What Chris Christie is Hiding Behind his Rage for Teachers [View all]

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“I’m tired of you people. What do you want?”

Those were the words New Jersey Governor Chris Christie used to respond to one of his constituents, a taxpayer, and a public servant of the state, who had the temerity to question the governor’s leadership of the state’s education system.

As reported by Valerie Strauss on her blog at The Washington Post, Melissa Tomlinson, an elementary school teacher who also runs an after-school program, asked the governor, “Why do you continue to spread the myth that our schools and teachers are failing?” She also questioned the wisdom of the governor’s decision to slash the state education budget by $1 billion.

SNIP

What Christie’s Rage Is Covering Up

A recent editorial in a New Jersey news outlet accused Christie of presiding over education policies that have resulted in schools becoming more “separate, unequal, and unfair.”

The author, Julia Sass Rubin, an associate professor at Rutgers University, described conditions in the Jersey system as increasingly “alarming” and cited seven examples of how current education policies promoted by the governor “are targeting public schools attended primarily by low-income children of color for harmful interventions.”

Among the seven examples cited are many things that the $1 billion cut from schools could certainly would have helped address, including worsening physical conditions in schools, forced school closings, and chronic “underfunding” in districts populated primarily by children of color.

While funds to traditional public schools were slashed, Christie presided over policies that sent more money to taxpayer-funded vouchers for private and religious education and to an expansion of charter schools.

http://ourfuture.org/20131106/what-chris-christie-is-hiding-behind-his-rage-at-school-teachers