These are the quieter meetings for Cami Anderson, the ones where the Newark school superintendent doesn’t face what has become the familiar wrath of community and parent activists.

This one was for Newark teachers, more than 60 of them, who traveled after school yesterday to the Harold Wilson School in the Central Ward to talk with Anderson about how they will be evaluated in the classroom — and whether they will have a job next year.

“We don’t know what will happen next, a lot of teachers feel that way,” said Eunice Mitchell, a teaching coach at Newark Innovation Academy. “The uncertainty is very scary.”

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John Merrow

Okay, let’s try this one more time.

Everyone seems to agree that the present scheme for evaluating teachers and principals is as good as useless. No system that judges 98 percent of workers to be “good” or “great” can be trusted.

At the same time, there’s no agreement that a fair, consistent, reliable, and effective system exists to replace the current one. Nor are we close to having one.

Yet reformers continue to beat a drum — hoping to make up in noise what they lack in accuracy — pounding out that we are good-to-go with a comprehensive and workable teacher evaluation alternative.

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Yesterday Newark Mayor Cory Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and several private developers and investors—including Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein—converged on a vacant lot in Newark’s historic downtown for the groundbreaking of Teachers’ Village.

The mixed-use development, a project six years in the making, will include expanded space for three existing public charter schools and a private pre-school; 200 moderately priced apartments reserved for Newark public, charter, and private school educators; and space for retail establishments, including restaurants and possibly a supermarket. The project’s designer is the Newark-born architect Richard Meier, best known for the Getty Center in Los Angeles and, locally, the all-glass luxury condominium building at 1 Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

The $150 million, eight-building project was largely publically financed, with support from federal, state and city governments. Its progress is evidence of Booker and Christie’s continuing cooperation, across party lines, on a school reform agenda focused on the expansion of the charter school sector. New Jersey civil rights organizations and teachers’ unions have criticized the state’s charter schools for serving a lower proportion of special-needs and English-language learner students than traditional public schools, and have cautioned against the risk of neighborhood schools turning into warehouses for the least-advantaged children. Politically, the Teachers’ Village concept could help Booker and Christie neutralize such critics by placing school reform in the broader context of urban revitalization supported by education advocates from across the ideological spectrum.

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