Apartheid Schooling in New Jersey

Bob Braun's Ledger: on One Newark

I remember standing in line at the career fair at the New Jersey university where I received my Master of Arts in Teaching and certification to teach secondary history and social studies. The line at the Newark table was vacant. No one, not one person, was interested in starting a career in Newark New Jersey public schools. Despite financial incentives, jobs in Newark and Camden public schools are still plentiful.

Bob Braun has been tirelessly covering education in New Jersey on his blog.  What is happening in Ferguson, Missouri, where schools budgets and services have been cut, should be a warning sign that people can only take so much oppression, discrimination and segregation.

The battle for Newark's children is also underway.

“We are going to go where others have not wanted to go,” said Robert Pickett, a lawyer with years of experience in the city. “We are going to talk about what no one wants to talk about.”

That would be unspeakably segregated schools in Newark where 90 percent of the children are black or brown in a county, Essex County, where some nearby towns—like Millburn and Fairfield and Nutley—have school enrollments that are 90 percent or more white.

Like the children of Newark, the children of Ferguson do not need more budget cuts, they need wrap around social services, physical education, art, music, dance, tennis and all the other essential programs children have in the private schools and wealthy suburbs.  They don't need more multiple choice tests and measurements.

So much for No Child Left Behind closing the achievement gap. Ferguson, MO has popped that balloon.  What will the impact be on the Value Added Measurements (VAMS's) of Ferguson's schools if students miss the first weeks of the school year because their city is under siege?

The Governor should hold teachers accountable because after all, we wouldn't want to give in to the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Newark Teachers: Reject Weingarten's Betrayal of Teachers

Everywhere AFT's lead lawyer goes to "help" negotiate for teachers, she leaves a wake of destruction for the profession.  But, then, that is what she is paid to do, as she works off her debt to Bloomberg and the plutocrats for making her president of AFT in the first place.

In Newark, she has now added to her impressive list of betrayals by cutting a deal with Cory Booker and the Facebook chief twink to offer a meritless bonus pay plan that has a demonstrated failure record in New York, Chicago, and Nashville, where paying teachers for higher test scores did not raise test scores.  What it can do is end job security for teachers and create an endless stream of temporary pedagogical sharecroppers that school CEOs can manhandle in their corporate reform schools.

Weingarten and her traitorous lieutenant, Joseph Del Grosso, are telling teachers this is good deal because they are ones who can apply the lipstick to this pig.  In other words, teachers will be given the  detailed checklists developed by the corporate reform schoolers to score their colleagues.  What the membership does not know is that the checklists provide no leeway for professional discretion in evaluating a teacher based on a what a small cadre of corporate crackpots consider good teaching.

If Newark teachers ratify this contract, they will have proved themselves as stupid and/or desperate as Weingarten believes them to be.  Newark teachers need to consult with their Chicago colleagues for their next steps, dump the traitorous Del Grosso, and run Randi Weingarten back across the Hudson River before they tear up this contract and start over.  Once they allow their pay to be determined by test scores, years of work will be unraveled overnight and their profession will be further denigrated.

Newark teachers need to stand up and say what is good for students in order to earn the respect of their communities.  This is not good for students, and parents will view ratification as a cheap sellout by teachers more interested in cash than caring, compassion, and collaboration.

Story from the NYTimes:           

By KATE ZERNIKENEWARK — On one side of the table was the union firebrand Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. On the other was the state education commissioner handpicked by Gov. Chris Christie, who became a star among fellow Republicans for aggressively taking on public employee unions.

During months of intense and late-night negotiations for a new teachers contract for the chronically troubled Newark school system, the parties settled on what they believed would be a landmark compromise.

At the center of it was merit pay — the idea of paying teachers based on performance that has long been a flash point between critics of teachers’ unions who believe it would increase accountability, and union leaders who fear that performance would be based on test scores rather than the subtleties of classrooms.

Though Ms. Weingarten had criticized what she calls “merit pay schemes,” she and the other union leaders agreed to embrace the concept in exchange for a promise that teachers would have a rare role in evaluating performance, declaring it a way to rebuild respect for a $1 billion school system that has bled students and money to the suburbs and, increasingly, to charter schools.

Joseph Del Grosso, the leader of the local union who was jailed for striking 40 years ago, has been telling his members that approving the contract will turn them into “heroes.”

But suspicion tends to run high in this New Jersey city, long rived by politics of race and class. Many teachers worry that the bonuses will never appear. And a faction has staged an insurrection against union leaders, saying the contract will weaken job security and pit teacher against teacher.

“This is how they will break our union,” said Renee Pulliam, a high school special education teacher in her 24th year in Newark.

On Monday, the city’s 4,700 union members are scheduled to vote on the contract. Both sides say they cannot predict the outcome, but either way, what happens here will echo among teachers’ unions across the country.

If the contract is approved, it could prompt other districts to push for pay-for-performance, by suggesting that merit pay is no longer so symbolic a fight among the rank and file.

Newark’s deal itself was prompted by recent changes to the state’s tenure laws that were once considered unthinkable. And both sides insist that this deal could be a model for union-management collaboration, giving teachers a voice they have often felt was denied in reform.
If it fails, beleaguered union leaders could take it as a new sign of strength in contract negotiations — similar, some teachers said, to the example of the Chicago teachers’ strike last month.

From novices to the most senior, Newark teachers would remain among the highest paid in the nation, earning average raises of more than 13 percent in the three-year contract. But teachers evaluated as “ineffective” would have to improve before they could earn the raises that under previous contracts have come automatically every year.

Teachers could earn bonuses of $5,000 if they are evaluated as “highly effective,” and an extra $5,000 if they agree to teach in the district’s lowest-performing schools, or an extra $2,500 for teaching subjects like math and science that have a lack of qualified teachers. The money for bonuses will come from the $100 million gift that Mark Zuckerberg, a co-founder of Facebook, pledged to the city in 2010.

As the union has mounted a push to pass the contract, Ms. Weingarten has insisted that the bonuses are not strictly “merit pay,” wanting to avoid the impression that the union sold out on a long-held principle.

The local president, Mr. Del Grosso, worries less about semantics. “I’ve always found it strange that any union, when it heard the word ‘pay,’ would reject it,” he said in an interview.
In presentations to members last week, Mr. Del Grosso argued that the contract would affirm teachers as professionals, like doctors or lawyers.

“The doctors take away another doctor’s license, lawyers disbar lawyers,” he said. “Why shouldn’t teachers be the judges of their own peers? My doctor tells me he gets bonuses, lawyers at law firms get bonuses. Why shouldn’t teachers?”

But at the first meeting last week, teachers challenged Mr. Del Grosso, calling him a “liar” as he tried to argue the merits of peer review.

“I’ve been a distinguished teacher for years; I’ve bought kids clothes,” said Donna Tollinchi, an eighth-grade math teacher, still shaken outside the meeting, at a performing arts center downtown, where she confronted Mr. Del Grosso. “For them to turn around and say I don’t deserve my salary?”

Some teachers, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, argued that few will actually get the performance bonuses — not because they are ineffective, but because the system has had a way of wasting money fast. Others worried that even peer evaluations could be unfair.

And even supporters of the contract acknowledge that there are about 650 teachers — those with more seniority or advanced degrees — who will lose the potential to earn as much as they did under the old contract. Those teachers could opt for a separate salary scale that pays somewhat more generously but does not offer the potential for performance bonuses.
Branden Rippey, 41, a high school history teacher, is one of those.

“I’m opposed to the principle of merit pay, and losing money to a new contract,” he said. The proposal, he argued, would just pave the way to staff the schools with young Teach for America teachers, “who get six months training and don’t work for more than 3, 4, 5 years.”

He is among a coalition of union members who held their own meetings last week, urging their colleagues to vote no, oust Mr. Del Grosso and choose new leaders to negotiate a better deal.

“I can’t believe I have counted on this union to negotiate all this time,” said Ms. Tollinchi, the math teacher. “This is the best they can do?”

Supporters of the contract reply, bluntly, yes. (Trying to emphasize their respect for the teachers’ union, and its autonomy, the Newark schools superintendent, Cami Anderson, and the state commissioner, Christopher Cerf, have declined to comment on the contract in advance of the vote.)

Governor Christie recently warned the city that it will see a significant cut in state aid next year. The state is struggling with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates and lagging economic growth.

Given the alternatives, is it not better, Mr. Del Grosso asked, to be known as the union that embraced change?

“I’ve heard the people who call the Facebook money ‘blood money,’ ” he said. “But if I don’t take the money, I wonder who will get it.”

