Chris Christie's Lying, Incoherent Letter to Teachers

By now, most teachers in New Jersey have received a copy of a letter, sent at taxpayer expense, from governor Chris Christie. I got mine on Friday, and I've posted it below. After reading it, I thought the same thing I've been thinking while following the Bridgegate trial:

It's impossible to choose between whether Chris Christie and his staff are liars or are incompetent -- they're both.

Of course, Christie has a history of sending teachers letters where he flat-out lies to our faces: back in 2009, during his first campaign, he told us: "I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor." But the first chance he got, he jacked up our contributions, gutted cost-of-living increases, made us pay much more for our health care without the benefit of negotiation, refused to follow his own law and make the pension payments he said he would make.

To make things worse, he then said he had no idea the pension problem was as bad as it was, even though literally everyone who had the slightest interest in the topic knew New Jersey's pensions were headed for disaster. It's incredible a man who ran for governor during the Great Recession would claim he had no clue the pensions were a serious problem for the state.

Again: Chris Christie's not just a liar, and he's not just incompetent. He's both.

Which brings us to his latest, utterly ridiculous letter. How many ways is Christie and whoever wrote this completely lying and/or clueless?

- Christie says the New Jersey Education Association (the state's largest teachers union) has acted "irresponsibly" toward its members. But his own letter shows NJEA members pay less, on average, for health care than other local public employees!

I mean, it's right there in the chart:

• Teacher's Average Premium Cost with a 9% Increase: $8,171 Per Year.
• Local Government Average Premium Cost with a 6% Increase: $9,967 Per Year.

If I was not an NJEA member and worked for a local government, I'd be wondering why the teachers are getting such a good deal on their health care!

- Christie says other unions got a "zero percent increase for their members." But his own chart in the letter shows a 6 percent increase! So which is it? Does he know? Does he care?

- The chart shows the difference in before and after premiums as an increase for NJEA members but a decrease for local government employees -- even though both premiums went up! Does anyone proofread this stuff? How does this make any sense?

- There is no indication of how Christie calculated the "average" premium cost.  I'm not sure a point estimate means anything in this context: there are just too many individual variables. How did they get this number? 

- As NJEA has explained, the union's protest has nothing to do with current benefits; it's over retiree benefits. NJEA President Wendell Steinhauer has released a statement that gets into the nitty-gritty, so I won't rehash it here. The basic issue is that the teachers unions are supposed to have 4 representatives on the State Education Health Benefits Commission: 3 from NJEA, 1 from the American Federation of Teachers (the union that represents Newark and a handful of other NJ districts).

Last year, Newark Teachers Union (the local AFT affiliate) president Joe DelGrosso passed away (he was a great fighter for teachers in this state). Christie has not allowed AFT to put a replacement on the commission, which gives him a voting advantage, which he has abused by trying to push through changes to retiree benefits.

The upshot is that NJEA's refusal to play Christie's game has nothing to do with the increase -- which still leaves NJEA members, according to Christie's letter itself, paying less for health benefits than other local employees!

I'll admit I'm pretty miffed that Christie is trying to drive a wedge between NJEA and its members. But what really galls me -- and ought to piss off every taxpayer in the state -- is that he's abusing his position to do it. It's simply outrageous that such a nakedly political document, targeting a public employee union, carries the seal of the state and arrived in our mailboxes on the taxpayers' dime.

If I have any advice for my fellow teachers, it's this: don't fall for any more cons from the worst governor in this state's modern history. The incoherence of this letter alone is enough evidence to disqualify anything Christie has to say to those of us who work in New Jersey's classrooms every day. But if anyone needs any more reason, look no further than Christie's history of blatant lying to public employees.

I called Steve Baker, the Director of Communications at NJEA, when I got this load of garbage in my school mailbox. I think he says it best:

"If we've learned one thing after seven years, it's that Chris Christie has a hard time telling the truth in letters."

Shut up! How dare you question my letter, even if it makes absolutely no sense! I'm the governor -- well, for now anyway. Just shut up and do what you're told!

Here's the letter (click to enlarge):

Massachusetts Charter Schools and Their Problems With "Attrition"

UPDATE: A commenter at Diane Ravitch's site pointed out that I had mistakenly included Phoenix Academy Charter in my group of Boston charter schools. He's quite correct; it's actually in the nearby suburbs. I've updated this post to reflect this, and apologize for the error.

Also: I left off the link to the MAPCSA post; I've added it.


The debate about lifting the Massachusetts charter school cap continues to rage on, in anticipation of November's vote on Question 2:

Question 2 on the November ballot will ask voters if they support giving Massachusetts the authority to lift the cap on charter schools. As it stands, no more than 120 charter schools are allowed to operate in the state; there are currently 78 active charters.

A "Yes" vote on Question 2 would give the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education the authority to lift the cap, allowing up to 12 new charter schools or expansions of existing charters each year.

Priority would be given to charters that open in lower-performing districts. New charters and charter expansions approved under this law would be exempt from existing limits on the number of charter schools, the number of students enrolled in them and the amount of local school districts' spending allocated to them.

Pro-charter researchers have been weighing in. I'll get to their arguments in due time, but for now, I want to concentrate on a key issue in the charter cap debate: attrition.

Determining whether attrition affects charter school results is central to the argument for (or against) their expansion in Massachusetts and elsewhere. If charter schools shed kids year after year -- especially if those kids are low-performing -- then their vaunted performance advantages are in question, particularly when compared to public district schools that aren't losing students.

The Massachusetts charter sector has been pushing back hard on this point. Here, for example, are the "facts" from the Massachusetts Charter Public* School Association:

ATTRITION RATES

The attrition rate in Boston and in Gateway City charters “has remained lower” than the attrition rates of district schools in those communities, according to data by (DESE) in Dec. 2015 (2014-2015 school year).

The attrition rate at Boston charters (9.3%) is significantly lower than in BPS (14.2%).
In Gateway Cities, charter attrition rates (6.2%) are lower than Gateway districts (11.4%).
From 2012-2014, an average of just 82 students left charters and returned to Boston Public Schools, according to BPS numbers – one-tenth of one percent of BPS total enrollment of 57,000.

Yeah, uh... no. Not really.

You see, "attrition," for the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, has a very specific meaning:

This report provides the percentage of attrition by grade from the end of one school year to the beginning of the next for students enrolled in public schools, including charter schools, in the state. The information is as of October 1 of the school year selected. [emphasis mine]

In other words, "attrition" is the percentage of students who only leave a school's rolls during the summer. Which may be an interesting statistic, but does not include all of the students who leave during the school year.

Further, "attrition" as defined by MA-DESE only tells half of the story we need to hear if we're going to evaluate charter school performance. What we really need to consider is whether the students moving out of charter schools are being replaced at rates equal to the replacement rates for students moving out of public district schools.

If we only consider a school's attrition over time -- all of its attrition, not just the students leaving in the summer -- we don't consider its "backfill": the students coming in to replace the ones who left. Students in economic disadvantage are often more mobile than students who are not, which means that urban centers, where charters proliferate, are more likely to have student populations who move in and out of different school districts.

Here's an urban school that backfills as much as it attrits students.

Notice the school gains as many students as it loses. Let's assume this is just for one grade; if so, that "cohort" will remain the same size no matter how large its attrition rate is.

But what happens if the school doesn't backfill?

This school has exactly the same attrition rate as the first school. But because it doesn't backfill, its cohorts keep shrinking. Every year it loses students, but it doesn't take in enough in the same grade to replace them.

Again, this is a key issue in determining if charters can be scaled up to take a larger share of students. If charters are not backfilling, they are probably serving a less mobile student population -- and one that is likely in less economic disadvantage. They are relying on the public district schools to take the students that are coming into the district, which raises some profound questions about how, exactly, the "successful" charters get their gains.

So now that we've described the real issues in this debate, let's go to the data. We'll focus on Boston as the city is, by far, the largest district in Massachusetts and will likely see the greatest amount of charter expansion if Question 2 passes. 

In this analysis I focus on high schools, for several reasons. First, we don't have to concern ourselves with the differences in grade level served between charters -- who often serve elementary and middle grades along with high school grades -- and public district schools. Second, we're less likely to see the type of attrition that occurs between grades 8 and 9, when students move into high school and often attend a private school.

Let's start by seeing how Boston's high school students divide up between charters and public district schools:

A few things to note here. First, there are two flavors of charter school in Boston: independent charters, and "Horace Mann" charters, which are sanctioned by the Boston Public Schools and staffed (mostly) with unionized teachers. I've marked the independents in red, the Horace Mann charters in purple, and BPS in blue.

