Jersey Jazzman Jammin' All Week
NJ Pays High Cost For Bad Teacher Evaluation
New Jersey's new teacher evaluation system -- code name: Operation Hindenburg -- is not cheap. Superintendents around the state have been warning us about this for a while: the costs of this inflexible system are going to impose a significant financial burden on districts, making this a wasteful, unfunded mandate.But if you don't believe me, and you don't believe these superintendents, why not lis
MAR 02
Chris Cerf's Final Spin: Mt. Olive
So yesterday was the first day of the rest of Chris Cerf's life: the former NJ Education Commissioner left his post to take a job at Amplify, the Rupert Murdoch-owned company run by former NYCDOE Chancellor (and Cerf's former boss) Joel Klein. Amplify sells tablet computers designed, among other things, to help districts prepare their students for the Common Core-based tests Cerf has pushed so vig
MAR 01
Cami Anderson's Apologists' Ignorant Arguments
Sigh...Remember when Facebook (FB) founder Mark Zuckerberg joined forces in 2011 with New Jersey’s Republican Governor Chris Christie and Newark’s Democratic Mayor Cory Booker to revive the city’s troubled public schools?They ended up selecting Cami Anderson as the city’s superintendent of schools, and two and half year later she has had some successes. She closed nearly empty schools in a city th
http://mcorfield.blogspot.com/
Rally for NJ Public Education Part 2: Stop Bashing Teachers!
Is it just me, or is everything marketed as ‘sexy’ these days? Almost every bride on every bridal reality show (Ok, I admit it, I watch them all!) wants to look sexy. (Whatever happened to classy?) Cell phones, computers, paint colors, guns, food, tools, toothpaste and a zillion more products are all marketed in some way, shape or form as sexy. I’ll bet somebody somewhere thinks it’s a good idea t
MAR 16
Rally for NJ Public Education Part l: It's the Poverty, Stupid!
This is a story about a hospital in an inner city neighborhood that serves a very high population of low-income people of color. Many don’t have the resources to properly care for themselves. Unemployment is high, and many still don’t have health insurance. A significant number live in poverty, and about one third don’t speak English as their first language. Many have seen their SNAP benefits cut
MAR 13
How does Gov. Christie sleep at night?
As governor, Chris Christie has done a lot of truly awful things to the people of New Jersey in the past 5 years, but even more egregious than promulgating the myth of ‘failing schools’, demonizing teachers and other public employees, leaving Sandy victims sinking without a life boat, calling a Navy Seal an ‘idiot’, telling the press to ‘take a bat out’ on a 78-year old grandmother (who just happe
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| http://bobbraunsledger.com/ |
Cami’s bad week
US Education Secretary Arne Duncan met last Saturday with Cami Anderson, the state-appointed superintendent of Newark schools, and suggested she might be moving too fast to privatize the city’s schools with her “One Newark” plan. To which, according to sources at the meeting, Cami told Duncan he was wrong. A few days later, just hours […]
MAR 18
Big pushback against Christie, Cami
Several hundred protesters yesterday shut down Newark’s central business district in a rush-hour demonstration aimed at showing the growing strength of the organized opposition to the Christie Administration’s “One Newark” plan that would close neighborhood public schools, expand charter school enrollment, and lay off experienced city teachers despite seniority. “We are building our movement,” s
Cami, where are the books?
It’s not the ideology. It’s not the politics. It’s not the ego (see most recent HuffPost by Cami Anderson, the overpaid tsar of Newark education). It’s not the national pundits screaming at each other over the Internet. It’s just plain incompetence and indifference to babies of all shades. This is from a teacher and it’s […]
MAR 16
Christie breaks the law. Again.
Kids get busted for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Motorists are given tickets for burned-out brake lights. Small-time stuff, not even real crimes, but the municipal courts are jammed with it. Now, how about a governor—like, say Chris Christie–who consistently flouts the law, keeping as much as $5 billion from the public schools? What […]
Data and thoughts on public and private school funding in the U.S.
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/
DFER Idiocy on New York School Finance
This may just be among the most ludicrous proclamations I’ve read in quite some time, and it’s brought to us by none other than Dimwits doofuses/doofi? …well something with a “D” For Education Reform: “Contrary to what you may hear from certain special interest groups, the best way to fix our schools is not just to pour more money into the education bureaucracy. New York already spends $75 billio
MAR 11
What really matters? Equitable & Adequate Funding!
Below is a section of a paper I’ve been working on the past few weeks (which will be presented in Philadelphia in April) Some of the content below is also drawn from: http://www.shankerinstitute.org/images/doesmoneymatter_final.pdf =============== Over the past several decades, many states have pursued substantive changes to their state school finance systems, while others have not. Some reforms h
MAR 10
What do our One Newark Reports tell us?
My doctoral student Mark Weber and I have just completed our second report evaluating the impact of the proposed One Newark plan on Newark schools, teachers and the students they serve. In this post, I will try to provide a condensed summary of our findings and the connections between the two reports. In our first report, we evaluated the statistical bases for the placement of Newark district scho