Chris Christie and Chris Cerf: Dismantling Equity in New Jersey’s Public Schools
Late last week New Jersey Spotlight, an online news service that covers information on issues critical to New Jersey, published an opinion piece by Mark Weber, Looking Closely at the Dangerous Legacy of Commissioner Chris Cerf. Weber profiles Christopher Cerf, Governor Chris Christie’s appointed state Commissioner of Education.
One of the reasons the piece is so important is that New Jersey had so much to lose when Christie and Cerf imposed what has become known as a “corporate reform” agenda on the state’s public schools.
New Jersey is an extremely segregated state racially and economically with wealthy suburbs of New York City, beach communities along the Jersey Shore, rural truck farming communities, and cities like Newark, Camden, Jersey City and Paterson—cities that are racially segregated with extremely concentrated poverty. Last fall the Southern Education Foundation—noting that, “The nation’s cities have the highest rates of low income students in public schools. Sixty percent of the public school children in America’s cities were in low income households in 2011.”—documented that 78 percent of the school children in New Jersey’s cities are low income.
Unlike other states, however, and thanks to the decades-long efforts of the plaintiffs in Abbott v. Burke and their