Month: January 2014

I’ve listened to the tape many times and, as best as I can determine, Natasha Allen said this to Cami Anderson at Tuesday night’s Newark school board meeting: “I’m trying to figure out, like, do you not want for your brown babies what we want for ours?”  That’s when the superintendent abandoned  her responsibility and ran away.

Three of the five Newark principals suspended after criticizing the “One Newark” plan have been reinstated.  H. Grady James of Hawthorne Avenue,  Tony Motley of Bragaw Avenue, and Dorothy Handfield of Belmont-Runyon will return to their jobs Monday. Two others will not be permitted to return to their schools. According to union sources, Deneen Washington of Maple Avenue and Lisa Brown of Ivy Hill School have been reassigned to the Central Office.

In 1987, then Gov. Thomas Kean, pressing for passage of the state school takeover law, called the failure of urban schools “educational child abuse.” On Jan. 22, 2014, the state administration of the Newark schools—now in power for 19 years—kept public schools open in single-digit degree cold and more than 10 inches of snow. But Newark’s charter schools–so obviously favored by state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson,  state Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf, and Gov. Chris Christie–were allowed to close.

Newark public schools are open today despite some 12 inches of snow in some parts of the city. The city’s charter schools—whose leaders insist are just as public as conventional public schools—were closed. Apparently the safety of charter school children and teachers is more dear to the hearts of Newark’s school leaders than is the welfare of  conventional public school children and employees.

The  Newark school principals suspended for speaking publicly now have company.  The state-appointed administration has cracked down on a parent organization president taping up notices of a PTO meeting and a central office clerk talking on a cell phone while using the ladies’ room. Welcome to Newark’s schools, the Republic of Fear, where even using the potty can be monitored by spies for state-imposed superintendent Cami Anderson, who, in turn, has emerged as the latest of Gov. Chris Christie’s mini-me surrogate bullies to achieve notoriety—and shame.

At Newark’s Hawthorne Avenue School, the test scores are up, higher than state-imposed goals—and certainly better than those of the highly touted “Renew” schools favored by the administration. The hallways are quiet. Teachers and administrators get along. And this was all done despite central office’s stripping away of faculty resources and shameful neglect of the building. So, in the crazy, bullying logic of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration of city schools, it was time to suspend the school’s successful  principal, H. Grady James. He was just too good to be allowed to stay.