NJ Education Report

NJ Spotlight has a great precis on RTTT reviewers’ comments, and also explains why Reviewer 3 took such a shine to us.

New Jersey Newsroom posts an interview with Governor Christie, who explains why the missing data on fiscal year 2008-2009 was just a “clerical error.” Also posted: Ed Commish Bret Schundler’s letter to the Feds begging for the remaining $75 million of the RTTT pot.

Senator Frank Lautenberg is in high dudgeon over our “faulty application.” Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver orders up a hearing on the DOE’s lack of competency: “With nearly half of a billion dollars lost because of human error, this hearing is an absolute must. The state, our taxpayers, and most of all our children deserve answers from the administration as to how such an egregious blunder could have been overlooked with so much as stake.”

Darryl Isherwood at PolitickerNJ says that the RTTT debacle is “the first chink to date in the Christie armor.”

Charles Stile at the Record gets the story wrong. The Courier-Post gets the story right, as does today’s New York Times: “Mr. Christie cited only the clerical error in explaining the state’s loss, but a look at the score sheet, released on Wednesday, showed that the state lost more points in other areas of its application, in part because it got only 59 percent of its 645 school districts to agree to carry out Race to the Top reforms, and only 1 percent of its unions. In New York, which was among the winners, all districts signed on.”

Not convinced yet? Hawaii, an RTTT winner (with a 4-day school week, no less) made a far more substantive clerical error — a 25-pointer — and still finished in the money, reports the Star-Ledger.

And, of course, there’s the NJEA’s glee over the fact that the NJ RTTT application which Comm. Schundler negotiated with union leaders contained the correct information on the question that cost us 3 points. And Gov. Christie’s bone-headed claim that it’s all President Obama’s fault.

Meanwhile, the schoolchildren in Trenton, Camden, and Willingboro are getting ready to start another school year.