Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, M.S.P.H.

teachers are placed in an impossible situation whereby they are required, if not mandated, to overcome the poverty of their students while they are denied the resources necessary to even begin to address this issue. While under-resourced, they are held to the highest standards and demonized for not meeting them.

A major component of the Cartel’s Achievement District strategy is the utilization of prominent community leaders and elected officials of color to make the case for this “backdoor corporate takeover of public schools” in their respective communities.

The Cartel for education reform is aggressively orchestrating a scam in New Jersey in an attempt to squeeze as much privatization as possible out of public education in the final year of Gov. Christie’s last term.

In recent years, the Cartel has targeted middle-class suburban districts for corporate charters as they view them as yielding greater profits to be raped and pillaged. Additionally, it has undertaken other strategies to fast track public school privatization.

the Cartel uses its communications unit to ensure that charter schools are referred to as “high performing and/or high quality” irrespective of their academic outcomes, fraud, and dismissal of students whom they claim are not a good fit.

the current privatization assault on public education escalated on January 29, 2009 when a representative of the corporate education reform Cartel (the Koch Bros.; Gates, Bradley, Walton, Broad, foundations, et. al.; and Wall Street financial firms) met with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office and handed him and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a fully developed copy of legislation for Race to the Top (RTTT) that instituted the national infrastructure for the dismantling and privatization of K-12 public education.

Public education in New Jersey has never been under greater duress. Christie is paying off his political debts to the Cartel by aggressively trying to turn over public education to the corporate sector in both urban and suburban districts.

In Camden, as will be the case in Trenton, the Hope Act which allows for the establishment of corporate charters with fewer controls and lesser accountability than the charters that already exist. And state funding is also available for their creation.

What is at stake here is the future of Trenton’s system of public education. There is a mad rush by the Christie administration to privatize and dismantle it before the end of his term in 2017 in payment for the Cartel’s support (more than $50 million) of his three political campaigns: two for governor and one for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.