Testy Christie rejects cooperation. Puts ideology ahead of education - again.6/5/2010
Apparently, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing in Gov. Christie’s administration. Earlier this week, the governor abruptly rejected a carefully crafted agreement reached between his own Commissioner of Education, Bret Schundler, and the New Jersey Education Association. The agreement, designed to bolster New Jersey’s bid for $400 million in federal Race to the Top education funding, was the result of weeks of collaboration between educators and the Christie administration’s Department of Education. Striving to improve on the state’s earlier failed application, the parties agreed on a series of meaningful, progressive reforms designed to keep New Jersey’s public schools among the best in the nation.
Late last week, an agreement was struck and Commissioner Schundler proudly announced it on the Department of Education website. NJEA went to work, reaching out to locals and urging them to sign on to the application. Such sign-on is an integral part of the application process. It is intended to make sure that educators – the professionals who will be charged with implementing the reforms – have meaningful input into designing the reforms. By working together, NJEA and the Department of
Education arrived at a plan that would have empowered educators and benefitted students.
At the same time it bolstered New Jersey’s chances of winning $400 million in federal funding for schools that have been devastated by Gov. Christie’s massive budget cuts.
Apparently, when Gov. Christie began getting some pressure from his right-wing base for having cooperated with NJEA instead of blindly attacking, he caved in almost immediately. Throwing his hand-picked Commissioner of Education under the figurative school bus, he went back to his bullying ways and gutted the carefully crafted agreement in favor of a poorly considered plan designed to undermine public schools rather than strengthen them.
It was a glimpse inside a dysfunctional administration, where cooperation with outsiders is considered tantamount to treason, and where the best interests of New Jersey comes second to the ideological agenda of the governor. Even the governor’s top lieutenants are not safe from Christie’s wrath if they dare take a step back from the administration’s scorched-earth policies, as Commissioner Schundler can now attest. In the all-conflict-all-the-time world of Gov. Christie, negotiation, cooperation and sharing of ideas are signs of weakness.
Instead of a broadly supported, well-crafted application, Gov. Christie has substituted a version that takes reliance on standardized testing to a whole new level. If he succeeds in imposing his educational agenda, parents can expect more class time devoted to test preparation and more pressure on their children to perform on those tests. After all, in the governor’s world, that test score is the only definition of learning and success. That is just the sort of myopic perspective that the US Department of Education hoped to avoid when it made educator buy-in a critical component of the Race to the Top grant application process.
Unfortunately, Gov. Christie is not interested in reforms that help New Jersey’s schools. He’s only interested in waging war against our public schools and the people who have made them the best in the nation. Educators have no role to play in his version of education “reform.”
Barbara Keshishian, a mathematics teacher in New Milford, is the elected president of 200,000 teachers,
Certificated staff, educational support professionals, and retired members of the New Jersey Education Association.
NJEAPres@njea.org
NEW JERSEY EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
