Lying with numbers in Newark
Here’s the core of the problem in Newark schools: Cami Anderson, Gov. Chris Christie’s agent in Newark, has the numbers that reveal how well or how poorly she is doing. No one else, including the city’s elected school board, has them. So she can make outrageous statements–like the first day of school had 90 percent attendance, as she said Tuesday night, and all the school buses ran on time–and, while everyone else believes she’s either lying or demented, or both, they have no way of disproving her.
The school board–or a majority of it because the panel is divided–is trying to force her to reveal the numbers, but there really isn’t much they can do. She is the “decider’s”– Christie’s–woman on the ground in Newark and she can tell the board members to shove it, which is what she does, but nicely. Most of the time, nicely.
A number of exchanges at Tuesday’s night’s board meeting between Anderson and board members illustrate the problem. For example, after her outrageously positive description of how well the first days of school went, Philip Seelinger, a board member from Newark’s Ironbound, described how, when he toured schools the first days of school, he saw overcrowded classrooms with 35 or more students jammed into one learning space, in violation of the city’s policy.
Anderson, who fancies herself light on her feet intellectually, immediately saw an opening. The reason, she said, was that “there always has ben overcrowding in the Ironbound” because the schools in predominantly white and relatively prosperous neighborhood are attractive to parents. So she works very hard to shoe-horn kids into the schools and, after all, parents want siblings in the same Lying with numbers in Newark | Bob Braun's Ledger: