Ghosts of NYC past return to haunt the news: the Rise and Fall of Amplify
credit; Lindamarie
Update 9/29/15: the Observer reports an estimated two thirds of the Amplify staff were just laid off.
Many ghosts from Tweed and NYC’s education past have re-appeared in the news the past few weeks, some of them popping up in unusual places
Former NYC Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who succeeded Joel Klein and Cathy Black, was recently appointed the state monitor of E. Ramapo school board. This board is controlled by Orthodox Jews who do not send their kids to the public schools and have been accused of raiding public funds to support their religious schools.
Our former Deputy Superintendent, Chris Cerf, who left the Department of Education in 2010 to become State Education Commissioner of NJ, followed by a brief detour at Joel Klein’s Amplify, was appointed the Superintendent of Newark public schools, replacing another former DOE educrat, Cami Anderson.
While Walcott has little power and Cerf has quite a lot, they both will presumably take orders from the autocrats who appointed them – in the case of Walcott, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, and in the case of Cerf, Gov. Christie.
Walcott has to decide whether to recommend that members of E. Ramapo’s elected school board be removed for diverting public funds to private schools. Cerf has to decide whether to give power back to Newark’s elected school board, which has been impotent for twenty years (!!) while watching state appointees run their schools and divert resources to charter schools.
After a public meeting where Walcott was introduced to angry E. Ramapo public school parents, whose pleas to rescue their schools have been mostly ignored by the state, he noted that he is suited to the job, as “I have a lot of experience being yelled at.” This is surely true given the three years he spent at the helm of NYC public schools, where charter co-locations, funding cuts and a whole lot of unpopular policies were foisted on our schools.
Cami Anderson stopped attending Newark school board meetings in January 2014, because she didn’t like all the angry words hurtled at her from parents furious about her “One Newark” plan that expanded charters, closed public schools, and eliminated any right for Newark kids to attend schools in their neighborhood.
Chris Cerf, on the other hand, who was forced to sit through lots of loud and angry meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy, has promised to attend all Newark school board meetings in the future. Here’s a video of Cerf’s presentation at the first Newark board meeting, where he claims to want to return the district to local control, but then gets angry yells when he says he will keep the One Newark plan despite NYC Public School Parents: Ghosts of NYC past return to haunt the news: the Rise and Fall of Amplify:
