OPINION: GOV. CHRISTIE MISSING IN INACTION FOR 2015-2016 SCHOOL YEAR
Governor’s pursuit of GOP nomination leaves little time for his home state, and has pushed his political agenda more and more to the right
- Mark Weber
It’s time to start another school year in New Jersey! Let’s take roll and see who’s here:
Students? Rested and ready. Teachers? Present, after a summer of planning and preparation.
Parents? Here. Administrators? Here. School boards? Here.
Gov. Chris Christie?
[…]
Is Chris Christie here? Has anyone seen Gov. Christie?
[…]
Bueller?
Uh-oh. Looks like Gov. Christie won’t be around for the 2015-16 school year. And that’s a big problem -- because we have many big problems with New Jersey’s education system, and we need our governor here, ready to work on them.
But like a 17-year-old with a bad case of senioritis, Christie is living in his imaginary future, rather than concentrating on this state’s here and now. All of his policy decisions, including those related to education, are affected by his increasingly unlikely bid for the White House.
Why else would Christie, previously a stalwart defender of the Common Core State Standards, suddenly claim they weren’t working after only one year of formal implementation? Clearly, he is pandering to the national conservative base, which sees Common Core as an unwarranted federal intrusion.
Reasonable people can debate the merits of Common Core; personally, I have my doubts about its developmental appropriateness and overemphasis on language skills in its mathematics sequence. But Christie is in no way involved in a serious critique of the standards. Hamstrung by the ideologies of the primary voters he is courting, he has no choice but to bend to their will.
This need to indulge the far right is also why the governor continues to flout the law and underfund schools. According to the Education Law Center, New Jersey’s state aid to schools is, once again, far less than it should be under the School Funding Reform Act: this year, $1 billion dollars less. Over the past seven years, the accumulated underfunding comes to over $6 billion dollars.
Those who make the claim that New Jersey has “thrown money” at its schools -- like Christie -- should acknowledge that the state has not supplied schools with the money its own law says they need to provide an adequate education.
But solving this problem would require raising taxes. And any Republican presidential candidate who agrees to a tax hike has about as much chance of winning the party’s nomination as Hillary Clinton. Christie knows this, which is why he signed conservative icon Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge just last month.
So now New Jersey’s school budgets are being held hostage by right-wing politics -- as is any chance of resolving the state’s ongoing pension problems. Christie’s own Opinion: Gov. Christie Missing in Inaction for 2015-2016 School Year - NJ Spotlight:
