Newark, New Jersey school official threatens to fire one third of district’s teachers
By Rory Dean and Sandy English
20 March 2014
Newark, New Jersey Public Schools Superintendent Cami Anderson, citing falling student enrollment as well as budget shortfalls, announced her intention to lay off 1,000 of the city’s 3,200 teachers over the next three years.
Anderson has made a formal request to the New Jersey Department of Education to allow her to “make performance a key factor,” as she explained in a recent letter to teachers, in determining which teachers she will fire. Under Anderson’s plan, layoffs would first affect teachers who have been classified “ineffective,” one of four performance ratings that were established when teacher tenure laws were effectively dismantled last year, with the approval of the teachers union. As a result, seniority protection would have a minor role in determining which teachers would lose their jobs.
The public school system in Newark, the state’s largest city, has been in state receivership since 1995. Newark, like other impoverished cities in New Jersey—Camden, Jersey City and Paterson—has had its schools placed under state control based on the pretext that this would boost abysmal graduation rates and improve educational quality.
The population of Newark is just under 300,000, and approximately one-third of the city’s residents live at or below the federal poverty line. Even by the generous standards set by the federal authorities, more than half of the city’s people live in or close to poverty.
The proposed layoffs are part of Anderson’s One Newark plan, which calls for the closing of public schools and the granting of school property for the use of privately owned, publicly funded charter schools. By some estimates the plan hopes to enroll 40 percent of Newark’s 40,000 students in charter
