Tag: education

Public education, private money — what comes next?

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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Arrogance and its consequences

I wasn’t going to comment on what is, really, nothing more than a clerical error — an expensive error, to be sure. But Gov. Chris Christie’s arrogance over this is remarkable. Consider this comment, published in today’s Star-Ledger:

While taking responsibility for the “clerical error,” Christie also blamed the Obama administration for refusing to let the state correct the error.

“This is the stuff, candidly, that drives people crazy about government and crazy about Washington,” the governor said, adding that the reviewers appeared to be more concerned with technical details than the educational proposals.

Christie said President Obama needs to explain “to the people of the state of New Jersey why he’s depriving them of $400 million that this application earned them, because one of his bureaucrats in Washington couldn’t pick up the phone and ask a question, couldn’t go on the internet and find information.”

It was the governor’s people who made the mistake, but the governor has decided to push blame off on the Obama administration, which was just following its rules. Imagine how the governor would have reacted were the New Jersey and Ohio positions reversed and the Obama administration opted to give Ohio a second shot at the application because it was the one that made the mistake.

The fact is, the Christie administration submitted an application knowing that it did not have the opportunity to make changes in the paperwork after the deadline. It made the mistake, which cost the state some points and left the state short. He should man up, as they say.

Bob Braun, in his Ledger column, makes it clear that the state lost out not just because of the clerical error — he’s a bit soft on the feds on this one — but because the application was weak and damaged by the contentious relationship between Christie and the teachers union, one that federal reviewers said raised flags about the ability of the state to implement its goals. New Jersey “didn’t get such high grades on its ability to persuade educators to sign on to its plan — a reflection on the contentious Christie-NJEA feud that climaxed with the governor’s last-minute rejection of a plan that his own education commissioner, Bret Schundler, negotiated with the union.”

“This lack of greater involvement will challenge N.J.’s efforts to meet its goals,” another reviewer concluded.

The reviewers also raised questions about the development of a statewide database to track pupil success and failure — something Schundler had earlier praised as an early accomplishment of his tenure.

“A detailed plan with specific goals, activities, timelines, and responsibilities was not included, so only medium points are awarded,” a reviewer noted.

The points deducted for issues like a database or the failure to bring educators to accept the plan cost New Jersey far more than the points deducted for including the wrong year.

The failure to garner Race to the Top money — which is incredibly flawed and based on some truly questionable goals (school choice and merit pay, both of which are conservative talking points — is only part of the problem here. The fractious relationship between Christie and the union is going to have its impact in the classroom at some point, and that’s just unacceptable.

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Memo to Christie: Enough is enough

At what point does the governor’s attacks against the state’s teachers union become seen for the petty, vengeful and unseemly vendetta that they are? After all, Gov. Christie rarely misses an opportunity to slam the NJEA — as he did yesterday.

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Public education in decline

Just came across this commentary by Diane Ravitch on public education. It goes to a column I wrote last month on the topic.

We’ve done a remarkable amount of damage to public education in recent years, because we insist on elevating tests and degrading our teachers. It is a shame and we will pay dearly for it in the future.

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Thoughts on public education and the scapegoating of teachers

Ann Sisko, my former sixth-grade teacher, passes along an important essay from Rethinking Schools magazine that follows up on some of the themes I touched on a few weeks ago in my Dispatches column, i.e., that the school reform movement is pushing public education off a cliff, that public schools and public school teachers have been devalued and that the accountability movement is taking us back to a less effective time of rote learning.

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