NJEA President Barbara Keshishian claims 'bait and switch' after deal is left out of $400M federal funding request
NJEA President Barbara Keshishian is led into in the Governor's Office at the Statehouse in this Star-Ledger file photo. New Jersey's Race to the Top application has ended the fragile peace between the Republican and the state's largest teacher's union.
TRENTON — The fragile peace between Gov. Chris Christie and the state’s teachers union ended today, five days after it began.
The Christie administration submitted an application for up to $400 million in federal education funding that rejected key points the New Jersey Education Association and the governor’s own commissioner of education, Bret Schundler, hammered out last Thursday.
At the same time, NJEA officials said they were stunned to learn the document submitted to the U.S. Department of Education did not contain the agreements on merit pay and tenure they had worked out with Schundler last week. Those same officials said there is now no chance the union will support the application — which could doom the submission.
The union’s president, Barbara Keshishian, accused Christie of “bait and switch.” She said “the governor has once again chosen the path of conflict.”
The union said it learned of the reversal when it called Schundler’s office Tuesday for an update.
Christie, who has engaged in a sustained attack on the NJEA since last year’s gubernatorial campaign, was unfazed by the union’s reaction. He minced no words in blaming Schundler either, stressing he will not budge from his core beliefs on how New Jersey’s schools can be improved.
“This is my administration, I’m responsible for it, and I make the decisions,” Christie told reporters during a news conference in West Trenton. “I’m sure we’ll have disagreements in the future. Hopefully, we’ll just handle them a little differently.”
Schundler did not return calls. His spokesman, Alan Guenther, referred questions back to Christie’s office.
The governor said he only learned of the Schundler-NJEA compromise after reading about it in the press. He tore into Schundler on the telephone Friday, one person familiar with the conversation said.
Race to the Top is a competitive grant program created by the Obama administration that rewards states for bold school-improvement plans. New Jersey filed a first-round application in January, but failed. Delaware received $100 million and Tennessee got $500 million — they were the only states to win funding.
Applications for the second round were due yesterday, and the state hand-delivered its paperwork.
In his cover letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Christie said the application “emphasizes and includes several bold initiatives to improve teacher quality,” and that he is so committed to the ideas that “I decided they should not be compromised to achieve a contrived consensus ... Winning the federal government’s financial support is not the end, but rather a means to an end.”
The revised document is largely a duplicate of the first application the NJEA opposed.
The union objected to Christie’s initial proposal to offer merit pay to individual teachers and agreed last week to a plan in which half of the money for teacher bonuses would go for schoolwide programs. The original concept was restored in the application, which says New Jersey “will design, evaluate and implement merit pay programs that pay individual teachers based on student achievement.”
The NJEA also took issue with the administration’s push to let districts disregard seniority when deciding which teachers should be laid off. Last week, the two sides agreed seniority would be taken into account.
“Educational effectiveness will replace seniority as the main factor in determining who to retain,” according to the document.
“The biggest losers in this entire fiasco are the state’s 1.4 million students,” Keshishian said. “Gov. Christie is insisting on an application that seeks to replace collaboration between teachers with competition for inadequate bonuses; an application that seeks to threaten teachers’ jobs rather than give them the confidence to take on new challenges.”
The application included one important point of agreement: a provision that student achievement will count for 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, instead of the originally proposed 51 percent.
Assembly Education Chairman Patrick Diegnan said Schundler briefed lawmakers recently and made it seem as though Christie was on board with the compromise.
“The entire presentation was that this was the administration’s approach,” Diegnan (D-Middlesex) said. “I guess (Christie’s) conservative base was not happy with what the compromise was. That’s the only conclusion anyone can reach.”
Staff writer Lisa Fleisher contributed to this report.
By Josh Margolin and Jeanette Rundquist/The Star-Ledger
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