There is no question that the independent charter sector is still relatively small in Boston, at least as far as high schools are concerned. That alone ought to give supporters of Question 2 pause: how can they be so sure these schools can maintain their alleged "gains" (we'll talk about whether these "gains" actually exist in another post) if they expand? What if they can only function on a smaller scale?

This is why we have to look at the size of the cohorts as they pass through from Grade 9 to 12. What, for example, happened to the graduating Class of 2014 as they moved from freshman to senior year?

We lost a few schools because they are so new that they hadn't yet had a cohort pass through from freshman to senior year. I also took out Boston Day and Evening Academy Charter because it is an alternative high school that mixes grade levels.

Every independent charter school in Boston had a higher cohort attrition rate in 2014 than BPS as a whole.

In the case of City on a Hill and Phoenix, their 2011 freshman class shrank by more than half by the time they were seniors. That is a remarkable difference compared to BPS.

But is it part of a pattern?

In the last decade, Boston's charter sector has had substantially greater cohort attrition than the Boston Public Schools. In fact, even though the data is noisy, you could make a pretty good case the difference in cohort attrition rates has grown over the last five years.

Is this proof that the independent charters are doing a bad job? I wouldn't say so; I'm sure these schools are full of dedicated staff, working hard to serve their students. But there is little doubt that the public schools are doing a job that charters are not: they are educating the kids who don't stay in the charters, or who arrive too late to feel like enrolling in them is a good choice.

This is a serious issue, and the voters of Massachusetts should be made aware of it before they cast their votes. We know that charter schools have had detrimental effects on the finances of their host school systems in other states. Massachusetts' charter law has one of the more generous reimbursement policies for host schools, but these laws do little more than delay the inevitable: charter expansion, by definition, is inefficient because administrative functions are replicated. And that means less money in the classroom.

Is it really worth expanding charters and risking further injury to BPS when the charter sector appears, at least at the high school level, to rely so heavily on cohort attrition?

As I've explained to charter leaders before:

It doesn't matter what you call it -- you're still shrinking.

* Notice where the world "public" is put in the title of this group? They desperately want us all to believe charters are "public" schools, even when the courts and other public authorities have ruled repeatedly that they are not.

Christie's New School Proposal Will Target Teachers Of Color

What do you do if you're the governor of New Jersey and a potentially embarrassing major trial begins?

Yell: "BAD TEACHERS!"

Gov. Chris Christie is asking the state Supreme Court to reopen the landmark Abbott v. Burke case that redefined school funding and to give the state education chief power to bypass laws and bargaining agreements that protect veteran teachers, the governor's office announced Thursday. 

In a legal filing by Attorney General Christopher Porrino, the Christie administration is asking the court to freeze state aid to the former Abbott districts until a new funding system is put in place.

Christie also wants the state education commissioner to have the power to overrule labor agreements in those districts that he sees as detrimental to students, such as the "last in first out" policy for teacher layoffs. [emphasis mine]

Christie has been running around the state the past few months pushing his "Fairness Formula," a school funding plan that would allocate the same amount of state aid for every student, regardless of whether that student is in economic disadvantage, and regardless of a community's capacity to raise taxes. As I've pointed out, the plan makes absolutely no sense: see here and here for full analyses.

Now, Christie wants to go even further off the deep end: not only slash state funding to these districts but overturn legally binding contracts and state statutes. It's an astonishing display of contempt for both the rule of law and the democratic legislative process. How can he possible justify this? What is he hoping to accomplish?

The governor said the answer was to instead acknowledge the fact that urban students often lacked the support structures, stable home lives and advantages of suburban districts like Berkeley Township, where he was speaking.

"I'm not worried about the kids in Berkeley doing well; they are doing well," said Christie.

"We're not doing it for the kids in the cities...We're teaching them the same way we teach the kids in Berkeley." 

The governor then explained that he'd be willing to keep school funding in place in exchange for longer school days and a longer school year, but union intransigence has stood in the way.

"I would pay what I am paying now, in Newark, if I could have a longer school day and a longer school year," Christie said. "But I can't. I have to pay what I'm paying and get what I'm getting...I'm paying for failure now. They're failure factories. And the people who are responsible for this need to be held accountable." [emphasis mine]

Well, Chris, you have been running the Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson schools for seven years, so...

Stop and think about this for a minute: Chris Christie does not want to negate contracts in all districts; he only wants to gut tenure and LIFO in the so-called SDA districts -- the 31 former Abbott districts that were the original plaintiffs in New Jersey school funding equity lawsuits. Most (but not all) of these districts have remained among the least affluent, most property-poor communities in the state.

Christie's own legal filing states he is only looking to skirt legal contracts and state laws in the SDA districts:

AND further good cause appearing:
  IT IS on this _____ day of _______, 2016 ORDERED:

1.That the Commissioner is granted the authority to waive statutory requirements and provisions of collective negotiation agreements in SDA Districts that serve as impediments to a thorough and efficient education, consistent with the Court’s opinion in this matter;

Now, think about who teaches in SDA districts, and who teaches in districts like Berkeley Township. Might there be a difference?

Let me spell it out for you:

Christie's plan to strip tenure and seniority protections from SDA districts would disproportionately affect teachers of color.

SDA districts enroll many more students of color proportionally than non-SDA districts. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that these same districts employ many more teachers of color. 22% of SDA teachers are Black, compared to 3% in non-SDA districts. 18% of SDA teachers are Hispanic; only 3% of non-SDA teachers are Hispanic.

Legally, this is referred to as "disparate impact": while teachers of color are not specifically targeted by the proposal, the impact of it is racially biased. For the proposal to be legal, the state would then have to show there was a rational basis for the proposal, and that it couldn't otherwise be achieved with policies that weren't racially biased.

Good luck with that. There is scant evidence that tenure leads to worse student outcomes, and the California appellate court in the Vergara trial showed that proving LIFO harms students is a very tough task. And the argument here would be even more difficult: showing seniority is an impediment to student learning in some districts but not others. 

I'm way past niceties when it comes to Chris Christie and education policy, so let me be blunt: this proposal is even more stupid than the Fairness Formula. Asking the court to throw out constitutional laws -- including the tenure law, which Christie himself signed and bragged about for years! -- without a shred of evidence to show they harm students is ludicrous. Asking the court to throw out legally binding employment contracts negotiated in good faith while upholding similar contracts in other districts is insane.

Chris Cerf, Newark's State Superintendent, has suggested lately -- and rather cynically -- that Christie doesn't really expect the Fairness Formula to be passed as he proposes it. It's merely a starting point for a negotiation, you see. 

This, in my view, is different. If Christie is trying to negotiate, he's starting from a place where he wants to throw out laws and contracts, but only for some staff, who just happen to more likely be teachers of color. No one who is serious about making good policy would ever make a proposal that was as contemptuous of educators -- and, let's be truthful, as flat-out racist -- as what Christie proposed today.

Hang on folks -- we're getting near the end. A little more than a year to go. We'll have a big mess to clean up, but at least the state's largest roadblock to improving our schools will be gone.

h/t Rob Tornoe.

ADDING: This is horrible:

Assemblyman Jon Bramnick, a Republican, praised Mr. Christie’s move, saying it showed his “commitment to the success of students who are being left behind by an outdated public-education system.”

Jon Bramnick's district includes some of the most property-rich districts in the state (including the one where I work). These districts would have an enormous advantage under the Fairness Formula, because they would get much more state aid and have the capacity to tax themselves at low rates, yet collect large amounts of revenue. Why? Because when a town's property values are high, it can set lower tax rates to collect the same amount of money compared to a town with lower property values.

So Bramnick's districts would have even more money to attract the most qualified teachers. But if Christie's proposal went through, they would also be able to offer teachers tenure and and seniority protections -- unlike the SDA districts. Terry Moe, a labor economist who is no friend to teachers unions, has pointed out that "...most teachers see the security of tenure as being worth tens of thousands of dollars a year.”

So Bramnick's districts would have a double advantage over SDA districts: better pay for teachers, and workplace protections. Plus, more revenue means better working conditions. How could the SDA districts possibly compete for the dwindling number of highly-qualified teachers available?

I understand the assemblyman wants to advocate for his constituents. But does Jon Bramnick really think it's good for all children to perpetuate a system so rife with inequity? Is he so cynical that he won't consider the damage that will be done to students outside of his own district? For that matter: does he really think his voters care so little about the other children in this state?

I've met Bramnick a few times. He's a very personable fellow. He comes across as if he really does care about the best interests of the state as a whole. But it's beyond me how anyone who supports this racist, classist madness could sleep at night.

Back To School -- 2016

And so another summer comes to a close, and those of us who actually teach children are headed back to our first jobs (aside from raising our families).

