The war against critics of charter schools
Julia Sass Rubin, a tenured faculty member and researcher at Rutgers University’s Edward Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and Mark Weber, a university graduate student who blogs under the title “Jersey Jazzman,” are publishing aseries of monographs that analyze publicly available data about New Jersey’s privately-operated, publicly-funded charter schools. In response to the first installment of the series, a lobbying group, the New Jersey Charter Schools Association (NJCSA), filed state ethics charges against Rubin and sent press releases about the charges to main-stream media outlets.
The NJCSA, which has notoriously failed to police ethical lapses among its own member organizations, invoked state power to silence critics of charter schools while, at the same time, it sought to shame Rubin and Weber by using clueless media outlets to spread the smear against critics whose work is backed by hard, empirical evidence.
Because charter schools cannot refute the evidence on its merits, they have chosen to try to intimidate those who make the facts available to the public. To ruin their reputations and future job prospects.
In a New Jersey run by Chris Christie, a governor who prides himself in acting the puerile bully, the charter school lobby is aping the same behavior. Little surprise here–since charter schools have been the recipients of tens of millions of dollars in state economic development aid, doled out by Christie’s special friend, Michele Brown, a woman who once borrowed money from Christie in an unrecordedThe war against critics of charter schools | Bob Braun's Ledger:
