Education, taxes, housing, immigration, politics, and other issues that affect the people of New Jersey
Rutgers University’s public information officials are refusing to answer basic questions about how its new $10 million supercomputer had to be shut down more than a month ago because of overheating–questions as simple as what contractor built the malfunctioning cooling system.
Efforts to find out how and why Rutgers University’s $10 million supercomputer crashed–or, at least, had to be shut down before it did crash because of a cooling malfunction–have only raised new questions about what has been touted as one of the fastest computers in the world. One that hasn’t worked since mid-January, just a few weeks after its official launch in December, 2016.
New Jersey’s largest supercomputer–considered one of the largest computing systems in the world–was quietly shut down a month ago by Rutgers University just weeks after a much ballyhooed celebration of what was then called “the most powerful system in the state” that would be made available to government, private industry, higher education, and other organizations.
Lawyers for Newark’s public school children have asked New Jersey’s appellate courts to block the Christie Administration’s effort to nearly double charter school enrollment in the state’s largest school district, warning the increased privatization of the city’s schools would deepen the system’s fiscal crisis, increase racial isolation, and deprive the neediest public school students of essential services.
A few days after the United States Senate confirmed the appointment of an avowed enemy of public education–Betsy DeVos–to be the nation’s education secretary, advocates of public education held a conference in New Brunswick to search for some reason for hope. The meeting’s organizers, including members and staff of such pro-public education groups as the Education Law Center and Save Our Schools, depicted the election later this year of a new governor to replace Chris Christie as an opportunity–as, indeed, it is.
New Jersey’s highest ranking Roman Catholic prelate sharply denounced President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration as “the opposite of what it means to be an American.”
New Jersey’s highest court has turned back an effort by Gov. Chris Christie and his team of compliant and spineless lawyers to convert the judicial tribunal into an unelected mini-Legislature willing to scrap both equitable school funding and protections for school employees.