs in protest of his cutting nearly $1 billion from public education.

Gosh, sorry to get that wrong. But I'm sure the Governor will be as equally dismissive of this rally as he was of the student walk-outs last year. He'll be out with a condemnation of this right away.

Yep, any minute now...

Any corporate reformer who tells you that reforminess is a "grass-roots effort" is full of beans. This is all a professionally staged, billionaire-funded, unaccountable assault on public education. And these people will use uniformed citizens and children as pawns without the slightest reservation if it gets them what they want.