John Mooney is founding editor and education writer of NJ Spotlight, an online service providing insight and information on New Jersey issues.
THE DEBATE over the performance of charter schools isn’t new in New Jersey, but it’s growing louder — and possibly more strident — with Governor Christie’s vow to expand them in number and scope.
But a related dispute also is being carried out both in and outside of the state over how to evaluate the performance of charters, an argument that pits academia against advocacy.
Over the past several months, a flurry of data has been parsed and prodded to determine how New Jersey’s 73 charter schools fare against the state’s traditional public schools. And often depending on the numbers being used, the answers have varied significantly.
The state’s charter school advocates, both inside the state Department of
Stella Serpa lives in Fort Lee. She is an administrative assistant in Columbia University Medical Center’s department of anesthesiology.
OUR STATE is on the verge of passing one of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the country. As we know, bipartisanship rarely happens in Trenton, but the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights (A-3466) was introduced with bipartisan support on Oct. 25. As I told members of the state Senate and Assembly that morning, I was not bullied for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual, and my bullying experience never brought me to the point of contemplating suicide. However, I can empathize with the emotional toll that bullying takes on people, their self-esteem and their spirit.
I grew up in a single-parent household, and my mother relied on government assistance to provide for us. My peers were aware of our situation because it showed: from the apartment I lived in, to the clothes that I wore and in the little red meal ticket that was issued to me as part of my school’s free lunch program.
Gordon MacInnes is a fellow at The Century Foundation, a non-partisan public policy research institution. From 2002 to April 2007 he served as assistant commissioner for the New Jersey Department of Education, overseeing implementation of the state Supreme Court ruling to put more money into the state’s poorest cities.
THE COUNCIL of Great City Schools represents 65 larger city school districts that enroll about every seventh student in the United States. All the big cities belong, as do many of the more urbanized county districts in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Maryland.
On Nov. 8, the CGCS released a statistics-jammed report, The Call for Change, on the educational plight of black male students (http://cgcs.org/cgcs/Call—For—