The comments drew a reaction from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who said Giordano’s comments were “outrageous” and he should be fired or resign. The union leader quickly fired back at Christie, saying he should resign for bullying him.

Not long after this battle of words did cameras start appearing at NJEA headquarters. Cameramen have been identified and have connections to the Republican Party, prompting union spokesperson Steve Wollmer to ask if Republican Christie was behind these tactics.

The Statehouse Bureau captures Michael Drewniak’s response for Christie well: “The governor certainly had no part in it, but it is great to see NJEA’s crack public relations machine at work. They’ve succeeded in re-shining the light on Giordano and his cold-hearted, ‘life is unfair’ feelings about children trapped in failing urban schools. Bravo.”

By John Mooney
NJ Spotlight
October 3, 2011

When the Christie administration last week announced it approved just four new charter schools out of nearly 60 applicants, it came with a message of quality over quantity from Gov. Chris Christie’s top education officials.

But there were clearly a few factors in play, from the politics of the upcoming legislative election to the changing rules in the department itself. For example, two of the approvals announced last week were part of larger networks of schools that are gaining favored status with the state.

Nevertheless, for anyone thinking the movement is slowing, 25 more schools are still slated to open next fall, the biggest new class yet. And there may be more to come.

Politics Matter

There was no doubt that Gov. Chris Christie was hearing grumbles from his Republican base. Many of his suburban legislators either voted for or abstained on new controls on charter schools being trumpeted by Democrats.

Christie himself had long been a lightning rod for the debate over charter schools, making their expansion a centerpiece of his education platform. When his administration last spring approved 23 new schools — by far the largest group ever — he went into Newark to announce the news schools himself.

But even before that, resentment was growing in the suburbs about the sudden advent of the charter schools in their midst, drawing dollars from their cash-strapped districts.

And as the months passed, Christie and his acting education commissioner, Chris Cerf, began to back off and publicly questioned whether charter schools were needed in relatively well-performing districts. Christie even said so in one of his national speeches in Iowa, before he started openly flirting with a run for the White House.

In the end, none of the half-dozen high-profile applications for suburban charter schools were approved, including those for Mandarin and Hebrew language schools. The one arguably suburban approval is a school in Cherry Hill that was predicated on drawing students from neighboring Lawnside, a low-income community, officials said.

Process Matters

With the backlash came some revising of the state Department of Education’s application process as well. Starting this summer, Cerf has clearly sent a signal that he wanted to increase both the staffing of his charter school office and the rigor of its process.

To that end, he brought in a national charter association to help lead the application review, and Cerf and department officials said the strength and capacity of applicants’ academic programs and their organizations would matter first and foremost. The fact that just nine of the 23 charters approved last spring were able to open this fall was a cautionary tale.

‘The first bar was the quality of the programs, their capacity and their ability to meet the timelines for opening,” said Carly Bolger, director of the department’s charter school office. “These four were pretty obvious for us in terms of being the strongest.”

“There was a pretty sizable gulf between what a lot of them said on paper and what they could show when they came in,” she said in an interview this weekend.

But others weren’t so pleased.

“We’re happy that good schools were approved, but I question a review process that couldn’t find more than 4 out of 60 applicants,” said Jeanne Allen, director of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter group in Washington, D.C. that assisted some applicants.

“I think they were being cautious, but maybe too cautious when there are tens of thousands of children needing these opportunities,” said Allen. “And it is inconsistent with the governor’s philosophy and his drive for more options for children.”

Quality Matters

While nearly two-dozen new charter schools were approved in the last round, barely that many even got the second-round interview this time, officials said. And even some of those were making their third or fourth try.

That leads to the question to how many strong applications were there and whether New Jersey had tapped out the market, at least for the time being. State officials wouldn’t say as much, but Bolger indicated there was clearly a dearth of quality.

“If there were more we had confidence in, we would have approved them.” Bolger said. “We didn’t go in looking for a certain number. This was the number we had confidence in.”

That leads to what the department does see as quality, and it was no coincidence that two of the four approved came from charter networks with what it said were established track records.

The one approved in Trenton comes from the Scholar Academies organization, with schools in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The one approved in Camden is connected with the Promise Academy charter schools in that city. The Jersey City charter school was not part of a management organization but was modeled after existing schools in Brooklyn and Springfield, Mass., Bolger said.

And noteworthy in the state’s announcement on Friday was that it also approved the expansion of two existing charter networks in Newark, both connected with larger charter management organizations, KIPP and Uncommon Schools. Those expansions at TEAM Academy and North Star Academy will add another 1,000 seats.

But others question whether New Jersey was giving up on those charter applicants coming from the communities they serve. “This is basically rejecting the grass roots that have lived and thrived in New Jersey,” said Allen.

And Allen wasn’t much impressed with the department’s stated reliance on those with track records, pointing to the history of one of the giants in the industry. “KIPP started without a track record,” Allen said.

Plenty More to Come

With the charter approvals from last spring, there are still 25 charter schools slated to open in the fall of 2012. And that is not counting another round of applications that will be arriving in the DOE by the next deadline of October 15, meant as an expedited round for more established applicants.

That has left some of those critical of the administration wary of celebrating too much from the small number approved in the latest round.

Julia Sass Rubin of Save our Schools NJ, a grassroots group that has led the call for changes to the charter school law, said the expected addition of more charter schools in the next round is all the more reason to put restrictions in law that give local communities binding say in whether charter schools open.

