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 after anti-Cami demonstrators twice closed down the city’s central business district during rush hour, she was hosted at a dinner where she was told by a number of old friends, including former state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf and former Mayor Cory Booker, that she was moving too fast.
Now, some of this might be wishful thinking on the part of many of Cami’s critics, but the sources for the Duncan meeting are strong and knowledgeable. They tell me Duncan, generally a fan of charter schools and a critic of teacher unions, expressed concern how quickly Anderson was moving with such a complicated plan that