By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
You and I know that the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) cares about two things, Save Jerseyans: preservation of their power, wielded through the accrual of money and politics.
Kids, parents and yes, teachers, be damned. But they don’t always come right out and say it.
Sometimes they do. Who can forget how back in 2012 then-NJEA Executive Director Vincent Giordano went on TV and told New Jersey’s poor families stuck in crappy public school districts sorry, “life’s not always fair.”
Next up: at the 2015 NJSCERA Conference on Virtual & Blended Learning held on Wednesday, the NJEA’s Marguerite Schroder (note: their website says she’s a “student organizer” but, no offense, she looks a little long-in-the-tooth to be a student so I’m not exactly sure what her duties include… maybe it’s like community organizing?) admitted to Bob Bowdon of the pro-school organization Choice Media that NO, her organization wouldn’t support a non-unionized school even if it was high quality:
We knew that.
Everyone should be trying to stop virtual charter schools.
They are a disaster.
They don’t work academically, producing consistently horrible results.
And they bleed hundreds of millions of dollars from the tax payers.
In NJ, a virtual charter would receive the same funding as a regular brick and mortar charter school, even though their costs are virtually non-existent. And that money would come out of already strained district budgets.
If a virtual charter school opened anywhere in New Jersey, any school district that has a child receiving the virtual charter’s online content would have to pay the virtual charter school 90% of the amount they spend to provide a child with a real education.
The only folks who benefit from virtual charters are the few corporations who run them, who rake in lots of our tax dollars for doing so.