Jersey Jazzman: How The Charter Cheerleading Industry Is Abetting The Destruction Of Public Schools

Jersey Jazzman: How The Charter Cheerleading Industry Is Abetting The Destruction Of Public Schools:

How The Charter Cheerleading Industry Is Abetting The Destruction Of Public Schools

Folks, I've had some real problems with Blogspot lately. For some reason, this post disappeared, and I can't finger out why. It's troubling because if I can't count on this remaining a stable platform, seven years of work is in jeopardy.

Luckily, Rosi Efthim at Blue Jersey had cross-posted this post, so I recovered what I could and moved it here. But I seem to have lost the links to graphics, and the formatting is messed up. I'll try to fix them soon.

Wordpress, you're looking better all the time...


I know I swore off wasting my time (and yours) criticizing reformy edu-bloggers. But I've been watching a back-and-forth on social media for the past few days that is such a good example of how destructive the charter cheerleading industry has become (fueled with aninsane amount of money from ideological foundations) that I have no choice but to comment.

This all started on Tuesday, July 5, when NJ Spotlight (full disclosure -- I write regularly for them) ran an excerpt of an address a graduating senior at North Star Academy Charter School gave to his classmates. Which is fine: all kids should be proud of their accomplishments and their schools (although it's a shame Spotlight has not, to my knowledge, published the excerpts of any other graduating senior's speeches -- especially students graduating in Newark).

So why does that matter? Well, this past month Governor Chris Christie proposed a radical shift in the allocation of state aid for schools -- one that would slash funding and jack up taxes in urban school districts while giving the state's wealthiest districts, already payingrelatively low effective tax rates, a huge infusion of state aid (I wrote about it for Spotlighthere).

How did Christie justify such a radical plan? Simple: if urban charter schools, like North Star, had higher graduation rates than their hosting public district schools, that then Jersey Jazzman: How The Charter Cheerleading Industry Is Abetting The Destruction Of Public Schools: