The corporate education reform group Jersey CAN has joined the organized effort to discredit a research report released last week by Rutgers Doctoral student Mark Weber and Associate Professor Julia Sass Rubin, which documented that NJ charter schools are educating a different population of students than the sending public schools. The Executive Director of Jersey Can, Janellen Duffy, posted an editorial attacking the reports authors and Save Our Schools NJ. Here is our response: Ms, Duffy, if you truly want to have a conversation about charter schools in New Jersey -- personal attacks, opposition research, and insinuations are not a great way to start that conversation. A few factual corrections to your post: 1) Save Our Schools NJ is in fact unincorporated and unfunded, which you must know as you have found no record of the organizations incorporation in your numerous research efforts. 2) Save Our Schools NJ is NOT virulently anti-charter. What we are against is the current charter school law, which allows the kind of segregation detailed in Weber and Rubins report and which gives local communities no say at all in whether a new charter school will be placed in their community. That has been Save Our Schools NJs position since the organization was founded by a group of parents in 2010. Please check out our web site for our charter position: saveourschoolsnj.org/reform-njs-broken-charter-school-law/ 3) Your efforts to mischaracterize the reports authors are disingenuous. Dr. Rubins daughter attended a charter school for 2 1/2 years and she chaired the board of a nonprofit that finances community facilities in low-income areas, including charter schools. Does that make her a charter school proponent or is it possible that Dr. Rubin and Mr. Weber have more complicated positions on charter schools than your simplistic love or hate dichotomy? The overall defensiveness and reality-denying by the NJ charter school association and its allies (such as JerseyCAN) is stunning. Where is all your supposed progressivity? Shouldnt those who say they care about low-income children be leading the charge against the segregation so plainly evident in the charter vs. district demographics? And please dont claim not to know this data. You were Governor Corzines education policy adviser and NJCAN prides itself on being data driven, yet here you are data avoiding. We welcome the opportunity to talk about how to address the segregation. But first, lets drop the personal attacks and focus on the data.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 13:07:37 +0000
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