We'll be in our classrooms, dealing with innumerate evaluation systems put together by people who have no idea what it's like to teach in a public school. We'll be trying to figure out how we can prepare our kids for the almighty state exam without killing the love they have for learning. We'll be educating any child who walks through the doors of our schools while others extoll the virtues of "choice."

We'll be struggling -- and yes, sometimes failing -- to figure out how to run our classrooms in a way that respects all of our students, no matter who they are or where they come from. We'll fail because we're human; those of us who've been on the job for a few years are humble enough to have figured that one out. We'll fail and be our own worst critics afterward, because that's who we are and that's what we do.

We'll be working to get better, though. We'll turn to our colleagues for support and advice and we'll listen to our parents and our students and we'll keep running that long, tough mudder toward improvement. Charlotte Danielson's rubric will catch us on bad days where we're "teacher-centered" -- but we'll keep trying.

Some of us will give up. This isn't a job for everyone and a fair number of us figure that out pretty quickly. Those of us who have some wear on our tires will wave goodbye and grin ruefully. We told you. We told you...

We're already steeling ourselves for the special stupidity an election season brings to the world of education policy. We're going to get blamed for a whole host of problems: inequality, poverty, segregation, racism, economic malaise. Of course, we didn't create any of these issues on our own -- but we're the ones who are expected to fix it all.

"The best anti-poverty program is a good education!" the politicians will proclaim, all while slashing our budgets and breaking their promises to us about our middle-class benefits. If only us teachers were better! If only we really cared about our students -- you know, like the people who collect paychecks from 501(c)3's that are backed by billionaires! They are the ones speaking up for the children, not us -- and certainly not our disgusting unions!

These fine, reformy folks are the people who really know what teachers are thinking! Gadflies like me and all the others who are on my blogroll at the left are outliers! How could people like that intemperate jerk Jersey Jazzman, or Peter Greene, or Marie Corfield, or
Awo Okaikor Aryee-Price, or Katie Osgood, or Jose Luis Vilson, or Arthur Goldstein, or Gary Rubinstein, or Mercedes Schneider* possibly know what teachers are actually thinking!

After all, they're only teachers...

We'll listen to this crap, mutter a few curses under our breath, and go back to our schools. We'll pick up our pointers and batons and wipeboard markers and paintbrushes and rulers and calculators and we'll ignore the idiotic union bashing and the preening self-regard and the intellectually lazy paeans  to "miracle" schools -- because that's what we do when it's time to teach.

But when class is over, we'll be right here: defending our schools, defending our profession, defending our students. Good luck in 2017 trying to keep us down, reformers -- you're going to need it.

Much more to come; stand by...




* I left so many of you out, and I didn't include many of you who work through other forms of social media than blogs, or even more importantly as real-time/space organizers. I am very grateful for all you do -- many, many thanks.

Another Reformy Reformer Leaves NJ

One of the blessings/curses of a long memory is that when a piece of hagiography is published -- like this goodbye to Reverend Reginald Jackson, written by the predictably reformy Star-Ledger editorial page editor, Tom Moran --  you can't help but marvel at all the history that gets magically swept away:

Jackson is known to most as the hero in the fight against racial profiling by the State Police in the 1990s, when he was head of the Black Ministers' Council. And he most certainly is that.

But dig deeper, and the man is full of surprises. He's the leading voice for school choice in New Jersey, and says black legislators have sold out poor kids in return for support from the teachers' union.

He says white Americans are too often clueless about racism, and that blacks are too often clueless about whites. He considers it a great blessing that his path in life has allowed him to cross that divide so easily.

He endorsed Gov. Chris Christie for re-election in 2013, mostly over education, and he cringes now when it comes up, saying the governor's soul seems to have been poisoned by ambition. [emphasis mine]

No wonder Moran speaks about the reverend in such glowing tones: they both endorsed Christie because they loved how the governor does battle with the NJEA. Too bad they were both so blinded by their reflexive disdain for the teachers union that they couldn't see Christie was a horrible governor in his first term, and that his opponent, Barbara Buono, would have been a far better choice.

But as long as anyone is willing to take shots at the NJEA and advocate for "reforms" like school vouchers, reformy folks like Moran and Jackson will ignore the obvious:

On school choice: Jackson favors both vouchers, which would provide poor children in failing districts with money to attend private schools, and charters, which are privately run schools financed with tax dollars.

"If you live in Millburn and the public school is not giving your child a good education, they can afford to send their child to a better school. Folks in Orange don't have that option...the position of the state is, well, if you can't afford it, too bad."

"I'm surprise there is so much opposition (to charters). When it comes to the education of children, 'By any means necessary.'"

What both Moran and Jackson fail to note is that Jackson's wife, Christy Davis Jackson, is the former CEO of Excellent Education for Everyone, at the time the state's biggest lobbyist for vouchers. Mrs. Jackson (who has a rather... interesting past) was making $147K in 2012 according to E3's tax forms (available at Guidestar). The group appears to have gone dark around 2014; still, it was a nice gig while it lasted.

E3, run for a time by the reformy Derrell Bradford, pushed the Opportunity Scholarship Act for years in New Jersey. And yet the school voucher scheme never became law, likely because it was always horrible policy. OSA would have overwhelmingly benefitted private yeshivas in Lakewood, and would have had little impact on cities like Newark and Camden because private school seats there are already severely limited, and the amount would have been a fraction of the cost of an elite private school education.

The evidence supporting vouchers is quite weak, and there is good reason to believe they promote segregation rather than ameliorate it. But they direct public funds toward religious institutions -- a policy Reverend Jackson has been interested in for years:

Rev. Reginald Jackson said he was celebrating after all five charter schools proposed by the Black Ministers Council were approved. They include an East Orange school with single-gender classrooms and a high school offering online instruction and instrumental music classes for students in East Orange, Irvington and Newark.

"I’m aware that most of our children are always going to be in public schools ... but at the same time parents ought to have options," said Jackson, executive director of the council. [emphasis mine]

Hey, if you can't get public monies through vouchers, why not give charter schools a try? According to NJ Spotlight, one of the applications Jackson's group backed was from anti-marriage equity crusader Pastor Amir Khan. I spent a lot of time reporting on Khan's attempts to open a charter school in Cherry Hill back in 2012; one of my favorite moments was when Chris Christie denied knowing who Khan was even as the pastor was sitting right behind him at a political event.

And that wasn't the only time:

Khan admitted that he wanted a charter school to help shore up his church's finances:

October, 2011: Khan admits, in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer's James Osborne:

But the opening of the larger charter school is essential to the church's plan to buy the land from the diocese, he said.

"We were anticipating the charter school to get additional income to carry us," he said. [emphasis mine]

November, 2011: Khan confesses to Osborne:

"I could sell a bikini to an Eskimo," Khan once boasted.

Khan's charter, facing intense community opposition, never opened -- but he wasn't alone. So far as I've been able to determine, none of the charters Jackson said his Black Minister's Council supported ever opened:

• Not Therman Evans Charter School for Excellence in Linden,
• Not the Atlantic Preparatory School in Mays Landing,
• Not Visions of Destiny Academy for Academic Excellence in Trenton,
• Not Arete Charter School in Orange,
• Not Spirit Prep in East Orange (see here).

Why was Chris Christie's DOE granting all of these charters if the schools' planning process was so poor that none of them actually opened? I believe there are actually two reasons: first, Jackson was obviously a powerful political ally and Christie was going to grant his wishes in exchange for his support. 

Second, the NJDOE had put unqualified yet politically connected players like Derrell Bradford and Shelley Skinner on its charter review panels. Given their ideological predilections for "choice" and their lack of practical experience in running schools -- making them poor judges of charter applications -- it was inevitable that plenty of charters that shouldn't have been approved would get the nod.

None of this, of course, is brought up in Moran's piece. Instead, Moran uses his time with Jackson to take yet another gratuitous shot at the NJEA:

On blacks and school choice: Jackson noted that in urban districts like Newark, families overwhelmingly choose charter schools when given the chance, and would use vouchers if they could. He's disappointed, he says, that black politicians and suburban blacks are not more supportive. 

"I received a whole lot of criticism from black legislators because of my positions on education. And yet, back at that time, there was not a single African-American legislator who had their own child in the public schools. 

"The problem was for most African-American legislators, they got their funding for the campaigns from the New Jersey Education Association. It bothered me then and it bothers me now that the funding of campaigns was much more important." 

"The union's number one priority is not the education of children: It's the salaries and benefits of the members of the union. And we need to always remember that." 

"Most people think the toughest issue for me was racial profiling. It was not. On racial profiling there was no division among blacks. But on education, you have a lot of blacks who live in the suburbs; their kids go to good schools and are doing well. So when they see blacks in the inner city, it's not their fight."

First of all, there are a number of researchers and scholars who would question Jackson's sanguine attitude toward the schooling black children receive in the suburbs. Second, as I said above, overwhelmingly the OSA vouchers were going to benefit Lakewood families whose students were already attending yeshivas, but not the vast majority of black families.

Third: it's becoming increasingly clear that "choice" is not the panacea for addressing education inequities that advocates like Jackson make it out to be. The NAACP is calling for a moratorium on privately-managed charters, citing fiscal mismanagement and damage to public district schools as its reasons. Charter proliferation has done little to improve segregation, nor racially-biased discipline policies.

America's families of color want safe, well-funded schools with high quality teachers where students are treated fairly. Many are undoubtedly signing up for charters because they view them as better alternatives than underfunded, crumbling public schools; that doesn't mean, however, that these same families are in favor of a system that disadvantages public schools to the benefit of charters.

In New Jersey, charters have been "held harmless" in their funding for several years, even as the state has pulled back on its commitment to funding equity under Chris Christie. In fact, Christie was underfunding urban public schools well before his reelection -- but Jackson supported him anyway. Now Jackson has his doubts about Christie's awful "Fairness Formula," which would be, according to his own state superintendent in Newark, "cataclysmic" for urban schools. Jackson now says:

 "I endorsed him almost solely on the issue I thought he was right on, education. For that I am still repenting."

"I'm sitting in a sanctuary and there are some things you can't say. And his school plan is one of them. It is absolute rubbish. I don't think he's genuinely committed to it. I think he's doing it for political reasons."

But where was Jackson back in 2011, when Christie was slashing hundreds of millions of dollars from NJ schools, particularly in urban centers? Isn't the "Fairness Formula" the logical continuation of those policies? Why didn't Jackson withhold his endorsement until Christie committed to fully funding New Jersey's schools?

For that matter: where was Jackson when the proliferation of charters in Camden and Newark led to the whitening of the teaching corps in both of those cities? Is he fine with urban students having teachers with less experience, and who are paid less, than teachers in suburban schools?

If Jackson ever had a problem with any of this, I must have missed hearing his objections. Instead, his time seemed to be taken up with pushing largely useless school vouchers. Back in 2013, he was willing to ignore all of Christie's other failures so long as the incumbent got behind OSA:

The minister said he endorsed Christie despite his veto last year of a minimum-wage increase proposed by Democrats, and despite the high unemployment rate among blacks during the Republican governor's first term. He described it as a "personal endorsement"; the nonprofit Black Ministers Council, a tax-exempt religious group, cannot by law endorse candidates. 

[...]

Jackson was a co-signer, with 42 others, of a letter to Christie last month urging him to speed up the pace of school repairs and construction in Newark. The state's Schools Development Authority, which Christie has control over, has moved too slowly in the last three and a half years, they wrote. 

"I'm always for enhancing and improving school facilities," Jackson said today. But in the end, he made his endorsement based on the vouchers, and said he was disheartened by black Democrats whose districts house failing schools.

Now, as he prepares to leave the state, Jackson shares his regrets. Like so many others, including Moran, he had Christie's back when it counted... but now he's very, very sorry.

I'm sure he wishes the best for those of us who remain in New Jersey and will have to clean up Christie's mess after 2017.

How many more days until I'm outta here?

ADDING: Here's Jackson on Hillary Clinton:

On Bill and Hillary Clinton: "They have fostered this perception that the laws that apply to everyone else don't apply to them, and that's problematic. I am a strong supporter, but I have to be honest. I know people will be upset with me for saying that, but that's the way it is."

 Let me just pull this out of the memory hole (from 2007) and leave it right here:

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign returned a $2,300 contribution from Christy Davis Jackson on July 5 — just seven days after it was received. Davis Jackson, a veteran New Jersey political operative and the wife of one of one of the state's most politically influential ministers, actively sought the state campaign director post. Instead, the Clinton campaign picked Karen Kominsky for the post — reportedly at the urging of Governor Jon Corzine and against the wishes of several key state Clinton fundraisers.

Davis Jackson was the Co-Campaign Manager of Corzine's 2000 U.S. Senate primary campaign, and served as Vice President for Government Affairs at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey until her resignation in 2005. At the time, Davis Jackson denied her resignation was related to a federal grand jury subpoena of records connected to her UMDNJ post. [emphasis mine]

OK, then...