Furor in N.J. Over Charter School Space

The idea proffered by teacher union bosses that charter schools, sharing space with conventional public schools, would "set up the opportunity for "the haves and the have-nots" because some charter schools raise money from private donors" is outrageous and dishonest.

In New Jersey, public charter schools receive 90% of the per-student funding received by the conventional, district-run public schools.  The school districts also have established foundations and raise enormous amounts of money from corporate donors, private foundations and individuals, and unlike the public charter schools, their facilities are funded by state taxpayers.

The union bosses do, indeed, fear a contrast between "the haves and have-nots," but it is not the contrast they suggest.  It is instead the contrast between dedicated teachers who have made a sacrifice to work as professionals teaching in charter schools, and those teachers who work to the letter of the contract as a union member.  The labor union mentality is at the heart of public school failure.  It strips teachers of professionalism and turns them into laborers, and it punishes those who go the extra mile and show initiative and dedication.

There are public school teachers in New Jersey who secretly offer their students extra-help off-site; because were they to stay after school and work hours not specified in the contract, they would become the subject of union harassment.

The students of New Jersey should be thankful they finally have a governor who is standing up for them and against the self-serving union mob.

From The Wall Street Journal

By Barbara Martinez

The union representing Newark's teachers is rallying its members to what is expected to be a raucous meeting Tuesday night over whether charter schools should share space with traditional public schools.

"Say No to peaceful co-existence in the same school building!" said an e-mail that went out to all 4,800 teachers of the Newark Teachers Union asking them to appear at the regular meeting of the Advisory School Board.

The space battle is the first frontier of a system-wide restructuring effort spurred by a $100 million grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Over the past month, the school system, which is under the control of the Christie administration, began raising the possibility that charter schools could take over space in under-used public school buildings. Almost immediately, the teachers' union and others objected.

Governor Christie on O'Keefe 'Teachers Gone Wild' Video

New Videos Expose Corrupt New Jersey Teachers' Union Thugs

From Examiner.com
By Terry Hurlbut

James O'Keefe, head of Project Veritas, yesterday released two videos in a series that he titled Teachers' Unions Gone Wild, a take-off on a popular TV show titled Girls Gone Wild. It contains candid footage taken by "citizen journalists" (meaning volunteer temporary stringers) interviewing several persons purporting to be teachers attending the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) leadership conference at the East Brunswick Hilton (August 7-13, 2010). Jason Method of the Asbury Park Press filed the first report yesterday evening.

The two videos are uploaded to YouTube and embedded at O'Keefe's Project Veritas site. The first of these videos follows:

WARNING: This video features candid interviews with persons or groups using profane and even obscene language. Parental judgment and discretion are advised.

The first video is taken at the conference, and shows several teachers describing hypothetical situations in which teachers (especially those with tenure) could utter racial slurs at their pupils in class and not be subject to termination, and also making crude references to Governor Chris Christie and describing the sort of violent assaults that some members would like to perpetrate upon him. Equally embarrassing are the shots of teachers playing video arcade games and boasting about doing so "on their dime", meaning at an event that they attended at parent/taxpayer expense.

One teacher, identified on the video as Alissa Ploshnick, a "special educator" in the Passaic Public Schools, appears telling an interviewer that "it is very, very hard to fire a tenured teacher." She said that even inappropriate sexual conduct would not be sufficient, and said that a teacher would have to be caught literally in flagrante delicto in the hallway for an immediate termination to occur. (The preceding is the Bowdlerized version of Ms. Ploshnick's remarks.) She then described the case of another teacher, whom she would not identify, who actually uttered a racial slur at a student and suffered no worse sanction than demotion.

The video goes on to capture several chants intended to demean Governor Christie, with shots of stories told of certain episodes of unprofessional conduct by school officials (like the Bergen County official who cut and pasted an e-mail wishing Christie dead and sent this memo out to the teachers who answered to him). It also mentioned an unidentified teacher describing the NJEA's role in altering the application for the Race to the Top federal grant without informing Christie or then-Education Commissioner Bret Schundler of the alterations. (New Jersey ultimately placed eleventh in the RTTT race and lost out on the grant.)

The video ends with the posting of a telephone number (609-599-4561) as if it were an advertisement for ordering a full-length video, and makes references to the rigging of elections. The telephone number turns out to belong to the NJEA. A viewer might interpret its presence in the video as either a take-off on lengthy TV ads for consumer goods "not available in stores," or an invitation to call the NJEA to ask, or complain, about the behavior depicted in the video.

The second video is largely a follow-up by one of the volunteer stringers on the Alissa Ploshnick interview. First he conducts an "ambush interview" with Ploshnick, an interview that turns out to be unproductive. Then he calls the assistant superintendent of the Passaic Public Schools, posing as the father of the boy who allegedly had suffered the racial insult.

NJEA spokesman Steve Baker denounced the two videos as inauthentic, saying, "It's James O’Keefe and that’s all you need to know."

However, in a later story carried by The Star-Ledger (Newark), Project Veritas spokesman Shane Corey defended the videos and insisted on their authenticity. He specifically says that no person posed as a teacher to be recorded making an embarrassing statement.

O'Keefe is famous for appearing at several housing-assistance offices of the old Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and posing as a procurer, with a young woman in tow posing as a prostitute, and asking for, and most of the time getting, housing assistance. The resulting scandal led to the official defunding of ACORN and ultimately to the spectacle of the national organization shuttering and its chapters changing their names.

Today O'Keefe released yet another embarrassing video for the NJEA, alleging a possible role for them in election fraud surrounding the Jersey City mayor's race in 1997, when Bret Schundler ran for a second term of office.

'Unvarnished Truth' from Governor Chris Christie

Governor Chris Christie responds to a teacher's question during a town hall meeting at Raritan Township. September 8, 2010.

Kids Deserve Choice of Better Schools

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger, 7/4/99)

As a sixth-grade public school student in 1963, I was asked to deliver a speech about brotherhood that my class had written to commemorate National Brotherhood Week. The riots that accompanied James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi had occurred a year earlier, and photographs of the dogs and fire hoses being turned on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, were fresh in the minds of Americans everywhere.

The closing words of that speech, suggested by our teacher, have remained with me ever since. They were the words of another Long Island student, an African-American girl, who said in a forensics competition, "Take my hand, for it is clean; take my heart, for it is pure; but do not refuse me justice because of the color of my skin, for if you do, I will refer you to God who made me."

The battle for universal civil rights, for freedom and opportunity for every American, has been the animating struggle of American history. It is a struggle that continues to this day. Meredith's struggle concerned the right of African-Americans to attend the college of their choice. Today, a growing number of parents, policy makers and citizens are beginning to demand recognition for a new civil right -- the right of poor Americans to send their children to the schools of their choice.

The opposition of modern-day teachers unions to school choice has placed them in direct conflict with poor inner-city parents, and with our American ideals of liberty and justice. The ultimate threat to government schools comes not from caring parents seeking the best schools for their children but from self-interested teachers unions, which secure generous salaries and benefits from monopoly school systems where, in inner-city neighborhoods, only one of every four students who enters the ninth grade graduates from high school.

In the years since delivering the Brotherhood Week speech, I have been privileged to work in Congress for the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., and in the White House for former President Bush. However, it was only in the past five years, while working in the inner-city for Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, that I fully grasped how far many American school systems have strayed from their ideals.

In 1995, Pepsi-Cola Co. approached the mayor's office with a proposal that would have resulted in a contribution from the company to a college scholarship program for every case of Pepsi products sold in Jersey City. We thanked the company for the offer, but explained that the great majority of kids in Jersey City had no hope of going to college. More than half of those who enter public high schools drop out, and fewer than half of those who remain pass a basic test required for graduation.

Would Pepsi consider, we asked, contributing to a new, privately funded scholarship program being established to help low-income parents who want to send their children to private elementary and secondary schools? This plan involved no public funds, would ease the burdens on the city's overcrowded schools, and would let poor people exercise the same choices enjoyed by more affluent parents, including the majority of Jersey City public schoolteachers who send their children to private schools. Pepsi agreed, and the scholarship program was announced to an approving media and a grateful city.

But within a day, we saw how ruthless those in control of the education monopoly are prepared to be in order to thwart choice and competition. Pepsi machines in public schools were vandalized throughout the city, and an official of the public schools (whose children had attended private schools) called Pepsi officials into her office to state that school choice is "elitist" and to protest Pepsi's involvement in the scholarship program. The president of the Jersey City teachers union, who sent his son to an elite private school, threatened a New Jersey Education Association boycott of Pepsi products across the state if the company did not withdraw its scholarship offer. Pepsi complied.

The racial oppressors of Meredith's day were able to hold back racial justice for a time, but they ultimately were moved out of the schoolhouse door, allowing Americans of all races to enter. Those who oppress the poor today think they can do so forever, but they are on the wrong side of history.

School choice can be delayed, but it can not be denied. The most powerful human instinct -- the love of parents for their children -- will overcome today's heartless union bosses, who would leave children in schools where they have a better chance of dropping out than of receiving a diploma. Polls now show strong majorities in New Jersey and across the United States in favor of school choice. Political and religious leaders and the courts are increasingly giving the idea a thumbs-up.

Americans are starting to recognize school choice as an important chapter in the civil-rights movement. But what will history say of those who denied justice, stood in the doorway, blocked private initiatives, thwarted the potential and ruined the lives of so many millions of students? Perhaps, like the Long Island girl, we can only refer them to the God who made us all.

Daniel J. Cassidy serves on the South Carolina Advisory Board to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.