"Mallomar" Al Doblin: NJ Schools Are "Eh"

"Mallomar" Al Doblin is always looking for the soft, squishy middle: this time, it's in NJ's schools:

In New Jersey, there are stellar schools, solid schools and places no child should ever be sent to for an education. The idea that some superhero will rescue you is childhood fiction. That is Canada’s point. He says that when he realized there was no Superman, he was filled with dread.

That's how a "centrist" describes our schools. I prefer facts:

8th Grade NAEP scores

Yes, Al, there are bad schools in NJ. But, as a state, we are awfully high up the food chain. Saying, "Well, some schools are good; some are bad" doesn't really give an accurate picture.

The deck is stacked against public schools for many reasons. Some are controllable. Christie’s war on teacher unions may result in more flexible contracts and in work practices that retain the best teachers.

And it may also drive the best and the brightest out of the profession, and unfairly punish teachers using an evaluation system that every expert who has studied the issue says is riddled with flaws.

But why does Christie get the benefit of the doubt at all? Don't you read the paper, Al?

Our children do not need Superman. They need Clark Kent. They need a mild-mannered regular guy or gal to argue with teachers and administrators, to push other parents to become involved in school activities, and most important, our children need us to push them.

Aside from the incoherence of this sentence, why does Doblin assume that it would be good for students to have more people arguing with teachers? Is he, once again, ascribing good faith to those who are bashing teachers when little is actually there?

This is Doblin: yes, there are great teachers, but we need to argue with them. It's a "centrist" position, right in the soft, squishy middle, so it must be wise...

Al Doblin (staff photo)

Doblin's Soft, Squishy Center

I obviously have a problem with the Pitchfork Bob Ingle-types of the media who cheerlead Chris Christie while demonizing public workers.

But, in many ways, I have an even bigger problem with so-called "centrists" like Al Doblin. Too often, they try to split it down the middle, affecting a posture that they are being "fair" to both sides. They equate that "fairness" with "wisdom": if we can find fault with both sides, we can then say that the truth lies in the middle ground between them.

The obvious problem with this attitude is that, in many (if not most) cases, both sides don't have equally valid arguments. Rather than calling out mendacity, the Doblins instead attempt to balance a scale that's already fixed.

Case in point: Doblin's column in today's Record:

A “Patterson,” named after state Supreme Court nominee Anne Patterson, whose nomination has been held up by Sweeney, is when a legislator refuses to do his or her job all in the name of politics. Sweeney may claim that it is all in the name of good government, and if two wrongs do indeed make a right, then I guess it is. 

In the case of the first “Patterson,” Christie should have renominated Justice John Wallace to the high court, but he didn’t. 

Sweeney remains miffed and intends to block hearings for any and all Christie high court picks until he gets satisfaction. Unlikely. Christie is a fan of Bruce Springsteen, not the Rolling Stones. Obstructionism isn’t attractive when worn by congressional Republicans. It doesn’t look any better on a South Jersey Democrat.

So here we have a Doblin equivalence: unnamed obstructionism by national Republicans is the same as Sweeney holding up Patterson's nomination.

Except it's kind of hard to judge the merits of Doblin's case when he won't tell us exactly what Republican obstruction he's talking about. Could it be holding up unemployment insurance? Is Doblin prepared to say that Sweeney's reaction to Christie's blatant disregard for precedence and shameless attempt to politicize the court is equivalent to withholding much-needed help to millions of Americans who can't find a job?

Here's another bizarre comparison from Doblin:

The state’s pension fund is underfunded for two reasons: One, the state had stopped making payments until former Gov. Jon Corzine took action. Two, the Legislature during Donald DiFrancesco’s short tenure as governor lowered the retirement age and changed the formula for calculating pension benefits. The latter was the proverbial iceberg.

But is each action the same? How much can we attribute to the increase in benefits, and how much to the  lack of funding by the state? Isn't this necessary information for us to make an informed decision? Why isn't Doblin looking for the answer?

And more false equivalence:

The fundamental problem with the state’s pension system is that promises were made that could never be kept. State workers believed union representatives and public officials when they were told that new contracts that increased pension and retirement benefits would be there when expected.

Since when are union officials responsible for the failure of Trenton to make its pension payments? Granted, I would certainly have liked it if the union had leaned a lot harder on the state to make the payments, but is Doblin seriously suggesting the unions should have backed off from getting their members what they deserved? Especially since public workers make considerably less than private workers of the same experience and education?

But here's the one that really kills me:

Christie is correct: Pumping money into a fundamentally flawed system is not sound public policy. Sweeney is correct that public workers no longer trust state government and need to see the state putting some cash back into the fund. 

But Sweeney is wrong in blocking needed reforms – reforms many Democrats would support – until Christie blinks. This is not the time for ultimatums.

The "fundamental flaw" in the system is that no one has been pumping ANY money into it!

To paraphrase Paul Krugman: if you go on a diet, cheat, and then don't lose weight, don't blame the diet. And don't use that as an excuse to keep cheating! You didn't lose weight because you didn't follow the diet; the pensions are in a mess because the state didn't put the money it was supposed to into them.

As to blocking these "reforms" - let's call them what they really are: benefit cuts that were promised to public workers in lieu of appropriate salaries. The fact that "centrists" like Doblin won't even entertain the possibility of raising taxes on the corporations and wealthy who have enjoyed a huge, wet, regressive tax kiss for the last 30 years speaks volumes about where our discourse is right now.

But bankruptcy is unlikely and a two-tier system dividing current and future employees will not save the sinking ship. It is going to take bold action. The state’s pension fund liabilities are the result of weak-willed public officials’ inability to say no to unions in 2001.

"Bold" my ass. These actions are craven, cowardly, and immoral. The "bold" action would be to stand up and say the state needs to fulfill its obligations, and the people who should pay are the ones who got a free ride during the pension holiday: the wealthy who benefit from our insane addiction to regressive property taxes.

Again: The taxpayer earning the average salary ($54K) in NJ pays around 8.6% in total state and local taxes. The top 1% - who average an income of $2.2 million - pay 7.4% (2007 numbers). Confronting this statistic would truly be "bold."

One other simple question: if NJ had made all of its payments, how big would the liability be today? Anyone at the Record working on that? Or are we content to just keep finding that gooey, squishy middle?

Al Doblin (staff photo)

Return of the Mallomar!

Al Doblin: The NJEA is never right about anything, even when they're right about something!

State legislators are not supposed to find public funding for Catholic schools. This is crossing the line of separation between church and state. And it makes it very clear that the bill is not about school choice at all.
Oddly enough, Lesniak, who has been a loud advocate for same-sex marriage and non-discrimination based on sexual orientation, is looking to hand over tax dollars to institutions that can legally discriminate if a policy is contrary to its beliefs.
How frank a discussion will there be about safe sex in urban Catholic high schools? What are the odds that a gay/lesbian alliance would be permitted as a club in a Catholic school? Why should public funds be used to teach children that Jesus was the Messiah, or if a parent wanted their child in a yeshiva, that the Messiah has not arrived? When did the Messiah become part of a “thorough and efficient education”?
Meanwhile the New Jersey Education Association continues to do itself no favors by not seeing past its nose. No one believes the NJEA’s sole complaint with the bill is that vouchers will undermine public education. Private schools do not have to hire unionized teachers. Vouchers also undermine the NJEA. The NJEA needs to play on a higher plane.
Vouchers do not just undermine public schools; vouchers elevate faith-based schools with public dollars. Forget about teacher contracts. Talk about the Constitution.

See, the NJEA should not be advocating for the unionization of teachers, even though that's their job and unionization gives teachers better pay, benefits, and working conditions.

No, they should be constitutional scholars! Duh! Of course, Doblin makes the same argument as the NJEA later - that tax dollars shouldn't be diverted from public schools. But it's different because...uh...

Well, it is. Or something.

Even when the union comes down on the same side of an issue as Doblin, he still slams them, because he MUST appear to be in the soft, squishy, impartial middle...

Al Doblin (staff photo)

Al Doblin Gets It All Wrong

Zombie lies - you can't kill them over at the Record:

The state's failure to supply a correct budget number on one page of a 1,000-page application has been made a cause célèbre....The notion that the omission of one budget number was the ultimate deal-breaker for Race to the Top funds is pure spin.

It is indeed - just not the way Al Doblin thinks it is.

That "error" was not just a budget number someone forgot to add; it was a deliberate rewrite in an attempt to remake the image of Christie as something less than the greatest threat to public education this state has ever seen.

Pundits like Doblin need to see this for what it really is. Christie reneged on a deal Schundler made with the NJEA because a talk radio DJ told him to. His staff then deliberately changed the answer to a specific question to make it look like Christie was increasing school support, when, of course, he has slashed it like no other governor before him.

The legislature's hearings have got to make this point crystal clear, so even partisans like Doblin can't ignore it.

