Newark: It’s time to decide to fight or to surrender.
Newark’s leadership and its people face an extraordinary challenge in the next few weeks. They either will collapse in the face of Chris Christie’s wily plan to divide the opposition and save his phony reputation as an educational “reformer” in time for the presidential primaries–or they will stand strong and united and use whatever means are necessary to force the state to return local control to Newark, to end “One Newark,” and to dismiss Cami Anderson, the inept, arrogant, and disrespectful agent of Christie in the city.
It’s a time for individuals to make important decisions that will reverberate throughout the city–and throughout history. Choices made by a man like Ras Baraka and a woman like Marion Bolden will make a crucial difference. If they cooperate with the state and its “working group,” they will deliver the city’s schools to the forces behind Cory Booker’s dream of making the city the “charter school capital of America.” And that will lead to his feverish, corporate-fueled dream of privatizing all public education.
If they refuse to cooperate, if they refuse to bail out Christie, Anderson, and Education Commissioner David Hespe, they can achieve the return of local control, they can stop the suffering of parents caught up in “One Newark” and they can begin a nationwide roll-back of the effort to turn the $650 billion spent on education each year to private hands.
So what will it be?
The Star-Ledger’s editorial board has made its choice. It knows what will help Cami Anderson, Chris Christie, and David Hespe. Just as it opposed Baraka’s election, it now calls for a “ceasefire” against “One Newark.” Just a Newark: It’s time to decide to fight or to surrender. | Bob Braun's Ledger: