New Jersey’s Education Cerf-dumb
In this class bludgeoning era of public education, when repression is used to silence dissent and school employee and student displacement is the new normal, anyone following predatory education reform tactics knows private money is trying to manipulate the fate of local school district business. Not exactly shocking news, but New Jersey is a case study in absurdity—backed by a private money trail as difficult to trace as it is to herd fat cats. New Jersey is an important national case study because of its proximity to New York City; its notorious former Independent mayor Michael Bloomberg; its segregated sub/urban population; its status as the home of important legal precedents in equal education; and its pro-public education activist-citizenry. In the post-Occupy era of activist malaise and low morale in the face of 1% triumphalism, there are many important lessons to be gleaned in the ongoing fight against New Jersey’s education “Cerf-dumb.”
New Jersey Commissioner of Education, Chris Cerf, is not a household name. He operates under the radar of GOP Governor Chris Christie’s scene stealing, media monopolizing, bridge-clogging antics. But we should all know about Cerf because, in many ways, his professional career parallels the trajectory of education privatization itself. This trajectory spans from Edison schools (early urban school privatizing enthusiasts), to his stint as deputy chancellor in the NYC Department of Education, to his firm Global Education Advisors, which received over $1 million of the $148 million Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg donated for Newark education reform in 2010. (The bulk of the Zuckerberg donation was managed by The Foundation for Newark’s Future, described in Forbes Magazine as a short-term philanthropic “shot in the arm” to achieve “long-term change in Newark’s schools.”)
Cerf, a 2004 graduate of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation Academy, is one of education’s important faces for public-private partnerships made in the sole interest of the 1%—and their bourgeois lackeys. But it’s difficult to track the specifics of these partnership projects despite