BETRAYAL, Part 2
There was hope in the spring. In March and April when the anti-privatization forces took to the streets, even in Trenton, and Wendell Steinhauer, the president of the 200,000-member New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) declared Newark’s fight was the fight of everyone who wanted to save public education. Remember that? Steinhauer even came to Newark and embraced Joe Del Grosso, the president of the rival Newark Teachers Union, and a smattering of teachers, NJEA members, from throughout the state came to Newark and marched in its streets. Then, well, nothing much happened. All the legislative efforts that might have helped the parents, children and teachers of Newark just sort of fizzled. Disappeared not with a bang, but with a whimper. All the promises made by all the fine speakers echoed away into the silence of indifference until they couldn’t be heard anymore and, once again, Newark was on its own. I’ve spoken to people in the NJEA and they’ve told me of the difficulty in getting their members to recognize Newark’s fight is their fight, too. The NJEA doesn’t represent teachers in Newark. But I also know there is much in common with the NJEA-represented teachers in Jersey City and Camden and Paterson, the other three districts taken over and now run by an incompetent state Department of Education. I think the problem is bigger than that and I was reminded by an unlikely source–the NJEA Review, its monthly magazine. Specifically, the “convention issue” that serves as a program for the big confab it hold every year in Atlantic City and for which the Legislature has carved out a special exemption for members to attend. I got my first real look at Cami Anderson, the tone deaf state superintendent of Newark schools, because of last year’s NJEA convention. That’s when she wrote a letter to Newark parents explaining her insistence that schools remain open, warning parents that crime would go up if their children were home from school. Then she denied writing the letter. I hadn’t paid too much attention to Anderson before then but I knew instantly then she was a liar and a bigot. So, this year, I paid special attention to the NJEA’s convention program–the 80-page special edition, BETRAYAL, Part 2 | Bob Braun's Ledger: