Remember when Joe Clark was the face of educational reform? The former Principal of Eastside High School in Paterson, NJ patrolled the hallways of his out-of-control institution in the 1980s with only a bullhorn and a baseball bat, fighting poverty, gangs, crime and under-performing students as the face of urban education. His tactics were crude and anti-education, but the fact that he was a hero to many spoke volumes about the way in which people saw the problems in our schools.
Today, the people with the bullhorns and the weapons are politicians and business owners who believe that the best way to cure the ills of public schools that have educated the freest, most productive people who've ever lived on this planet, is to make our schools just like the entities that led the way towards job outsourcing, unconscionable home loan processes, and a laser-like focus on stock prices that have almost bankrupted the economy.
Governor Christie has had some major legislative accomplishments over the past two years including a 2% cap on property taxes and a public worker pension and benefits overhaul. Mind you, these laws have not necessarily made life better for New Jerseyans, as taxes have still risen and thousands of experienced public workers have either retired, fled or have been laid off because of them.
The past six weeks, though, have been another story for the guv'nor.
Despite his general popularity, the Republicans actually lost seats in the November legislative elections. Now Christie will need to rely even more heavily on the Democratic majority in the legislature and the Democratic power brokers in Essex and Camden Counties. Add in the disdain that Senate President Steven Sweeney has for Christie and you have a recipe for gridlock sprinkled with a tablespoon of revenge.
Then, the general consensus was that the lame duck legislative session was going to be one of the most active in years, with bills flying around State Street on teacher tenure and evaluation, property taxes, jobs, budget cuts and patronage. What's happened? Nada. Almost every issue was pushed to the formal session that begins in early January, and won't probably get any steam until the Governor's State of the State message in the middle of the month.
And in the spirit of the holidays, Christie picked a fight with Senator, and former Governor, Richard Codey over the permanent appointment of Commissioner of Education Christopher Cerf, accusing Codey of (gasp!) feeding information to reporters. Christie canceled Codey's security detail and fired Codey's cousin from the Port Authority board. That's politics through and through and shows that Christie will never be the warm, fuzzy leader he sometimes pretends to be.
But the true state of the Governor's clout was uncovered when New Jersey was actually awarded $38 million dollars in Race to the Top funds by the Obama Administration so it could implement a speculative teacher evaluation system based on student standardized test scores. Getting money should be a positive, but this award only dredged up the previous failure to even qualify for $400 million dollars in education funds because of the Governor's attitude towards the New Jersey Education Association. Not only did it cost the state money, it also cost Commissioner of Education Brett Schundler his job and showed that Christie would blame everyone but his leadership for the error. It's a pattern that he's repeated in every misstep since, and it's one reason why he would not make a good president.
He's ending the year by essentially becoming Mitt Romney's pit bull and possible vice-presidential running mate. Granted, he did only say that he would keep the door open, but that will only serve as a distraction in the coming year, as his flirtation with the presidency proved throughout the fall, because every time he doesn't get what he wants, the media will remind us all that he's got his eye on the national ticket. The Governor should just say no this time around and focus on the state.
It's still very possible that Christie will get some of his reforms through the legislature, but many in the state are tired of his outbursts and outlandish statements. Prosecutors like him are convinced that they are always right and that they have the ultimate truth on their side, so why compromise? We need to remember that the next time one runs for statewide office.
Michelle Rhee, the former Washington schools chancellor, who sat beside Mr. Christie's wife during Tuesday's speech in Trenton, has committed her new organization, StudentsFirst, to providing policy support for Mr. Christie's education initiatives. "I think it's incredibly courageous of the governor to take these issues on," Ms. Rhee said Wednesday. "These are ones that have long been considered sacred cows."
"These reforms provide a comprehensive approach that recognizes there is no single solution. For a new accountability system to be effective and successful in benefitting children, we must have all of the tools that are provided for in this legislation. A piecemeal, incremental approach will not turn around our failing schools or close the achievement gap."
To further these gains and decrease the achievement gap, we must continue to increase the level of accountability for everyone in the system, including teachers.
To recap: Christie loves Rhee. Rhee loves Christie. Christie values closing the achievement gap. Rhee values closing the achievement gap.
I'm going to focus this post on fourth grade math, since it seems to be the subject and grade level most suspectible to reform efforts. In DC since 2003, the black/white score gap remained constant, the poor/non-poor gap grew, and the Hispanic/white gap closed slightly.
Achievement gaps would be less disturbing in and of themselves if overall achievement levels were moderate or high. But what we continue to see in DC is that white students score well above both national and urban district averages for their race; black, Hispanic and poor children score well below national averages for their races and classes. This makes DC the city in the nation with the largest black-white student achievement gap. [emphasis mine]
[Acting Education Commissioner Chris] Cerf got applause from the crowd when he mentioned the high ranking of New Jersey's education system nationally, and gave teachers a lot of the credit.