Mallomar Update

Haven't checked in for a while on the soft, squishy center that is Al Doblin:

Lonegan once drove through The Record’s Hackensack parking lot in a vehicle towing a large fake pig. The pig symbolized excessive government spending. If he brings the pig down to a rally peppered with Wisconsin natives sporting foam cheddar hats, it could be ham and cheese for all.

Can you believe he gets paid to write stuff like this?

No doubt some of the anti-union gubernatorial actions are designed not to reduce budgets as much as to destroy unions. But for all of Christie’s anti-union bluster, he is advocating for reasonable reforms. 

“I propose that by 2014, the state should pay 70 percent of the cost of employee health benefits, and the employee should pay 30 percent,” Christie said Tuesday.

Is it "reasonable" to ask every teacher in the state to take a 12% - 20% pay cut? Because that's what we're talking about here, Al. Let's not hide behind the term "benefit reforms" - these are teacher pay cuts, straight up.

All across America, anti-unionism is growing. Some of it is pure envy. More Americans are finding themselves without pensions and affordable health care. They want what public workers have and if they can’t have that, neither should public workers. But some of the push-back isn’t petty. It’s math. 

Property taxes, as they say in New York, are “too damn high.” Whether pension and health benefits for public employees are too generous or not does not matter. They are financially unsustainable. That’s the essence of Christie’s speech. 

Dear lord, that's such a shallow understanding of this entire issue. Americans are paying historically low taxes, but the middle class is still getting squeezed because all of the gains of the past 20 years have gone to the top 1%. Basing so much of our revenue stream on property taxes feeds into this, because property taxes are so regressive.

The "essence" of Christie's speech fails to address these very basic facts. You would think a journalist like Doblin would believe that part of his job is to inform his readers of these facts so they can make informed decisions about the merits of Christie's plan.

Instead, he fills his column with this tripe:

Americans have heard governors speak. They have heard unions speak. They have not heard themselves. As the debates spread from state to state to state, it is time for all the people who are not governors, legislators, union leaders, public employees or relations of the brothers Koch to realize they, too, have a voice.

Wow - the people should realize they have a voice. What an insight...

Al Doblin (staff photo)

More "What Is Lobbying?"

Soft, squishy centrist Al Doblin loves to create equivalencies:

At the same time the NJEA was spending large, many state Democrats, the traditional allies of the NJEA, were labeling a Christie-focused advocacy organization, Reform New Jersey, as a shadowy arm of the governor. Reform Jersey Now’s leadership, with its close ties to Christie, was raising large amounts of money. The group disbanded at the end of last year, finally revealing its donors. But despite the heavy hitters, the organization’s cash reach amounted to a box of Goobers compared to the NJEA’s cash stash. Reform Jersey Now spent $403,000 on mass communication lobbying 

The NJEA spent $6.6 million while Reform Jersey Now spent $403,000. That’s more than a 10-1 advantage for the NJEA. It is hard to sympathize with the NJEA’s cries of Christie abuse. It’s like an elephant complaining after squashing a circus clown that a red rubber nose is stuck in its toes.

The NJEA is a model of transparency compared to Reform Jersey Now. The comparison between the union and Christie's shadow government is specious, as even Doblin admits:

It is not a level playing field. Christie, as governor, can get lots of prime media time free. Major networks are lining up to have the governor on their talk shows. NJEA President Barbara Keshishian would be lucky to get a 15-second spot in an Earl Scheib commercial airing at 2 a.m.

NJEA has to pay to get a voice in the debate, while Christie gets his huge megaphone for free. But, somehow, that's NJEA's fault.

Sorry, Al but it's really your fault - yours and your fellow travelers in the press. If the NJEA was really getting an equal say in the press during this debate, they wouldn't have to buy air time: they would just make their case on Morning Joe and Fox News and Face The Nation and the lead paragraphs in the Record and in all of the other outlets Christie has access to but are denied to the NJEA.

Again: there's lobbying, and then there's lobbying. NJEA buying media time to counter Christie's message hardly strikes me as an ethical concern; especially when pundits like yourself write things like this:

Public education is not deodorant. It is not a packaged commodity with a set number of ingredients. It is constantly changing. Education actually is rocket science. But instead of scientists, we have lobbyists, fund-raisers and elected officials telling everyone how to fix something they have not a clue how to construct.

Teachers know how to construct it. And we should be listening to them. But when a governor uses his bully pulpit to denigrate teachers, and journalists happily give him the platform with minimal challenges, you can't equate that with the teachers buying air time to fight back. It's the same old soft, squishy middle  that refuses to see the inequity in the entire situation.

Al Doblin (staff photo)

Courage Under Fire

All class, once again:

Bucking decades of tradition, New Jersey’s acting education commissioner has declined an invitation to address the state’s largest teachers union at its annual convention in Atlantic City this week. 

