The NJEA continues to impress me, Save Jerseyans. Rather than worry about their own declining popularity and inability to swallow enough of their unearned pride to take meaningful part in meaningful reforms for the students of New Jersey, they continuously seek to discredit and smear a governor who is taking aim at the problems of education in our state. Millions of dollars and millions of smears have no worked yet, and that doesn’t seem likely to change. However, the NJEA shows no sign of slowing down.
The NJEA twitter feed recently posed numerous questions to New Jersey, but I am not so sure that they thought too hard about the answers. If they had, they likely would not have asked in the first place.
1. If you lost your healthcare in the last few months, I think we all know who we can blame. In fact, the House of Representatives just began debate at 10:00 this morning to roll back that poor excuse for legislation that arguably delivered power to the GOP in 2010. In the last year, premiums have skyrocketed and companies have been begging for waivers from the law so that they can continue to actually offer insurance to their employees. Over 100 companies have been issued a waiver so far, but how many were denied and will be forced to either cut benefits or fire enough employees to get under the threshold of Obamacare?
2. As companies are finally beginning to hire again, and our Governor has been hard at work to attract companies to New Jersey to create jobs. The people who should feel insecure in their jobs are NJEA members, and thats not the fault of the state or the economy, but the fault of their union! Their refusal to work with the Christie Administration will only end poorly for teachers who end up getting laid off in 2011 due the record number of school budgets that I expect will fail this year. Rather than giving an inch, the NJEA would rather teachers get dragged for a mile through the muddy process of reform all without a seat at the table.
3. Is the community safer? Aside from the fact that the NJEA has nothing to do with community safety, I would imagine that they are taking a swipe at cuts in state aid to towns and cities that are choosing to cut their police forces to balance the books. Places like Camden and Newark, who likely have other areas of government that could be targeted for cuts to mitigate any lay offs of police, but are not doing so.
4 & 5. For many students in New Jersey, 2011 will finally be the year where their school is better than a year ago. No, not because the Governor is going to open the Corzine flood gates and pour a ton of wasted, debt financed money into failing schools only to see it bring no progress and poorer results. Instead, it will be because thousands of students will finally have access to stronger charter schools. Just this week Christie announced that he has approved 6 new charter schools, and will have 23 additional schools in 2011. That will bring the total number of charter schools to 96 by the end of the year. So by the end of this year, I think that many students will be able to give an emphatic “yes” response to this one as they leave their failing NJEA institutions for greener pastures, finally finding some solutions to the true civil rights issue of our day. Finally, since so many students will be leaving failing schools for a brighter education and future, the NJEA run schools wont have to worry about class sizes anymore.