“Whether its four schools or 40 schools approved, communities are still disenfranchised,” she said. “This may cool things off for the election, but we still need a change in the law.”

The administration, led by Cerf, has opposed some of those changes, especially the one that would give local communities final say over whether a charter would be allowed to open. But whether that happens or not, Bolger said she is pleased with the progress, even with one of the smallest round of new charter approvals yet.

“It’s less about putting up numbers of new schools,” she said. “That’s great, but my goal is serving more kids. And we’re feeling pretty good about that.”

It’s back-to-school time, as President Obama reminded the nation in his annual back-to-school speech today. And during election season, no school year begins without stirring up education reform debates.

But this election is all about the economy and will likely revolve around what role the federal government should play in stimulating job growth, not how much it should spend on merit pay or standardized testing.

So when it comes to education policy debates, whether it’s the Democratic incumbent or the array of Republican challengers, all eyes – and talking points – are on two things: the federal government’s role and the overall cost.

“The meta-narrative [for Republican presidential candidates] is obviously pushing back on health care reform and on the stimulus,” said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Obama’s education agenda is being framed by the GOP, and especially the Tea Party, in light of those other elements.”

From the president’s perspective, America’s schools are crumbling and Washington needs to step in and invest $30 billion to rebuild them, a move Obama has said will both “create a better learning environment,” and, “create good jobs for local construction workers.”

But more government spending is just about the last thing on the minds of any GOP presidential candidate. Rather than pushing for further investments, White House hopefuls are touting their ability to rein in spending.

In New Jersey, where rumors abound that Gov. Chris Christie may toss his hat into the GOP race, the governor used a line-item veto to strip $500 million from education funding. Christie also helped usher in public employee pension reform which will save the state $130 billion over the next 30 years, a move that, coupled with decreases in collective bargaining rights, infuriated teachers unions.

Faced with a $15 billion budget deficit this year, Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed off on $4 billion in cuts to education in the 2012 and 2013 budgets.  The Texas State Teachers Association estimates that as many as 49,000 teachers may be laid off as a result of the cuts and 43,000 college students will lose all or part of their financial aid.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in August that the Texas school system “has really struggled” while Rick Perry has been in the state house and that he feels “very, very badly for the children there.”

But while Texas spends less per student than almost any other state, the Lone Star state’s test scores fall within a few points of the national average in both reading and math. High school graduation rates are within 2 percentage points of the national average as well.

“The president’s secretary of education may want to do a little more homework before commenting on education in Texas,” Perry’s spokesman Mark Miner said shortly after Duncan’s comments were aired on Bloomberg.

Perhaps the biggest beef Perry has had with the Department of Education was over the administration’s Race to the Top competitive state grant program. Texas was one of four states that chose not to participate in the $4 billion program that Perry said “smacks of a federal takeover of public schools” and “could very well lead to the ‘dumbing down’ of the rigorous standards we’ve worked so hard to enact.”

Perry is not alone in his dislike of the federal program. In fact, his fellow GOP candidates, Michele Bachmann, Gary Johnson and Ron Paul, not only condemn Race to the Top but have said they would do away with the entire Department of Education.

At the last GOP debate, Bachmann said that if elected, she would “go over to the federal Department of Education, I’d turn off the lights, I’d lock the door and I’d send all the money back to the states and localities.”

If Christie decides to jump in the race, he would be the only GOP contender that supports Race to the Top. Under Christie’s direction, New Jersey fiercely competed for the federal funds, but because of an application error lost out on a potential $400 million grant.

Christie is one of the only candidates who has praised any part of the Obama administration’s education policies. In April, Christie said Duncan has been “a great ally” in education reform and that he and the secretary have “a lot in common … in the education reform agenda.”

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has tried to distance himself from the Obama administration’s education policies. At a recent debate in Florida, he challenged accusations from Perry that he had flip-flopped on his support for Race to the Top, saying, “I don’t support any particular program that’s he’s describing.”

While Romney has not called for closing down the Department of Education, he stressed that “we need to get the federal government out of education.”

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney pushed to double the number of spots available at charter schools and vetoed a bill that would have put a moratorium on expanding the school choice program.

Jeanne Allen, the president of the Center for Education Reform, said Romney and Christie are similar in their stances on education in that they each take about half of their education policy from Obama’s book and about half from former president George W. Bush’s.

“The distinction is that neither would likely have an appetite for the kinds of jobs bill and money approach that makes Obama unique right now,” Allen said.

Under a Romney or Christie administration, there would be “a balance,” she said, between the federal role and the state role.

“It would be less heavy handed than we are seeing now under Obama,” Allen said.

“If you gut the purpose of the program to begin with, what good is it?…

If you compromise yourself away to nothing, then I don’t know what you’ve won…

(Legislators) are irrelevant in this in comparison to the children in 200 plus failing schools in New Jersey who are being stripped of hope…

People wonder why there is violence in our cities. Violence is commited, in the main, at least in my experience, by people without hope.

They wonder why there is drug abuse in our cities. People who turn to drugs are generally people with out hope.

They wonder why families are disintegrating in our cities. Families disintegrate because of the poison of a lack of hope.

And the greatest antidote to a lack of hope is a world class education“.

(Watch his complete response.)