I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor. - Chris Christie, "An Open Letter to the Teachers of NJ" October, 2009

Saturday, August 28, 2010

We Don't Need No Stinking Training!

Great catch from Bill Orr at Blue Jersey about the RTTT fiasco:
Note to the Governor: Trying to re-write a large and complex proposal over a long weekend when so much is at stake is a fool's errand. Errors creep in and there is the danger of making spur-of-the moment changes that have not been well thought out. Also why did NJ not send a delegation to the Technical Assistance Workshop? 41 other states did. It might have helped.  
 From the link above:
The workshop was held in Minneapolis, was open to the public, and included a conference call option
Schundler couldn't pick up the phone? Seriously?

Hold my calls...

2 comments:

deciminyan said...

You only need the stinking training if you really want to win. I'm guessing that Christie went through the RTTT process to placate his critics, but really didn't want to do something that would bolster public education.

Duke said...

I'm back and forth on that, because there were positives to both winning and losing:

If NJ won, Christie gets a lot of money to implement "reforms" that the NJEA doesn't want, and he gets to preen that he won the money without their help, so he really has the kids' best interests at heart.

If NJ lost without all this Schundler nonsense, Christie would have been able to point fingers at the NJEA and say they were the roadblock to getting more funds, using that as a justification to cut state aid further because we now have less money.

As it stands, he'll still use this as a justification to slash funds - he just doesn't get to pick on the union nearly as much.

But don't worry - soon, someone tangentially connected to the NJEA will send a stupid cut-and-paste joke about Christie in an email somewhere and he'll get into a hissy fit. The press will tut-tut at this appalling lack of decorum and stand idly by while another 10,000 teachers are axed from the payrolls.

Unless we get together and stop this idiocy once and for all.