Long-Time School Privatizer, Cory Booker Enters 2020 Race as Democratic Presidential Contender
Public education policy is not usually something on which Presidential candidates have a solid record. They make their cases on foreign, economic, and environmental policy. The future of public schools makes it into the Party platforms but rarely becomes a candidate’s make-or-break issue.
However, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who, last Friday, declared himself a Democratic candidate for President in 2020, has a long record of projects that threaten public education. Cory Booker has been a leader in the effort to privatize public education for nearly two decades.
Most recently as mayor of Newark, New Jersey from 2006-2013, he collaborated with New Jersey’s Republican Governor, Chris Christie on an idea for a charter school transformation for the city’s schools. In her 2015 book, The Prize, Dale Russakoff summarizes the Booker-Christie scheme: “One of the goals was to ‘make Newark the charter school capital of the nation.’ The plan called for an ‘infusion of philanthropic support’ to recruit teachers and principals through national school-reform organizations, build sophisticated data and accountability systems, and weaken tenure and seniority protections. Philanthropy, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending.” (The Prize, pp. 20-21) Booker was the salesman who enticed Mark Zuckerberg to pay for it all. The plan was launched in celebrity fashion when Zuckerberg presented a check for $100 million to Christie and Booker on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Even as Russakoff traces the eventual four-year failure of their scheme, her book’s topic is less about school reform than about the hubris of Cory Booker and the cruel arrogance of Chris Christie. She concludes: “For four years, the reformers never really tried to have a conversation with the people of Newark. Their target audience was always somewhere else, beyond the people whose children and grandchildren desperately needed to learn and compete for a future. Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg set out to create a national ‘proof point’ CONTINUE READING: Long-Time School Privatizer, Cory Booker Enters 2020 Race as Democratic Presidential Contender | janresseger
