NJ Education Report

Newark Superintendent Roger León is shocked, shocked to find out there’s malarkey afoot over the construction of the new Newark High School of Architecture & Interior Design! Who knew? Not León, not Mayor Ras Baraka, not the Newark School Board, all in attendance at a celebratory ground-breaking at the site of the old Jefferson Hospital, no one was aware the private investment group Summit Assets was illegally hiring non-unionized construction workers and paying them well below the mandatory “prevailing wage,” no one knew city and state taxpayers will end up paying twice as much as the building is worth at the conclusion of this sweetheart deal, no one knew that the landlord of a century-old tenant near the site, Olshin’s Pharmacy Inc., has “threatened its employees with physical harm, broke locks and forcibly entered the pharmacy, cut wires and pipes, and damaged and stole items from the premises” in order to get them to agree to ending their lease, which lasts another 34 years. (No one knew, that is, until Tom Wiedmann and Mark Bonamo of Tapinto Newark started covering the story. This last item came out late Friday.)

Leon called their coverage “scary and appalling.”

Here’s what I think is scary and appalling: Gannet’s North Jersey Media Group (“The Record,” etc.), which covers Essex County where Newark is located, hasn’t printed a word about this scam which comes at great cost to state and local taxpayers, business owners, and construction workers. (Even the Star-Ledger, less focused on the region of North Jersey, had coverage this weekend with an appropriate salute to Wiedmann and Bonamo.) This is in spite of North Jersey Media Group’s 2019 extensive “exposé,” under the direction of Executive Editor Daniel Sforza, which claimed NJ public charter schools cheat taxpayers by leasing facilities instead of buying them, albeit without mistreatment of anyone. (Unlike traditional districts, charters have to do this because our state’s 27-year-old charter school law disallows any state aid at all for charter school facilities.) “Millions of Your Tax Dollars have Disappeared into NJ’s flawed Charter School Experiment” includes nuggets like this: “taxpayers on the local, state and federal level…routinely pay for buildings that are used by charter schools but owned privately. Flaws in the law and a lack of public policy and oversight have led to a system where private groups are created — or step in — to own and finance real estate.”

(This take has been echoed by anti-choice luminaries like Bruce Baker and Mark Weber, who call this practice “lunacy” while simultaneously ignoring lunatic antics by traditional districts.)

Now that Newark Public Schools District is doing exactly the same thing Sforza lambasted charter schools for—using taxpayers to pay for buildings owned privately– why isn’t North Jersey covering “flaws in the law” and the state’s “lack of oversight,” especially since traditional districts have a choice? Why isn’t North Jersey Media Group using its vast resources (yes, Gannett is laying off reporters right and left but has assets of $4 billion) to dig further into this story and look at other Newark district leases with private equity firms? If it was worth 6,000 words in 2019, why isn’t it worth a 200-word squib in 2022?

I guess what’s good for the goose is good for the gander—unless we’re talking about NJ public charter schools.