NJ Education Report

From today’s New York Times:

One is a municipal councilman and high school principal, son of a celebrated and controversial black poet, who negotiated a truce among this city’s gangs and urged them to fight a white conspiracy and “seize power, block by block, city by city, place by place.” (See here.)

The other is a law professor raised by his grandmother and the Boys and Girls Club after his mother was murdered, who went to prep school on scholarship, then to Duke and Columbia, before returning to Newark to work free on civil rights cases, raise his family and help start a network of charter schools.

Great article that clearly paints the divisiveness in Newark over the meaning of “progress,” Baraka’s insistence that he’s the real Newarker, in spite of the fact that he’s settled his family in Central Jersey, Jeffries’ struggle to effectively cast Baraka as a failed leader (murders are up 70% in the ward that Baraka represents as a City Councilman) and the city’s ambivalence about Booker.

[P]olls done by the campaigns show that the race has grown closer in recent weeks, particularly as Mr. Jeffries’s allies have shown television ads pointing out that Mr. Baraka earned more than $200,000 between his jobs as a member of the Municipal Council and as the principal of Central High School.