Long Live The Queen of Tenure!

The Queen of Tenure has survived her attempted usurpation:  

The Perth Amboy Board of Education has voted to end its lengthy fight with Superintendent Janine Caffrey by rescinding her suspension.

On Thursday, the nine-member board — with three new members elected in November and two re-elected — rescinded a resolution it adopted Sept. 23 that placed Caffrey on administrative leave with pay, and notified her she would not be reappointed at the end of her term in June 2014.

Caffrey remained on the job, however, because several weeks after the vote, Assistant Education Commissioner Barrier Erlichson ordered her back to work, saying the vote was premature because a state decision was pending on an earlier board vote.

The saga of Janine Caffrey's tumultuous tenure in Perth Amboy has been chronicled by this blog since she first burst on the scene as the Queen of Tenure, crowned thus by none other than Star-Ledger Editorial Page Editor Tom Moran:

Even her administrators and secretaries are protected by tenure. Caffrey can't fire them, or even demote them, without jumping into the hated tenure vortex. 

"This is the single greatest impediment to education improvement in New Jersey, without a doubt," she says.

Oh, yes, tenure is so much more important than poverty, "without a doubt"...

Of course, when her board tried to fire her, Caffrey ran as fast as she could into the arms of due process - which is all that tenure is anyway. That she remains in her job due to the intervention of a third-party is an example of hypocrisy so blatant that it boggles the mind. Of course, it helped that the billionaire-backed B4K paid for a public relations campaign to keep her in office.

It was always clear that the NJDOE and Commissioner Chris Cerf wanted her to stay in the job. So they ran out the clock until a new board of education could be elected. California millionaires and other outsiders with an interest in charter school expansion poured a boatload of money into the Perth Amboy school elections. The board president who was one of Caffrey's strongest critics lost his seat; his opponents were super-duper classy in their victory:

It's all about the kids...

So now Caffrey is safe. We'll now see if Cerf's buddy Joel Rose gets his fat contract with Perth Amboy to bring digital "learning" to the kids there. We'll see if Caffrey decides to quash her love of running to the media whenever she feels the need. We'll see if things finally calm down in a district that has many... issues.

God bless you, Perth Amboy. Your children deserve great public schools: your board and your superintendent have pledged to make that happen. Hold them to that promise. Make then accountable. You deserve nothing less.

Accountability begins at home.