by Bob Braun -

Christie to NJ: Sit down, shut up and vote for my bro, Cory Booker

NJ's bros
NJ’s bros

What is so maddeningly frustrating about Cory Booker’s inevitable victory in tomorrow’s election for Senate is that it was engineered by a man most Democrats in New Jersey pretend to hate: Gov. Chris Christie. Without Christie, Booker would never have faced such an extraordinarily easy path to a full, six-year Senate term following a tenure as Newark’s mayor that left the city broke, bleeding, divided, and the model for how the rich and the white can reclaim a city through gentrification based on the destruction of neighborhood public schools.

by Bob Braun -

The unforgivable lies in NJEA’s endorsement of Cory Booker

BLOGCHRISTIEBOOKERMy favorite definition of education is a century old, from Oxford don John Alexander Smith: “Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.” By that standard, the endorsement of Cory Booker by the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) should be used in all standardized tests throughout New Jersey, perhaps the nation. It is pure, unadulterated rot and an insult to every thinking teacher in the state.

by Bob Braun -

NJEA, AFT: How about a robo-call apology for backing Cory Booker?

NJEA President Wendell Steinhauer
NJEA President Wendell Steinhauer

The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) spends a fortune of members’ dues money on what loosely could be called “communications”-advertising, promotion, public relations, marketing, and other methods of getting its message out. And, last year, it put a lot of that effort behind the election of Cory Booker as United States senator despite Booker’s embrace of ultra-conservative educational policies, including vouchers. You’d think that, this year, it would use the same approach to correct that awful mistake-but it hasn’t.

by Bob Braun -

CHARTERS: NJ press-finally-smells rot, but proposes reforms that continue racist policy

Deseret Segura, 16, comforts her grandmother, Deseret Richardson, 83. The older woman was weeping because her granddaughter would be transferred to a school far from home they shared because of the so-called “One Newark” enrollment plan. It was designed by Christie administration to ensure charter school enrollment growth. It continues today despite promises by Mayor Ras Baraka to end it. ( 2014 Photo by Bob Braun)
by Bob Braun -

EXITING NEWARK: Strange happenings as state loses control of the schools. Part One.

Christopher Cerf and friend

Just days before the New Jersey state school board voted to end state control of the Newark schools in 2017, local administrators appointed by former Republican Gov. Chris Christie pushed through a contract awarding nearly $200,000 to a consulting firm with ties to state officials who ran the district. It was just one of a number of commitments the system’s former state masters imposed on the struggling, financially strapped district.

by Bob Braun -

MURPHY RIGHT TO REMOVE PAULA WHITE; LEDGER COVERAGE, A DISGRACE

Gov. Phil Murphy (photo WHYY)

Gov. Philip Murphy’s rejection of the appointment of Paula White as assistant state education commissioner was the right decision for the public schools of New Jersey. She is an avowed proponent of school privatization, the former head of an organization that promotes charter schools. She was named to a top position in a department already overloaded with ideological partisans of charter and voucher schools who flocked to New Jersey during the eight years of former Gov. Chris Christie’s misrule.

by Bob Braun -

Newark’s Cerf expected to quit, may stay on as consultant-Gregory new schools chief

Newark Superintendent Cerf and Christie

Newark’s state-appointed school superintendent Christopher Cerf, Gov. Chris Christie’s long-term enforcer of the plan to turn Newark into the “charter school capital of the state,” is expected to resign-perhaps as soon as today-and turn temporary control of New Jersey’s largest school district over to his hand-picked choice, Robert Gregory, a deputy superintendent.