The acting commissioner, Rochelle Hendricks, told Barbara Keshishian, president of the New Jersey Education Association, in a letter dated Monday that she was declining the union’s invitation to speak at the convention because the union is resistant to “fundamental change.” The convention opens today and runs through Friday. 

[...]

Christie fired his education commissioner, Bret Schundler, in August after a clerical error cost the state $400 million in federal education grant money. Schundler later testified that Christie forbade him from submitting an application that the NJEA had endorsed, saying that he could not “cave in” to the union. The union’s endorsement would have earned the state enough points to qualify for the grant money in spite of the clerical error.

So, the NJEA won't work with the Christie administration, except when they do.

Just last week, Christie appointed nine people to serve on a task force charged with finding ways to use student achievement and other criteria to evaluate teachers and principals. No one was appointed to represent the NJEA, although the task force does have one representative from the much smaller American Federation of Teachers New Jersey, which represents about 30,000 teachers.

So, the NJEA needs to work with the Christie administration, but has been excluded by Christie from working with the administration.

Hendricks noted in her letter to Keshishian that “New Jersey schools are led by some of the finest, most talented teachers in the nation.” But she chided the union for its refusal to consent to changes that would tie teacher tenure to student performance.

So, NJ has great teachers, but they need to give up tenure on the basis of an evaluation system that they won't have a say in creating.

In a near future edition of the Record, I'm sure Al Doblin will say that it is up to both sides to put aside their differences and come together...

The Record's Al Doblin (staff photo)

Doblin Starts To Gets It

I've been pretty tough on Al Doblin in the past. And I think he's deserved it. But I also think he's starting to understand the real dynamic of what's going on:

Starting over means not just closing these schools, but doing away with teacher tenure and replacing it with merit pay attached to student performance. It also means opening more charter schools. Blocking the way is the New Jersey Education Association, according to Christie. The NJEA is the Big Bad Wolf. 

Maybe there is some truth to that, but there isn’t just one wolf bearing its teeth on the path to grandma’s high-property-taxed house. Let’s face it: Chris Christie isn’t Little Red Riding Hood. 

Two hundred failing schools is unacceptable. But the state Department of Education’s website lists a total of 2,485 schools in New Jersey. That means less than 10 percent are failing. It would seem that the majority of schools, and the teachers inside them, are doing rather well. No doubt, students in failing schools can take little solace in that. 

I agree 100 percent with the governor about tenure. I do not believe in guaranteed jobs for life. I do not accept the notion that the current form of tenure allows for the removal of poor-performing teachers. But eliminating tenure without having a viable alternative that does not leave teachers vulnerable to the whims of angry parents and school board members with agendas is equally unacceptable.

Read the whole thing. Unfortunately, while he's starting to catch on, he's not quite there yet:

The governor can close every poor performing school in New Jersey tomorrow and replace them with a charter school and there will still be failing schools because if those schools are required to teach everybody, they will have some students who will not get with the program. And if these charter schools toss out the students who do not meet their schools’ criteria, where do these students land? 

There is a reason – a reason more complex than tenure – for failing schools. Schools don’t fail in Glen Rock, Ridgewood and Mendham for a reason and it has nothing to do with tenure. It’s stability. It’s parents. It’s safety. It’s many, many things.

The leadership of the NJEA remains a good target because it has been inflexible. It has put its interests ahead of it members. But less than 10 percent of the schools in New Jersey are chronically failing. If teachers, and yes, the NJEA, are to blame for 200 failing schools, they are also responsible for 2,285 schools that are succeeding. 

Al, if you're going to make that charge - serious one - against the NJEA, you'd better back it up. If you don't, you're still playing the "one-side/other-side" game. That may be nice for style points, but, as you are starting to understand, it's not necessarily the truth.

Until you acknowledge that, you're still stuck in the soft, squishy middle:

Teacher Pay Obsession

The obsession with teacher pay continues. First, Al Doblin:

The new teacher increase averages represent the lowest since the school boards group began collecting data 30 years ago. 

In many ways, it is heartening to see teachers unions stepping up to the plate, realizing that the economy is only slowly improving, that taxpayers are tapped out and that state and local public coffers are running short of money.

And yet, many other teachers unions should be following suit. 

According to the school boards group data, only 42 of the more than 600 teacher bargaining units across the state agreed to one-year pay freezes, including a handful of districts in North Jersey. When administrators and support staff are included, there were 140 districts in which staff agreed to concessions and/or freezes. Those concessions varied across the board, ranging from higher health care copayments to adjustments in step raises to tuition reimbursement.

Yes, it's "heartening" that teachers, who make 2/3 of the money as similar workers for 5/6 of the work, are getting such small raises. It's about time they understand that the richest country on the planet can't afford to give out raises that barely outpace inflation to middle class workers - especially if we're to keep income inequity so high.

And yet to help avoid future job cuts among public employees, we would encourage more unions and their leaders to consider givebacks and concessions or agree to smaller raises, if not outright freezes in salary. Given these trying economic times for so many New Jerseyans, it seems the least they can do.

Because the 1.5% you gave up this year for your health care and the inevitable hits you're going to take on your pension and the fact that you historically have gotten raises less than the average worker in NJ just isn't enough.

I must have missed Doblin's call for corporations and millionaires to make similar sacrifices; it must be in there somewhere...

We also have some more noise from the wingnut-welfare gravy train - this time, it's the AEI boxcar:

According to data from the New Jersey teachers pension plan, the average teacher in New Jersey receives a salary of around $68,000 (see page 46 of this report). A household of two teachers would have a combined income of $136,000, giving them roughly twice the earnings of the typical New Jersey household of around $70,000.

Yeah, uh, hello? Who said you could just conjecture a two-teacher household for your comparison, with both making the average salary? Can we double your salary to compare the relative worth of right-wing shills?

That’s pretty significant, since the typical teacher doesn’t come into the workforce with a particularly outstanding academic background. The average individual entering teaching school has only slightly higher than average SAT scores (about 1050 versus the national average of around 1015)...

Teachers have higher than average SATs. Which don't predict teaching success, but keep that in mind anyway.

...and if better-qualified teachers disproportionately leave the profession it’s not hard to imagine the typical practicing teacher having lower academic qualifications than the people they are teaching.

That's a really big 'if" don't you think? And the people they are teaching are kids, dude - they don't have academic qualifications. Unless you want to compare SAT scores of students to their teachers; but then, not everybody takes the SAT, do they?

Despite having only average academic qualifications going into teaching school, in New Jersey teachers receive about twice the average salary.

Twice the salary if you include people who don't have college degrees! Again: 2/3 of the pay, 5/6 of the work. For people with above average SATs.

Finally, here’s the real kicker: despite the fact that Krugman’s post was intended to debunk the idea of Cadillac-driving schoolteachers, a couple made up of New Jersey school teachers, with a combined income of around $136,000, would have a higher household income than the typical Cadillac buyer, around $129,000.

I swear he wrote that - no really, he did.

AEI Scholars Roundtable

Zombie Lies

They don't die at the Bergen Record, thanks to Al Doblin:

Alissa Ploshnick attended a New Jersey Education Association-sponsored conference this summer and had the misfortune of speaking with an apparent minion of James O’Keefe. If Ploshnick had known she was speaking with someone who was secretly filming her, she might have walked away. 

O’Keefe, who first made a name for himself by going undercover and exposing abuses inside ACORN offices, fancies himself a journalist. There’s no law against self-delusion. I’m not sure that there isn’t one that protects average citizens from being recorded and videoed without their knowledge while relaxing in a bar.

Al - there were no abuses inside ACORN offices:

Echoing the recent report of the Kings County, NY, District Attorney who completed a five-month probe finding "no criminality" seen in video tapes secretly taken of low-level ACORN and ACORN Housing workers last year in New York, California's Attorney General has now reached a similar conclusion regarding videos recorded in three different cities in the Golden State last Summer, according to a report released today which finds the workers "committed no violation of criminal law." 

While describing "highly inappropriate behavior" by some of the workers caught on secret video tapes made by Rightwing activists, CA AG Jerry Brown's report finds that "the evidence does not show that the ACORN employees in California violated state criminal laws in connection with their conversations" with activists posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend.

Breitbart is a journalist... Breitbart is a journalist...

It's Getting Worse

While I was down and out in the blogging game, a lot happened to the NJ education system:

- Christie is hard selling his elixir of educational snake-oil, consisting of charter schools and tenure reform. I won't bore you with another bazillion links to how charter schools do not do a better job than regular schools - I will only point out, once again, that if you liked privatizing our military, your gonna love sending your kids to Halliburton High.

- The tenure thing is so transparently a non-issue that it's almost embarrassing to watch the politicians and the punditocracy make such a big deal about it. Remember, 50% of teachers leave the field in the first five years - that indicates some quality control, don't you think?

In any case, let's suppose you go ahead and fire all those "bad teachers" - who's going to take their place? Christie says he wants to cut the bottom 5% - do we have an extra 6,000 teachers ready to go?

And since he's proposing to cut teacher pay by a good 10% with his insane health insurance and pension proposals, does he think there are going to be lots and lots of well-qualified college kids lining up to enter the field?

- Of course, tenure is a protection not primarily for teachers, but for schools - it's designed to keep politics out of the classroom by removing the temptation to turn teaching positions into patronage jobs. How does Christie assure us that he's not going to let that happen if we remove tenure? By firing seven county superintendents for apparently no reason other than he wants his own toadies in the slots.

Al Doblin, of all people, gets it right:

School budgets and superintendent contracts are currently micro-managed by state-appointed executive county superintendents. As a parting New Year’s gift, seven of these county superintendents read last week by e-mail, no less, that “Your last work day is today.” 

Their three-year contracts expired at the end of the year — last Friday. These superintendents, whether they represented the previous Corzine administration’s priorities rather than Christie’s, deserved to know months in advance whether their jobs would continue. Clearly, civility isn’t one of the things being reformed now or soon in New Jersey. 

Personally, I would do away with much, if not all, of county government. Home rule is so entrenched in the culture of New Jersey that it is impossible to eliminate local municipalities. But there is little lasting love for county government from anyone other than the local political power brokers who control much of state government and ensure that their sycophants have appointed and/or elected offices. 

The governor is not planning to dismantle county government. He is intent on creating chaos in public schools. He has demoralized teachers, castigated the NJEA, publicly humiliated his now-former education commissioner and selectively targeted district superintendents’ salaries, while leaving other higher-paid state employees in the clear. 

Now he has undermined the worth of county superintendents, leaving a third of the state’s counties without one.

Al, I take back all those Mallomar pictures.

- If you needed more proof that Christie intends to politicize education, look no further than his "special" guest at the State of the State: Michele Rhee. A political hack and a fraud, Rhee's self-serving nonsense perfectly mirrors Christie's: they both claim wild success without having accomplished one blessed thing. For Rhee, that means claiming your teacher evaluation policies caused test scores to rise, when they haven't even been implemented for a year; for Christie, it's claiming you balanced the budget without raising taxes, when, in fact, you didn't balance the budget and you merely pushed tax increases to the towns and schools.

These two are peas in a pod, and they are the future of both education "reform" and modern conservatism: vanity, ignorance, greed, and brazen claims of success when none exists. We've seen this before:

- Which brings us to trashing of the requirements to become a superintendent. Christie seriously thinks it's a good idea to have teachers be supervised by people who aren't educators:

"Good candidates are discouraged from applying to be school superintendents because New Jersey's regulations are unnecessarily burdensome," Hendricks said. "We need to open the doors of our public schools and let successful people with proven track records help us reform and rebuild schools where strong leadership and new ideas are needed the most."

Which is why capping their pay is so important. Because if you want the best and the brightest, dumb down the requirements for the job and lower the pay!

(It amazes me they can put this nonsense out there with a straight face - but, hey, if the press doesn't bother to point out the huge holes in the logic, why would they worry about it?)

Again, this is right out of the Bush playbook: set the standards for your lieutenants low enough, and you'll have plenty of boot-lickers around to do your dirty work. And it doesn't hurt that this sets the stage for lowering the requirements to be a principal and, eventually, a teacher.

- As if enough hasn't happened, Abbott got sent back to a lower court for "fact finding":

Christie’s office said his cuts were necessary to close a deep budget gap and were made equitably across all districts. Spokesman Michael Drewniak reiterated the governor's State of the State address, calling the court’s edicts part of the "failed education and funding policies of the past.”

"The Governor pointed to the continued achievement gap between students in urban vs. suburban districts, despite the massive infusions of funding and per-pupil cost in some districts," said Drewniak.

I'll point you to the inimitable Bruce Baker to dispel the spin that we are shoveling money at our schools:

Typically, state school finance systems have not kept up with the true increased costs of maintaining teacher quality, increased outcome demands or changing student demography. Nor have states sufficiently targeted resources to districts facing the highest costs of achieving desired outcomes. Seewww.schoolfundingfairness.org. And many states, with significantly changing demography including Arizona, California and Colorado have merely maintained or even cut current spending levels for decades (despite what would be increased costs of even maintaining current outcome levels).

Evaluating education spending solely on the basis of changes in the price of a loaf of bread and/or gallon of gasoline is, well, silly.

