Month: January 2013

…

Complaint contends that Christie’s school turnaround plan does nothing for poor black and Hispanic students

By John Mooney

Sharon Smith, activist and mother of three, who filed the Newark civil rights complaint.
Forty Newark parents and activists boarded a charter bus to Washington, D.C., late yesterday to join in what is becoming a growing backlash to public school closures in cities across the country.…

According to the administration, making it more difficult for charter teachers to earn tenure gives the schools themselves “more flexibility”

By John Mooney

Soon after proposing that certification rules for new charter school teachers should be eased, the Christie administration is moving to toughen what it takes those teachers to get and keep tenure.

In a proposal posted on the New Jersey Register this month, the administration has suggested that new teachers at charter schools would receive tenure protections after five years — a year more than the current four years for district teachers.…

By Kenneth J. Bernstein

Too many teachers’ voices have been excluded from the decision making process driving our educational policy.

We were sitting in a Starbucks in Arlington, Va. It was our first meeting. Previously, Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and I had talked by phone and exchanged blog posts on education. His campaign staff had reached out to a number of educational bloggers, as he was seriously considering running for president and thought education was a good issue for him.…