Shavar Jeffries and the color of education ‘reform’
Shavar Jeffries took over last week as president of Democrats for Education Reform, the national group that represents the wing of the Democratic Party that has embraced public charter schools, merit pay, mayoral control of urban school districts and other measures at odds with another Democratic constituency, the teachers unions.
Jeffries takes the helm of DFER, founded by a group of New York City hedge fund managers to be a counterweight to the unions, at a time when the movement to change education policy has been criticized by some for being too white and elitist.
Jeffries, a 40-year-old attorney raised by his grandmother in Newark, N.J., won a scholarship in eighth grade to Seton Hall Preparatory, New Jersey’s oldest Catholic school. He went on to Duke University and Columbia Law School and was founding president of TEAM Academy, a Newark outpost of KIPP, the country’s largest public charter school network.
Jeffries also served as president of the Newark School Advisory Board, an elected body that is supposed to advise the state-appointed superintendent of the Newark Public Schools. The state seized control of the Newark public schools in 1995, citing chronic academic failure and fiscal problems. Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s failed attempt to radically remake Newark public schools, with a $100 million gift from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, has received national attention and is the subject of a current best-selling book “The Prize” by Dale Russakoff.
Jeffries unsuccessfully ran for mayor in Newark in 2014 — with backing from DFER — in a race that became a referendum on Christie’s school reform plan. Jeffries lost to Ras Baraka, a son of the radical poet Amiri Baraka and a former high school principal in Newark, who got heavy support from the Shavar Jeffries and the color of education ‘reform’ - The Washington Post:
