Bob Braun's Ledger

An independent New Jersey journalist was roughed up, his video camera was seized, and he was ejected from a New Brunswick conference sponsored by a number of pro-charter school organizations.

Paul Robeson was nothing less than a “force of nature,” according to the cover article in the most recent Rutgers Magazine, an alumni publication. He lived a “remarkable life” that “stirred the world.” He left behind “an extraordinary legacy in athletics, the arts, and…the fight for human rights.”

The Jersey City school board has sued the state, demanding the Legislature restore at least $27 million funds cut from New Jersey’s second largest school district.

All you really need to know about the Newark school board election Tuesday can be found on some videotape clips.

The first was recorded at a cocktail reception at the North End Bar April 3, held to raise money for school board member–and candidate for reelection– Tave Padilla.

Newark voters go to the polls April 16 but the real question they face in the school board election isn’t printed on the ballot. It’s a question that’s brutal, clear and stark–a question that, maybe, no one wants to face:

Just days before the New Jersey state school board voted to end state control of the Newark schools in 2017, local administrators appointed by former Republican Gov. Chris Christie pushed through a contract awarding nearly $200,000 to a consulting firm with ties to state officials who ran the district. It was just one of a number of commitments the system’s former state masters imposed on the struggling, financially strapped district.

Jim Pathe, a veteran photojournalist who worked for decades at The Star-Ledger, has died.  He was 83 and succumbed to thyroid cancer on Jan. 13.

Pathe, a Navy veteran who joined the submarine service, came late to mainstream journalism. He had worked in construction, built lobster boats, served as coordinator and spokesman for an organization of veterans who opposed the Vietnam War.

The New Jersey state education department has refused to release public documents that might  shed light on former Gov. Chris Christie’s loan of $10 million in state funds to a failing Newark charter school and its partner, a private, for-profit real estate developer that was receiving more than $800,000 in public funds as annual rent from the school.