Bishop Jackson

An influential black minister endorsed Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie this week because of the governor’s support for school vouchers. In doing so, Bishop Reginald Jackson also offered a harsh assessment of the Democratic Party.

“It is sad for me to see my party, which embraced the civil rights movement, now in New Jersey blocking low-income and minority children from escaping the slavery of failing schools,” Jackson said, according to several news outlets. Of black Democratic lawmakers in particular, he added, “Every day, they see children who are not getting a quality education and that doesn’t seem to move them.”

In an interview with redefinED, Jackson went further. Many black Democratic lawmakers “have placed the special interests above the interests of their constituents," he said in the podcast attached below. "The unions … have more influence and more bearing on them than the children who live in their districts.”

Bishop Jackson is a household name in New Jersey and often considered the state’s most powerful black leader. His resume includes a long list of progressive causes. He led efforts to deter racial profiling by state police and predatory lending by banks. He worked to secure more funding for public schools. Asked if supporting school choice was in line with Democratic values, Jackson said, “School choice is in fact an America value.”

His comments come as New Jersey lawmakers continue to beat back efforts to expand school choice while their counterparts in other states – Democrats included – are warming to them.

The key to getting more Democrats to come around, Bishop Jackson said, is educating parents about where Democrats stand. “They have to become aware that the folk whom they’ve elected to represent them right now do not have their children as their No. 1 interest,” he said. “Once we are able to open up their eyes so they can see this, then hopefully they will make better choices in terms of who they put in the Legislature.”

If that means more black voters going Republican, he suggested, so be it.

From the online news service NJ Spotlight:

In a stunning display of strange bedfellows, Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic power broker George Norcross took to a Camden graduation stage on Friday to call for the immediate passage of the tuition tax credit bill that would provide up to $12,000 vouchers for low-income students in select districts to attend private schools.

The odd pairing gave fresh speculation to the future of the Opportunity Scholarship Act (OSA), the long-debated school voucher bill. OSA has picked up new political momentum in the waning days of the legislative session this month.

But for the measure to actually pass, a few uncertainties and long-running battles remain to be resolved.

Many of you are aware that the New Jersey legislature is considering a tax credit scholarship bill modeled on Florida’s successful program. Sponsored by some prominent Democrats, this bill has inspired spirited debate in legislative committees, at rallies at the Capitol, and in the press. Today, former Democratic Gov. James Florio weighed in with a column published in the Newark Star Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper. I don’t often do this, but I couldn’t resist adding my own comments after the Governor’s (His column is below, and my comments are in italics).

By James J. Florio

The establishment of a system of universal public schools for all American children was a historic event for the world and the key to our nation’s development and prosperity. It provided unmatched literacy levels for our citizens and a commitment to excellence as a national goal. It enabled people from every country to be blended into one people, representing an amalgam of ideas of freedom and opportunity through upward mobility. Our diversity was molded in the public schools and became our strength. [Democracy does require a publicly funded education system that embraces and develops our diverse strengths into a unified whole, but empowerment and customization are necessary for this to occur. Top-down, command and control education systems are the wrong way to go. In this century we cannot expect a one-size-fits-all model, where we assign students to schools by zip codes, to work effectively.]

Now, we find — through proposed voucher systems — a rejection of our unifying universal educational model. [Not true. Parental empowerment is a part of a new, more democratic model of publicly-funded education. The old model gave taxpayer dollars to a monopoly system that disempowered parents by assigning students to schools by geography. The new empowerment model allows parents to choose from qualified, properly regulated suppliers of many kinds—without preference for who the provider is.] (more…)

No matter how fair-minded advocates for school vouchers or tax credit scholarships make their case, they're often drawn into a straw-man argument.

Newark Star-Ledger columnist Bob Braun is the latest to criticize New Jersey's proposed Opportunity Scholarship Act as "another gimmick masquerading as school reform." Braun is right to point out that "vouchers won't fix" the collapse of traditional public schools throughout the Garden State, but few of the bill's proponents are claiming that it will. While Braun mocks Newark Mayor Cory Booker for invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "no fewer than three times" during his testimony in support of the New Jersey bill, he neglects the core of Booker's argument. "This bill doesn’t remove our moral obligation to fix the failing public schools in New Jersey, nor does it relieve the crime that’s happening every day when we fail our children," Booker told the New Jersey assembly's Commerce and Economic Development Committee on Thursday, which approved the measure 5-0. "[But] it’s about time we give some small sliver of immediate hope for parents who are desperate in our city.”

This is not to say that advocates for school choice have never made far-reaching claims. Researchers John Chubb and Terry Moe didn't help the debate when they wrote in their 1990 book, Politics, Markets & America's Schools, that "without being too literal about it, we think reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea." Whether Chubb and Moe's rhetorical flourish helped build the straw man that opponents to vouchers, charter schools and other forms of choice have found it convenient to knock down is another debate. But for more than two decades, people like Cory Booker have been engaged in a debate over an assumption they've never made. (more…)

UPDATED: New Jersey's proposed Opportunity Scholarship Act won unanimous approval Thursday in the state assembly's Commerce and Economic Development Committee. Of the five members who approved the plan, three were Democrats, including the committee chairman, Albert Coutinho. While Coutinho acknowledged there are concerns over the measure within his party's caucus, he said the vote was "a sign that we're serious about education reform and considering all options."

Newark Mayor Cory Booker testified in favor of the proposal: "This bill doesn’t remove our moral obligation to fix the failing public schools in New Jersey, nor does it relieve the crime that’s happening every day when we fail our children. [But] it’s about time we give some small sliver of immediate hope for parents who are desperate in our city."

Before approving the plan, Coutinho said the overall size of the program would be reduced from nearly $1 billion over five years to $360 million, the Asbury Park Press reported. Proponents said they expect further amendments as the bill heads to the assembly's Budget Committee.