The financial crisis, as planned by the state, has become a political crisis in Newark
They call it reform
The crisis is at hand. The decision by Cami Anderson, appointed by Gov. Chris Christie to run the Newark schools four years ago, to cut neighborhood school budgets by an additional five percent brings closer the day, predicted by a deputy state education commissioner, when the financial crisis becomes a “political crisis”–and the political crisis results in a decision to turn the entire district over to private hands.
Andy Smarick, the former deputy commissioner, indicated that was the state’s plan. It’s also the plan outlined by his then boss, Christopher Cerf, in his “School Turnaround Proposal” (Does that word ring a bell?), funded by the Broad Foundation that would create a special “achievement school district” in which all collective bargaining contract provisions would be suspended (Can’t do it, huh? Heard anything about the inviolability of pensions, lately? Public employees now live in a free-fire zone).
Anderson’s demand that every school in Newark cut their spending plans by anywhere from $200,000 to $700,000 meets her needs–the further degradation of neighborhood schools that would allow further expansion of the privatized sector, meeting the $70 million deficit she ran up through wasteful spending on favored consultants, hopeless legal cases costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the assignment of fully paid teachers to rubber rooms, and creating a pretext for the state’s approval of a seniority waiver that is still sitting on the desk of state education Commissioner David Hespe. If Hespe signs that waiver, seniority The financial crisis, as planned by the state, has become a political crisis in Newark | Bob Braun's Ledger:
