Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has denounced as “terrible” and “irresponsible” the decision by the Christie Administration to allow major expansion of Newark’s charter schools.
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The fear was obvious at Monday night’s school board meeting in Paterson. And sadness. Anger. Frustration. Parents tired of having children taught by substitutes, upset because sports and band and art and music are gone. Teachers and other school employees worried about their jobs and their inability to deal with out-of-control class sizes. Clergy members disheartened by knowing they are losing children to the streets. But, in Paterson, many are fighting back against budget cuts, raising their voices against the brutalizing effect of unfunded schools.
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Newark’s state-appointed schools chief Christopher Cerf has spent a lot of time lately praising the Christie Administration for increasing Newark’s state aid-“The first time in years we haven’t had flat funding,” he told the board meeting Tuesday night. Several members of the audience yelled out, “Liar!” and they were right. The extra money is part of the big Cerf/Baraka sell-out of public schools-and it is not going to the city’s public schools. It is going to charters, the favorite educational children of Christie, Cerf, and now, sadly, Mayor Ras Baraka.
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Newark’s state-appointed school superintendent Christopher Cerf set out last night to smear-and maybe destroy-the Newark Teachers Union (NTU), contending its leaders had “taken the fifth” to keep information away from a judge. The lawyer representing the union immediately denounced what Cerf said, contending his statement was “absolutely, utterly and, probably, knowingly, false.”
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Years of resistance to the state masters of Newark’s schools collapsed last night in a stunning show of the political power of the new alliance between state-appointed superintendent Christopher Cerf and Ras Baraka, the mayor whose election was due almost solely to his opposition to state control and his support from employee unions. The elected school board voted 6-2 to approve Cerf’s giveaway to the city of millions of dollars in school property-a plan endorsed by the mayor.
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Newark’s state-appointed superintendent Christopher Cerf has reached a deal with city officials to turn over 12 school district properties worth millions of dollars to the Newark Housing Authority-for nothing.
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In 2013, a time when the state-operated Newark public schools suffered from one of the highest truancy rates in the state-if not the nation-its state-appointed superintendent fired all of its attendance officers. Now, three years later, with the district experiencing an even worse absenteeism problem, an administrative law judge has ruled the system acted “in bad faith” and broke New Jersey’s truancy law.
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