But they rolled their eyes when he said that the DOE and governor are not against unions, and laughed outright when he gave high marks to Washington D.C.'s teacher-evaluation system. When he challenged them to look at D.C's data, saying he'd bet $1 right there that he was right, a teacher told him to put the dollar instead into teacher pensions. [emphasis mine]
In America today, students who peacefully question the status quo can expect this:
Obviously, these kids never learned to conform, which demonstrates a failure of our public education system. Because schools are not supposed to produce critical thinkers capable of independent thought who can see past the corporate propaganda our media grinds out every second. No, schools are there to produce "21st Century workers" - people who are smart enough to do the work but not smart enough to challenge the system. Even our "liberal" president thinks so.
We need an education system that indoctrinates students to produce uniformity of thought. The best way to do this is to put all of our teaching emphasis on secretly designed and implemented standardized tests, whose sole function is to determine whether students' thoughts have been "standardized."
Just like the picture above, we should mete out punishments to students and teachers who do not adhere to a strict schedule of learning development; the Common Core will keep us on track. To accelerate the the process, we should narrow the curriculum and take away workplace protections for teachers who dare not to go along.
We should also have more charter schools and private schools, with their "Success For All"-style group chanting and uniforms. It's especially important to promote these in poor, urban areas, as these are the people who stand to gain the most by developing the critical thinking skills that would lead them to analyze their current situation and realize how badly they're getting screwed.
Of course, one thing we've learned since No Child Left Behind is that there will always be kids who fall through the cracks. Despite our best efforts, some children will not get with the program, and will actually believe the TV less than their own lying eyes.
Don't worry: we'll just make sure we put an emphasis on "lifelong" learning:
Let's all take a moment to thank the incredibly wealthy people who are funding the corporate education reform movement to get our kids to conform. Obviously, these billionaires know what's best; and if you don't understand that, we have ways of making you understand.
The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress were just released. NAEP is the "nation's report card," the standard assessment used to judge student achievement.
The new report looks at test scores in 4th Grade and 8th Grade math and reading; comparisons can be made to 2009, the last year the test was administered.
The "achievement gap" between white and black students remains large, as does the gap between children both in and out of poverty. But this gap is largely due to the very strong performance of white and not-in-poverty students - NOT relatively weak performance by black and in-poverty students.
More to come as I sort through the data. But my first takeaway:
Let's be careful not to break anything that is already working well.
So yet another study was released this month about charter schools. What does it conclude?
The overall tenor of our results is that charter schools are in some cases outperforming traditional public schools in terms of students' reading and math achievement, and in other cases performing similarly or worse.
No one should be surprised at this: there is a large body of evidence that charter schools are simply not the panacea for education that corporate reformers would have us believe. They don't teach the same population of students, and the successful ones don't cost any less (in many cases, they cost more) than public schools. There may be a place for charters as laboratories for educational theories, but the fraction of successful charters will never be replicable on a large scale.
So, I'm a school board member. A new one. I got elected by writing myself in when no one would put their name on the ballot. I got some friends to vote for me. Made a couple of phone calls. Knocked on 5 doors. Made sure everyone could spell my last name right (it's long). 30 votes later, here I am.
I am also a Democrat. A life-long Democrat. A real Democrat. Thus, I am a fish out of water on the board. And a real freak at the New Jersey School Board Association's annual workshop last week in Atlantic City. I went for two reasons: One, I needed to attend the "Governance 1" class required for new board members and; Two, Tuesday was devoted to school "reform," and I wanted to see what they were up to.
Belief in merit pay reminds me of Linus in the pumpkin patch. It doesn't matter that the Great Pumpkin disappoints him year after year: he insists on believing. He can't adjust his view of the world based on facts; the world must adjust to him.
So I've given up trying to change people's minds on this. Either you are open to the truth, or you're not. And the truth is, merit pay will never, ever help student achievement.
The entire corporate "reform" argument hangs on the use of standardized tests. Reformers insist that these tests are absolutely critical in ensuring "accountability" throughout the teaching profession, and that pay, tenure protections, and even job security should be tied to the tests.
The corporate education "reform" movement here in Jersey is hiding more secrets than a James Bond villain. For example: who is approving all these new charters?
The DOE has only a handful of staffers who oversee charter schools and it can't carefully review every application it gets on its own. This year, a record 58 candidates sought to open charters.
So to help with the painstaking selection effort, the state enlisted more than a dozen unpaid volunteers, experts on charters and education who reviewed the applications and gave recommendations. Ultimately, the DOE made the final decision and approved 23 of those schools.
Now, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and state Sen. Nia Gill (D-Essex) are demanding the DOE identify the volunteers, to make sure there are no conflicts of interest.
That's a good idea - not because there's evidence of anything objectionable, but because the public has a right to know. It will protect the integrity of the very necessary job these screeners are doing. And it's just one more way of ensuring that the very best charter schools are chosen.
The DOE doesn't want to release the names, saying volunteers have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." But that's not justification enough. The screeners are performing a public job, and any charters chosen for the wrong reasons would hurt the growth of good ones.
I recently spent a week here at Blue Jersey demolishing the corporate "reform" argument. Well, no, that's not quite right; I'd spent that week bringing together a bunch of research and writing that did all the demolishing for me. Folks like Bruce Baker, Matt DiCarlo, Valerie Strauss, Leonie Haimson, and Diane Ravitch are among the many who have done the legwork that makes it so easy to build a case against these rash, uniformed, and just plain silly proposals.
But all of this leads to a question: what should we do instead?
It's a fair question. Even though this notion of an education "crisis" has been blown way out of proportion, I do believe that we could make things better. And I do believe that the continued achievement gap is a serious problem that needs to be fixed once and for all if we're ever going to live up to our promise as a nation.
But let's not destroy what already works. Let's not come in with cheap gimmicks that will wreck great schools like "merit pay" and "tenure reform" and "charter schools" and all that other reformy jive. Let's instead come up with a serious plan for serious reform.
Here then are the key points of the Jazzman Reform Plan:
I'm not sure where to begin. I have been thinking about the repercussions of the Christie/Sweeney benefit and pension laws that were recently enacted. The increased health and pension benefit contributions, combined with cap law and the polarization of PERC will ensure for me, and tens of thousands more, a pay cut for the next 5 years. My disposable income in 2011 will be more than it will be in 2016. I know this makes many feel good. The greedy public worker finally gets what has been coming to him. It was a good call to arms by Christie to rally those who have suffered from the greed and selfishness from the Wall Street thieves. A common enemy in a depressed economy is a fabulous way to propagate an ideology to make others feel someone should suffer. So here we are.....tens of thousands will not see pay increases as the cost of living increases and the value of investments and real estate plummet.
To me the question is, what is the value of this law and union busting to the general economy? The issue of health insurance and its ever increasing costs is where the answers lie, the real ideological difference between left and right. Should the ability to see a doctor for a reasonable cost be a human right, or should it be a privilege for those fortunate enough to participate in a for profit health insurance scheme? The answer is obviously that Christie and Sweeney believe that perpetuating a privileged, for profit health care system is the America they would prefer to see. The cost of health insurance is where they decided to target, they could have chose a Massachusetts style reform, or expanding the SHBP by making public employers mandatorily participate and increasing the negotiating power of the state. The governor and legislature chose perpetuating the current broken, privileged, for profit system of delivering health care.
The economy is another ideological difference here. Any economist will tell you, and history will prove that government should spend during a recession, not curl into a ball and let things fall apart. Christie and Sweeney took this opportunity to pursue their ideological fantasies to screw public sector unions. Each public sector employee will now take a multi-thousand dollar pay cut, money that will not be spent on cars, home improvements, and flat screens. The lack of spending will reduce commission paid to sales people and sales tax paid to the state of NJ. Some may not be able to afford their homes any longer, adding more stock to available real estate, thus pushing real estate values lower and decreasing the value of real estate taxes. As day care, fuel, electricity, and food costs continue to rise this will further diminish purchasing power of the middle class. Increased cost of living combined with legislated pay cuts to the public sector will further decrease sales tax revenues.
The Christie/Sweeney pension and benefit reform may produce some short term relief for municipal budgets as the public sector is now required by law to take a pay cut. I question if taxes will really go down as government is subject to the same uncontrollable costs as every other citizen. Real, long lasting reform could have been accomplished by fixing real problems (like our broken health care system). The pension-benefit law will do more harm than good. It fulfills an ideological hatred for government and its employees. The damaging effects of this recession and its impact on those most vulnerable creates a real need for competent government. Shrinking government when those who need it most is insane. Perpetuating a broken system on the backs of the middle class is insane. Legislating a pay cut that will further damage a weak economy is insane. It may take decades to correct the Christie legacy, if we are lucky enough to make a correction.
The New Jersey Assembly voted 78-0 to delete "obsolete and derogatory state statutes pertaining to the status of women". I think it's worth reading the statutes and reflecting on how far the progressive movement has come. I'm not criticizing the reformers of 1800's, but it's nice to get this out of the legal code:
If a wife after being ravished, consent to the ravisher, she shall be disabled and forever barred from having her jointure or dower, unless her husband is voluntarily reconciled to her and permits her to dwell with him, in which case she shall be restored to her jointure or dower.
Or this:
The paraphernalia of a married woman, being the suitable ornaments and wearing apparel of a married woman, which have come to her through her husband during coverture, shall be her separate property as if she were a feme sole.
I will say this: It won't take a century and half for the half-measure of civil unions to look like this.
Tonight, let me be the first to welcome the best and the brightest to the corps of public workers for the great Garden State!
Yes, I know you bright, ambitious, industrious young people could have pursued careers on Wall Street or Madison Avenue or K Street. But you've looked at the high regard in which our political class holds public workers tonight, and you've signed on for a career of serving the people of New Jersey! You won't be disappointed!
We want you to know that we value your service! We know that when you run into a burning building, or answer an armed robbery call, or teach a child in poverty to read, or build a bridge, or counsel the old... that we value you. We respect you.
I support the NJEA, CWA, PBA, FOP, and other unions that may be in Trenton today protesting the pension/benefits reforms. They are standing up against the bullies in the legislature and the governor's office. They are doing their best to defend collective bargaining and standing up for the working class.
Let's assume the legislature passes this legislation tonight. What happens tomorrow?
There may be legal challenges to the entire law or certain parts of the law. Some may challenge the fact that two topics were placed into one law, which many would argue is unconstitutional. Some may challenge the freezing of COLAs for retired pensioners. Some may lobby the legislature to make more changes to the law. Some people may decide to retire. Some may decide to try to find work in the private sector.
But what happens to the rest of us that have to go back to work for the government?
When this is all said and done, I call on ALL the unions and their locals to take some time to explain, in detail, how this legislation will affect each of their members. They have done a pretty good job of explaining that their members will have to pay more money. But they have done a poor job explaining details beyond that.
I call on the unions to create programs for their members that promote good financial decisions. Since members are losing a significant amount of money, I would love to see a program that teaches members how to create a family budget and how to abide by that budget. You would think that every family should know how to do that already, but with a sudden loss of income, they may need a refresher course.
I call on the unions to promote programs that would assist their members financially. That could mean an expansion of their scholarship program. That could mean that unions use some of their union dues for a financial-hardship assistance program.
There are a lot of positive things the unions can start doing tomorrow. Naturally they will still be involved in political activism. We still need someone to finance the voice of the working class. But what else will the unions do tomorrow?
Hey, you. Yeah you, the one reading the Star-Ledger. Do me a favor, would you? Put down the paper, turn off NJ101.5, and come over here for a minute.
Let's talk.
I know you've been following what's happening in Trenton. You seem pretty happy about what might happen to public workers tomorrow: losing health care benefits; losing pension benefits; losing collective bargaining. I was just wondering...
What's in it for you?
Wait, hear me out. I'm asking a simple question: where's the benefit in all of this for you, the average taxpayer in New Jersey. What do you get out of this deal?
Are your property taxes going to go down? No, it's clear at this point they won't. The bill does nothing to contain exploding health care costs or address the past shortfalls in funding the pensions: those are the two biggest drivers of your property taxes by far.
Nearly a decade of America's test-based accountability systems, from "adequate yearly progress" to high school exit exams, has shown little to no positive effect overall on learning and insufficient safeguards against gaming the system, a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academies of Science concludes in a new report.
A recent article innorthjersey.com regarding sweeney's healthcare reform bill seems to indicate that the transformation of Senator Stephen Sweeney from marginal Democrat to absolute Republican is complete and that the disease is contagious.
Thick as Thieves
The only thing missing in the article are the names of those Democrats Sweeney's office are claiming the support of. Could it be part of the deal? Do they fear the wrath and rage of the public workers enough to want to keep their names off of the bill until it is too late to stop the passage?
It seems very telling that the senator's office isn't mentioning names. Maybe
accountability for bad legislation isn't something they want to have? Maybe they
know that legislating healthcare and pension benefits is a bad idea and reeks of
Republican ideology and anti-labor spirit?
Their is a disease permeating the Democrats in New Jersey and it's called
DiNO-syphillis. A disease caught from ideologically laying with Republicans on
the anti-union / anti-labor agenda. The Typhoid Mary Prostitute of this recent
outbreak is, without a doubt, Stephen Sweeney and his pimp is George Norcross,
III.
But, just because the "Bosses" want it, don't count the Assembly out of riding in to save the day:
""The Assembly continues to be increasingly frustrated by the governor's failure to show leadership and do what's he's supposed to do - negotiate a contract that both protects taxpayers and worker rights." - Sheila Oliver
Few Assembly Democrats support Sweeney's pension overhaul plan, sources say
It's time to clean up the Democratic streets of New Jersey and start
demanding a return to the progressive ideals that made New Jersey the jewel of
the Northeast for so many years. Stop the disease by calling every legislator
and letting them know that if they don't stand with labor, they won't stand in
office long. Votes are power and voters have the final authority, not George
Norcross, III or Stephen Sweeney.