Notably, we may identify new “efficiencies” that allow us to produce comparable outcomes, with comparable kids at lower cost. We may find some of those efficiencies through existing variation across schools and districts, or through new experimentation. But it is downright foolish to pretend that those efficiencies are simply out there (even if we can’t see them, or don’t know them) and we can simply squeeze the current system into achieving comparable or better outcomes at lower cost.

In the wake of this, Christie predictably used the holiday to push his nonsense in the name of Dr. King:

"I truly believe if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were with us today, as he worked toward economic opportunity and voting rights and civil rights, he would recognize it's education opportunity which is defining how we bring hope to this next generation of our citizens," Christie said.

Yes, if there's anything Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for, it was breaking unions, removing political protections for civil servants, taking money away from public schools to use in charter schools that encourage the segregation of the poor, overturning decisions that bring more money to urban schools serving black kids, and encouraging a climate of disrespect to both your political opponents and union members.

Chris Christie, like Dr. King, is a true champion of the poor and oppressed. Which is why they voted in such large numbers for him...

Kiryas Joel, NJ

Our governor hates it when kids miss class - except for photo-ops. So he rolled on down to Robert Treat Academy (which Al Doblin quite funnily calls NJ's "Lourdes," as all politicians apparently now have to make a pilgrimage there) to announce a whole bunch of new charter schools. Oh, joy...

I'll first point out the SL coverage cites Jeanette Rundquist's awful story on how well charters perform compared to neighborhood schools - a story that neglected to mention charters have far fewer kids who are in poverty, speak English as a second language, or as classified as special education students.

But there's another link: the list of schools approved to become charters. Not very adequate in terms of telling us who's going to be running these schools and how they're proposing to do it, but one did jump out at me:

Shalom: K-8 (240) Englewood, Teaneck – Bergen County
This application presents a plan for an academically rigorous, Hebrew language immersion program.

A Hebrew immersion school. Well, I'm sure all the First Graders there will easily separate the academic study of the Torah as a piece of literature from any religious indoctrination. Just like they do in Kiryas Joel, NY.

Hey, when are they opening an Arabic immersion school?

Splitting Hairs

I'll get back to this article by Al Doblin later, but let me just weigh in on this:

Last week, Governor Christie and I went back-and-forth on public education during an editorial board meeting with The Record. The governor corrected me when I said the state was constitutionally required to provide a thorough and efficient education. New Jersey must provide a thorough and efficient system of public education, he said.

Can I just point out that this rhetorical splitting of hairs is just about the stupidest aspect of our ongoing education debate here in New Jersey?

Is anyone saying that the NJ Constitution allows a child to get an education that isn't thorough and efficient, as long as the system is thorough and efficient? Do you think this distinction was very important to the writers of this clause?

Pundits like Paul Mulshine love to use this distinction to denigrate the Abbott decision. Leave aside the fact that Abbott isn't even an issue anymore; attaching importance to whether the word "system" is in the quote is simply ridiculous.

A thorough and efficient system provides a thorough and efficient education to all students. How hard is it to figure that out?

disgRace To The Top

The spin was fast and furious yesterday in the aftermath of the Christie Administration's debacle of losing out on $400 million dollars in Race To The Top funds. But, as is all too typical, the real story was lost in the blizzard of accusations and blame.

Chris Christie insisted on changes to the RTTT application - changes that led to the costly error - because of the rantings of a radio personality. By any objective reading, the changes were deliberate and were made to obscure the reality of Christie's cuts to education.

In other words: Christie lost the RTTT funds because he insisted on using the application as a political tool. Contrary to what some opinion brokers may have us believe, this was solely and completely the governor's fault, and it reflects on his twisted priority of putting politics before the children of our state.

A review of the events is in order:

This past spring, the teachers union negotiated, in good faith, an agreement with Education Commissioner Bret Schundler that produced an RTTT application that both sides could agree on. But radio personality Jim Gearhart of NJ 101.5 - a consistent critic of the NJEA ("New Jersey Extortion Association" is his idea of wit) - objected to the deal and blasted Christie publicly. This prompted Christie to immediately denounce the deal, embarrass Schundler, and order a hasty rewrite of the application without the consent of the NJEA.

There's little doubt that Gearhart's rant was the impetus for Christie's reneging on the deal; he went on Gearhart's show immediately afterward and apologized for making the original deal with the union. Nor is there any doubt Christie himself insisted on rewriting the application: he publicly embarrassed Schundler and thoroughly distanced himself from the original application.

The NJEA has released the original application, and it's clear the error was created during the hurried rewrite by Christie's staff over the Memorial Day weekend. But it's wrong to describe the error as "clerical": this wasn't the case of putting an answer in the wrong place on the form.

