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NJ Spotlight--Sweeney and Prieto Thrust and Parry over School Funding Plan
Senate president and assembly speaker agree on at least one issue: They need to get out ahead of governor’s ‘Fairness Formula’
While it’s anyone’s guess as to what Gov. Chris Christie will do next with school funding, state Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto continue to spar on what will be the Democratic strategy.
On the same day the Senate unanimously passed a resolution to hold four hearings on the topic, Prieto announced his chamber’s education committee would hold four hearings of its own, starting next week.
“This is the number one issue of the day,” Prieto said yesterday in an interview after Christie’s State of the State address. “We need to see what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and make it better.”
John Mooney | January 11, 2017
Washington Post--A disturbing look at how charter schools are hurting a traditional school district
Bethlehem Steel is reflected in the Lehigh River in Bethlehem, Pa., in 1995. The author went to the town to understand the effect of charter schools on Pennsylvania’s public schools. (Nanine Hartzenbusch/AP)
Charter schools have become a central feature of the school “choice” movement, itself a key part of corporate school reform, which seeks to operate public schools as if they were businesses rather than civic institutions. There are now thousands of charters — which are publicly funded but independently operated, sometimes by for-profit companies — enrolling a few million students in 43 states and the District of Columbia who make up about 6 percent of public school students across the country.
While they are a small minority of the public school student population, outsized controversy surrounds charter schools in many communities, especially in states where lax oversight has resulted in financial irregularities and traditional public schools are negatively affected. There are so many issues surrounding charter schools that in October 2016, leaders of the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States, bucked intense pressure from charter supporters and ratified a resolution calling for a moratorium on the expansion of charters and for stronger oversight of these schools.
Here’s a cautionary post about the impact of charter schools in one school district in Pennsylvania, one of a number of states with extremely lax charter school laws. It was written by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. She has been chronicling problems with corporate school reform for years, including with a series about troubled charter schools in California.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/09/a-disturbing-look-at-how-charter-schools-are-hurting-a-traditional-school-district/?utm_term=.f1440eb72986
By Valerie Strauss| January 9