Criminals In Charge of Education in New Jersey

Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality.
                                                               Chris Hedges                                                      

Liars in NJ: The corporate fascists will go to any extreme to make the numbers match their ideological agenda to destroy any remants of democratic public education so that their friends can suck every last dime and swoop down like vultures on the poorest and the most vulnerable. They are not out of touch with reality, the reality is they are greedy, power hungry bullies who believe they can get away with it. Here's a press release from the Education Law Center in New Jersey, one of the last remnants of social justice and truth in a state that is sacrificing one of the most equitable public education systems in the country so the elites can rake in a few more bucks. Too bad the story won't get much play in the corporate-owned media run by the media elites who have also lost touch with reality.  ACTING COMMISSIONER DRAMATICALLY LOWERS NEWARK'S STATE MONITORING SCORES Newark Downgraded From High Performing to Failing in Less Than a Year In a letter dated July 2, 2012, Acting Commissioner Christopher Cerf issued yet another round of scores on the Newark district's performance under the State monitoring system of NJ school districts -- the Quality Single Accountability Continuum or "QSAC." The latest scores dramatically lower the district's ratings in the governance, personnel, and curriculum and instruction areas of QSAC monitoring from the ratings issued by Mr. Cerf less than a year ago. The new ratings come on the heels of the Acting Commissioner's highly unusual decision to conduct a full review of Newark after certifying the district as high performing in four of the five areas of evaluation under QSAC in July 2011. The Acting Commissioner is also making the new scores public just days before a deadline to answer a lawsuit filed by the Newark School Board and numerous community groups, parents and taxpayers seeking to overturn Mr. Cerf's July 2011 decision not to return the district to local control despite the district's high level of performance. In his July 2nd letter to State Superintendent Cami Anderson, Mr. Cerf significantly downgraded the district's performance from July 2011 as follows: Governance dropped 34 percentage points, from 89% to 55% Personnel dropped 46 percentage points, from 94% to 48% Curriculum and Instruction dropped 30 percentage points, from 64% to 34% Fiscal management also dropped 5 percentage points, from 93% to 88%, while operations remained the same at 83%. Under the QSAC statute, a district scoring over 80 in any of these five areas is considered high performing and, for state operated districts such as Newark, the State is required to withdraw control over those areas. A district scoring below 50 is considered failing and subject to more in-depth State evaluation and oversight. The legal appeal filed by the Newark School Board and community groups is a direct challenge to Mr. Cerf's refusal to restore local control by withdrawing from the governance, personnel and fiscal management areas given Newark's high performance in the July 2011 scoring. In 2009, the former Commissioner Lucille Davy withdrew State control over operations when the district scored over 80 in that area. The precipitous drop in ratings from high performing in July 2011 to failing in July 2012 occurred under State Superintendent Anderson, hired by Mr. Cerf and Governor Chris Christie in June 2011 to lead Newark's public schools. In announcing her appointment, Governor Christie hailed Anderson "as someone who knows how to execute a plan, and that's what is needed here in Newark." ELC Executive Director David Sciarra noted that Mr. Cerf issued his new QSAC scores just days before the extended deadline for the State to answer the Newark Board's legal appeal seeking local control. "The process, timing and results of Mr. Cerf's actions call into serious question the credibility of, and public confidence in, the State's monitoring of local school districts under the QSAC framework established by the Legislature," Mr. Sciarra said. Mr. Sciarra also noted that Mr. Cerf's dramatic downgrade of Newark from high performing to failing in less than a year also raises concerns about the management and direction of Newark schools under State's own leadership. "Mr. Cerf needs to explain why Newark's quality review scores dropped so dramatically one year after bringing in highly touted new leadership, and why the State Education Department allowed the district's performance to deteriorate so dramatically, so quickly," he added. On July 2nd, the same day that Mr. Cerf issued his letter downgrading Newark's ratings in district governance, the State Superintendent vetoed the Newark Board's decision to reject Anderson's plan to close several Newark public schools and lease the buildings to charter school operators. The Board refused to sign-off on the school closings and charter leases after failing to receive assurances that the district had complied with State regulations governing school closures and state public bidding laws. Education Law Center Press Contact: Sharon Krengel Policy and Outreach Coordinator skrengel@edlawcenter.org 973-624-1815, x 24 815, x 24