As dennismcgrath at Blue Jersey has shown, the error is unquestionably deliberate. The original text from the application agreed to by the NJEA and Schundler is nowhere to be found in the final version, and the incorrect answer from the new text is nowhere to be found in the NJEA draft. This was not a cut-and-paste mistake.

Comparing the two answers makes clear why Christie insisted the original, correct answer be changed. Here's the question on the application:

Q: The extent to which— (i) The percentage of the total revenues available to the State (as defined in this notice) that were used to support elementary, secondary, and public higher education for FY 2009 was greater than or equal to the percentage of the total revenues available to the State (as defined in this notice) that were used to support elementary, secondary, and public higher education for FY 2008

This is a technical question designed to gauge what Rutgers professor Bruce Baker calls "essential preconditions." Here's the original, correct answer:

New Jersey increased its state percentage of spending on education from 36.9% in 2008 to 39.6% in 2009. In 2010, despite huge budget shortfalls, the Governor increased the education budget by 2.4%. ($238 million.) The New Jersey legislature remains committed to funding education even though almost every other area of state spending has been cut. Education appropriations for the 2011 budget show an overall decrease of 7.7% because of the impact of the one-time ARRA funds used to support the state. Despite severe fiscal challenges, the leadership in the state of New Jersey remains committed to education and has demonstrated it in their funding of the 2011 proposed budget. (emphasis mine)

And here's the new, incorrect answer:

In fiscal year 2011, despite huge budget strains, the Governor is proposing an increase in state revenue-based support for education by 2.2% ($238 million). As proposed, preschool-12 education spending as a percentage of the state budget will be 35.4%. Federal ARRA funding will not be available to school districts in FY 2011, but the Governor and the executive team remain committed to funding education even as state revenue-based support for most other areas of state spending has been cut. This demonstrates that, despite severe fiscal challenges, the leadership in the state of New Jersey remains committed to education. (emphasis mine)

Notice the change? The correct answer shows a pattern of increases disrupted by a decrease. The incorrect answer shows no such pattern. Further, the correct answer refers to the size of the budget, while the incorrect answer refers to the size of "state revenue-based support," omitting the federal stimulus funds NJ has used up.

In an Orwellian twist, Christie actually uses this answer as a chance to paint himself as a leader who is increasing educational spending - this depsite the fact that he has spent the past year slashing $1.3 billion dollars from school district budgets.

(It's worth pointing out that Christie's total cuts in K-12 education this past year equaled $1.3 billion. Even if the $1 billion in ARRA stimulus funds Jon Corzine used to stabilize state aid in 2009 had been divided between evenly 2009 and 2010, Christie would still have presided over an education cut of $800 million.)

And yet, in spite of all this, many in the media insist that there is blame to go around. Bob Braun at the Star-Ledger, for example, quotes Joseph DePierro, dean of the College of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall University :

"Both the governor and the NJEA need to accept responsibility for the outcome."

Some continue to insist, despite the evidence, that this was an innocuous "clerical" error, but the NJEA still bears responsibility, like Al Doblin at the Record:

A clerical error on past school funding cost the state five points.... The state may have gained the lost five points if the NJEA-approved version had been submitted, assuming the clerical error did not originate in that version, but would have lost points in other places. 

Further, a quick survey of the reporting - The NY Times, The Star-Ledger, The Courier Post, The Record - shows that the Gearhart connection has disappeared from the narrative. The question of why Christie made this sudden u-turn is not even broached, let alone answered.

And now we have video that flies in direct contradiction to Christie's attempts to deflect blame off of himself and on to the Obama administration. All evidence suggests that he himself is to blame for this mess, and his motivation was purely political.

There are three important lessons to be learned here:

1) Chris Christie, like almost every other Republican these days, is a slave to his talk-radio-lovin', tea-gulpin' base. If a radio DJ tells him to do something, he'll do it, even if it means embarrassing his staff and breaking his word.

2) Chris Christie will always put his own political ends above policy - even policy he espouses. He will sell out the children of this state to tell a pleasing story about himself, even when that story is nothing more than a twisting of the facts.

3) In the face of overwhelming evidence of Christie's craven pandering and cowardice, the NJ media will continue to portray him as an honest actor, no better or worse than his opponents. No matter how poorly he behaves; no matter how gutless his positions; no matter what self-serving portraits he paints of himself with rose-colored facts: the media will never make him out to be any worse than those who stand in opposition to him.

In summary - we've seen this before, and this results are sure to be the same:

I'm the decider!

ADDING: To be clear: it is my opinion, as a professional educator, that Race To The Top is a terrible idea and we are better off without it.