NJ Education Report

Alan Steinberg predicts that the pending battle between Christie and the NJEA “could become the Ali-Frazier of New Jersey issue battles.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a post-mortem on the Corzine loss, concluding that his”inability to stare down the state’s free-spending Legislature and its public employee unions doomed his efforts to straighten out New Jersey’s troubled finances.”

The New Jersey Herald speculates that it was Christie’s education platform that helped him “nibble at the Democrat’s built-in advantage in the cities where many poor-performing schools are located,” particularly his promise to bolster school choice.

The East Brunswick School Board is “dumbfounded” by the financial impact of a new charter school set to open in the district, Hatikvah International Academy, which will use the International Baccalaureate curriculum and teach Hebrew as a second language.

The Press of Atlantic City editorializes that the Legislature should shelve a bill that would prohibit districts from charging for extra-curricular activities, including sports.

Star-Ledger tries to have it both ways with the preschool program:

The results of this effort are in. The children graduating from these programs are now in elementary school, and their scores on fourth grade reading and math tests have risen substantially. This is a key reason why the racial achievement gap in New Jersey is closing faster than in any other state. That’s reason for this state to be proud.

Christie is surely correct, however, that we cannot afford to expand these programs now. Corzine had drawn up plans to do so, to ensure that all low-income children were enrolled, no matter where they lived. That remains an important goal. But we’re broke. So it has to wait.