I want to applaud the grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to Newark schools — the city desperately needs the cash infusion — but the use of private money only underscores the dysfunction built into our educational funding system.
The fact is that urban schools are in desparate need of money (the per pupil estimates that the state provides are misleading because they gloss over the very real and costly challenges that districts like Newark face — security, higher maintenance and utility costs associated with older facilities, etc, special ed, basic skills and ESL programs), and to begrudge the city this windfall would be callous.
But the grant allows the state — and by the state I mean both the people who run the state and all of us who live here — to pretend that we have no role in ensuring that Newark (and New Brunswick and Jersey City and Camden, etc.) have enough money to pay for good teachers, clean and safe buildings, etc. Instead, we are looking at a private grant that will allow Mayor Corey Booker and Gov. Chris Christie to move ahead with so-called merit pay (so-called because it has nothing to do with merit and everything to do with undercutting the teachers union), charter schools and vouchers, aid to private schools — reforms that have more to do with dismantling public education than anything else.
So, I am happy for the children of Newark who will get some short-term help, but have to wonder what this is going to mean for the kids in Camden and Trenton who won’t be seeing a dime, but who will be dealing with the fallout of the Newark experiment.
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NJ has a top rated public school system or it did until Christie wielded his hatchet and his hatred for teachers and their unions. States with no teacher unions or greatly weakened teacher unions have much worse public school systems than NJ. So the right wing and corporate Democrats who blame unions for school failures are just using a straw man. Germany and Finland, which have top rated school systems, are totally unionized. In addition, they don't have charter schools, school vouchers or home schooling. Home schooling is illegal in Germany. The billionaires and the hedge fund managers are the big money behind charter schools and school vouchers. Without the big money, none of this crap would be going on.
From schoolsmatter.info:Where vouchers have been offered as \”choice\” for parents to get a private school education at public expense, the results have been anything but convincing for such \”choice.\” The latest from Ohio, where test scores comparisons that are now mandatory under new state law show that the lowest-performing public systems are still outperforming the private voucher schools more often than not. Meanwhile, this failed experiment continues to drain approximately $65,000,000 from the Ohio public schools every year. Never mind the hundreds of millions that are being drained every year by the charter dollar sinks run by industrialist, David Brennan. From the Columbus Post-Dispatch:On the whole, Ohio students who used tax-funded vouchers to attend private schools last school year did no better on state tests than public-school students.That was true in the Columbus City Schools, too, where district students outperformed voucher students on seven of 12 standardized tests. The public-school students bested their private-school counterparts most often in math. But middle-school voucher students had better passing rates, particularly on last school year's state reading exams. Eighth-graders outscored Columbus district eighth-graders on all three tested subjects – math, reading and science. . . .
When the heck are these billionaires going to give their money to regular public schools? Oh wait, that's not part of the script. Regular public schools, public school teachers and their unions are always painted as the villains, as the evil obstructers to this right wing/libertarian (with the help of many corporate Democrats and all Democratic politicians) attack on public education. The goal is to privatize the schools, destroy the unions and turn teachers into wage serfs. Bill Gates, the guy who loves to replace American workers with H1b visa workers, who tried to turn much of his workforce into permanent temps, is throwing his millions at the charter and school voucher crapola. Do you think that the failure of many Newark schools might have something to do with crime, unemployment, poverty and broken homes? But it's so much more fun to lambaste public school teachers and their unions so that you can replace them with charter schools and school vouchers. Never mind that charter schools are no better than public schools and of course we will overlook all the charter school failures which outnumber the charter school success stories, that's not part of the script. Hell will freeze over before some billionaire gives money to the traditional public schools. After Christie gets done, NJ's public schools will go from top rated to low rated, in the same class as those of Nevada or Texas. Many of the school districts in this country which have no teacher unions are doing worse than NJ's public schools and yet Christie wants to bash unions and blame unions for the failings of the Newark or Camden school systems, for example. We will just overlook that poverty thing.