NJ Education Report

Superintendent Charles T. Epps Jr. of Jersey City explains it all: “Our worst enemy is the young ladies.The young girls are bad. I don’t know what they’re drinking today, but they’re bad.”

Here’s the Christie Administration’s new tenure reform draft bills and coverage from NJ Spotlight, The Record, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Star-Ledger.

Jim O’Neill, Superintendent of Chathams Public Schools slams Christie’s new tenure reform proposal and says it has nothing to do with improving education: “The governor, instead, is clearly pursuing a political agenda that is blatantly anti-intellectual and appeals to the worst aspects of human nature while we all endure a prolonged economic downturn.”

Carl Golden looks at the history of the Abbott cases as the State Supreme Court prepares their ruling on the 2010-2011 school aids; he notes “that early speculation that a compromise is a likely outcome, that the court would grant the administration additional time to bring funding up to the formula standards or to permit a phase in which the state commits to a specific level of additional aid for a set number of years.”

Senator Barbara Buono says “the new normal is inadequate,” because our School Funding Reform Act works: “If followed properly, the new school funding formula, which is based on meeting individual children’s needs regardless of where they reside, will continue to mitigate achievement disparities between school districts.”

Assemblyman Patrick J. Diegnan Jr. is “sponsoring legislation that would require charter schools to be approved by the voters of the district at the annual school election before they are authorized to operate.”

Lots of hoopla over the discovery that the Broad Foundation paid for a consultant to help restructure the NJ DOE to the tune of $60K. People are outraged, mainly because Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf is an alumnus of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendent Academy. But $60K is chump change for such a task. Why not celebrate the bargain?

The Courier Post calls for tenure reform:

The tens of thousands of great teachers we have in New Jersey don’t need tenure because they’re excelling in their jobs. But there’s no job field on Earth where every worker in that field is excellent and none are lousy and worth getting rid of. It’s time to take away that crutch of lifetime tenure for those few teachers who aren’t performing as they should.

The Wall St. Journal looks at how the $100 million Facebook donation to Newark is “dividing the residents of this city into two camps: those who are excited about what the money can do and those who are suspicious of the donors’ motives.”

Kevin Carey in The New Republic warns that the Republican Party is regressing back to pre-Reagan rhetoric in assailing teacher unions. At the same time the GOP is “embracing the worst elements of the teacher unions’ national education agenda, by insisting that the federal government should have a limited, possibly nonexistent, role in school policy.” Mike Petrelli at Fordham says he’s wrong.

Christie-ism of the Week: upon finding out from the Comptroller’s Office that New Jersey is contractually required to pay $700 per year in clothing allowances to 27,000 state employees, most of whom don’t wear uniforms, the Governor told the Star-Ledger and The Record, “I’m telling you this whole collecting bargaining stuff has been such a great education for me,” he said. “You should see all the crap they’ve got in there. It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable.”