All in all, a system that would make Gordon Gekko proud.
IN THE IMAGE of his corporate godfathers, Governor Christie's "tool kit" approach to educational reconstruction (not reform) emulates the classic corporate hostile takeover. The correlations are unmistakable, and the sequence is typical.
Wow, guilt by association. That's just a horrible thing to do.The New Jersey Charter Schools Association seriously questions the credibility of this biased data. Rutgers University Professor Bruce Baker is closely aligned with teachers unions, which have been vocal opponents of charter schools and have a vested financial interest in their ultimate failure.Baker is a member of the Think Tank Review Panel, which is bankrolled by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Great Lakes Center members include the National Education Association and the State Education Affiliate Associations in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. Its chairman is: Lu Battaglieri, the executive director of the Michigan Education Association.There are now thousands of children on waiting lists for charters schools in New Jersey. This demand shows parents want the option of sending their children to these innovative schools and are satisfied with the results.
This feud has gotten silly. The governor can’t improve our schools by poking teachers in the eye. He needs their help. And if he would climb down from his pedestal, he might even learn something by listening to the people who work with our children every day.Wow - a real change in tone?
The latest snub came Tuesday when Rochelle Hendricks, the acting commissioner of education, rejected an invitation to speak at the union convention in Atlantic City, where several thousand teachers are gathered.What better opportunity to make the case for reform? The governor often claims that his beef is with the union leadership, not the teachers. So why turn down the single best opportunity to speak with the rank and file?
Maybe the governor is genuinely outraged that the union dares to defy him, and this was an emotional reaction. But it is more likely a calculated attempt to score political points.
Thank the overpaid union leadership for that. They refused to accept a one-year pay freeze when taxpayers needed help. And they have done all they can to protect incompetent teachers by opposing needed reforms. This gang of entitled misfits makes a perfect target for Christie.Dear lord, that's stupid. First of all, plenty of districts took a freeze, Second, the average pay raise in new contracts is down to 1.6%. Third, you can't just open up contracts illegally. Fourth, why should teachers take a freeze when millionaires got a $600 million tax gift?
So, the NJEA made "concessions," but they "oppose needed reforms"?!?!Legislature the governor wants this conflict with the teachers union to continue for political reasons.Recall that Schundler had hammered out an agreement with the teachers union before he was fired, and that the union made grudging concessions on merit pay and the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. But Christie rejected that deal and later fired Schundler. In his testimony, Schundler said the governor found it “intolerable” to be perceived as compromising with the union.
Christie apparently thinks these kids are as stupid as the punditocracy in this state - the pundits who take him at his word when he says he's not anti-teacher, he's anti-teachers union.TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie took his fight with the state’s largest teachers union directly to the kids today, telling a room full of Trenton students their schools were short on supplies because of greedy teachers union officials — not state aid cuts."There’s a lot of really great teachers in the state," said Christie. "But their union cares more about how much they get paid than they care about how well you learn."A spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association said the remark was ironic considering the governor’s April statement that teachers were using students as "drug mules" by discussing state aid cuts with them."The governor apparently has a double standard, because he claimed that teachers were using kids as drug mules," said NJEA spokesman Steve Wollmer. "Now he’s speaking directly to children about matters political."
In the final moments of Waiting for “Superman,” the children and their parents assemble in auditoriums in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley, waiting nervously to see if they will win the lottery. As the camera pans the room, you see tears rolling down the cheeks of children and adults alike, all their hopes focused on a listing of numbers or names. Many people react to the scene with their own tears, sad for the children who lose. I had a different reaction. First, I thought to myself that the charter operators were cynically using children as political pawns in their own campaign to promote their cause. (Gail Collins in The New York Times had a similar reaction and wondered why they couldn’t just send the families a letter in the mail instead of subjecting them to public rejection.) Second, I felt an immense sense of gratitude to the much-maligned American public education system, where no one has to win a lottery to gain admission.Waiting for Superman is not an indictment of public education. It is an indictment of our failed public discourse, driven by a callow, self-satisfied, ignorant, and money-grubbing media.
State Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney said this morning that some local mayors essentially have been duped into supporting Gov. Chris Christie’s proposed toolkit to aid municipalities in controlling property taxes.
“I can’t believe the mayors let themselves get bought into something that’s not going to save them,” Sweeney, D-Gloucester, said during a news conference at the Statehouse. “Because it’s not.”
Sweeney argued that civil service reform -— one of the major parts of the governor’s toolkit -— would only affect one-third of New Jersey’s municipalities.
“So how is that going to fix everything?” he asked. “It needs to be reformed, and we’re going to reform it.
He also said that, although it is needed, arbitration reform -— the process through which public contract negotiations at impasse are resolved —- would not fix all municipal budget ills either. And he added that the governor was hiding behind the toolkit as a way of deflecting blame when property taxes continue to rise.
But the TOOLKIT fixes everything! Its magical powers prevent tooth decay, make your whites even whiter, and gets 50 MPG on the highway!“These are sound bites the governor has convinced people are going to fix things, so when taxes go up again, the governor is going to say, ‘I gave them a cap. I gave them tools, and it’s their fault that taxes and spending keep going up. Don’t look at my … funding cuts to municipal aid, school aid, rebates. Don’t look at them, they had nothing to do with it. It’s the mayors’ fault.' ” Sweeney said. “This is about assigning blame and … pointing fingers.”
Congressional Democrats angered centrist school reformers, MoveOn.org-style progressives, and other party activists in Augustwhen they voted to ladle $10 billion in federal subsidies (funded from future cuts to the Food Stamp program) to school districts in order to stave off layoffs of 160,000 teachers (or just 2.6 percent of the nation's 6.2 million school employees).Liberals were angry that the money was coming out of food stamps, and not out of 10,000 other things liberals want money cut from. But if you really think liberals wanted to cut teacher jobs, you must have a screw loose.
In turn, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers poured more than $40 million of their hefty campaign war chests (including more than $15 million by the NEA in the last weeks of the election season alone) to help the Democrats keep full control of Congress.Perspective is a good thing, so let's add some: this last election cost about $4 billion. The teachers unions spent 1% of that.
The fact that NEA and AFT efforts yielded little fruit is one more sign to Democrats that their alliance with the unions -- already frayed over President Barack Obama's school reform initiatives -- is no longer of much value."Frayed"? You must be joking. Race To the Top is a worse affront to teachers than No Child Left Behind ever was. I'm going to go out on a limb here, as I am not a political pundit (thank God), but there's been plenty of conventional wisdom that the Dems took a beating because their base is demoralized. Obama's treatment of teachers is just another example.
The fact that centrist and progressive Democrats think that improving the quality of teachers is as critical a civil rights issue as integration was during the 1960s also means a long-term break is coming. The NEA and the AFT are the most obstinate opponents of teacher quality reform efforts such developing alternative teacher training programs -- especially Teach For America, a vanguard of the school reform movement -- and using student performance data to evaluate teacher performance. Last month, the Economic Policy Institute -- a think-tank cofounded by Community Reinvestment Act author Robert Kuttner that has benefited from more than $1.3 million in NEA largesse -- issued a petition against stronger teacher performance management.No one in the unions is against raising teacher quality; in fact, the unions have been at the forefront by advocating for better teacher pay, something one would think the free marketers at the Spectator would embrace.
The heavy use of VAM in a teacher evaluation system will misidentify large numbers of both effective and ineffective teachers. Leading authorities (such as the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and researchers from RAND and the Educational Testing Service and a recent Economic Policy Institute paper by a group of prominent scholars, Problems With the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers) concur that VAM is too inaccurate to be used as the primary way to evaluate teachers. Most uses of test scores in teacher evaluation, in practice, actually fall far short of the flawed VAM measures because of a lack of appropriate data and the adoption of weaker statistical methods.Why is it an anti-reform position to reject a method of teacher evaluation that every study shows will not work?
At the state level -- where the NEA and AFT have traditionally wielded even more clout -- the damage couldn't come at a worse time. President Obama's Race to the Top initiative (along with the accountability measures contained within the No Child Left Behind Act) has given school reform-minded governors of both parties cover to expand charter schools (the nation's most-successful form of school choice), and allow the use of student test score data in evaluating teacher performance.That's one hell of a claim. Where's the data to back it up? Because there is a lot that suggests the opposite is true.
Meanwhile the NEA and AFT face a longer-term threat to their influence -- the $1 trillion in lavish public pensions and retired teacher healthcare benefits that are now pressuring state budgets. New Jersey, Vermont and even New York State took small steps to force rank-and-file teachers to contribute more to their retiree benefits and retire at ages more in line with what is acceptable in the private sector. More steps will come by 2018, when states have to figure out ways to finance increasingly underfunded pensions for teachers and other state workers.Well, having government actually pay their share, just as teachers have been doing all along, would be a good start. Taxing the richest citizens, who control more of this nation's wealth than any time since the Great Depression, would help as well.
Considering that the traditional system of near-lifetime employment, degree- and salary-based pay scales and seniority privileges have done little to improve the nation's woeful public schools or attract talented people into teaching, the NEA and AFT will have difficulty defending the status quo.Our public schools are not woeful; far from it. But if you really think they are, and you think the problem is that the teacher corps isn't talented enough, I'd like to know how you think decreasing teacher pay and benefits, opening up more schools to corporate control through charters, discouraging teachers from getting advanced degrees, gutting teacher pensions, and using statistically flawed evaluation methods is actually going to help recruit a better group of teachers.
ATLANTIC CITY — At least one member of the state Board of Education today questioned whether Gov. Chris Christie pressured his education chief to reject an invitation to speak at the annual New Jersey Education Association convention in Atlantic City.[...]"She may have signed (the letter), but I honestly don’t think she wrote it," said board member Edithe Fulton, a former NJEA president who said she has known Hendricks for 25 years. "She’s between a rock and a hard place, and she serves at the pleasure of the governor. It’s unfortunate that she was not allowed, I believe, to come to this convention because she would have had wonderful things to say to our teachers."
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This really does look small and petty. I know the posters at nj.com love that stuff, but normal people have got to see this and wonder what is up with this guy.State Sen. and former Gov. Richard Codey (D-Essex) said Hendricks’ decision is a missed opportunity for the Christie administration to speak directly to teachers about its school reform agenda."I’m not sure every governor has had the support of the NJEA, but that didn’t stop them from reaching out directly to the teachers at this convention," Codey said. "If the administration thinks it has a solid case for reform that is being stopped at NJEA headquarters, then the smart move would be to have the commissioner take it directly to the rank and file."
TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie today made good on his plans to introduce rules limiting how much school superintendents are paid — an action that would shave $9.8 million off the salaries from about 360 school executives when their contracts expire.
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Under the plan, superintendents would earn no more than $125,000 in districts with no more than 250 students. Salaries would increase incrementally, based on district size, to a pay limit of $175,000 in a district with 6,501 to 10,000 students. The state education commissioner could allow a higher salary in districts with more than 10,000 students.A recent Star-Ledger review found 235 school administrators earned more than $175,000 in the 2008-09 school year.
No wonder Wall Street LOVES the charter movement.[...]The rules would not apply to charter school superintendents or executives who run private schools for disabled students funded by public dollars.
