Booker attempts to whitewash friend Cami’s black NPS record

Former Newark mayor Cory Booker, a close friend and former employer of Cami Anderson, did not resist the temptation to try to inject positive spin into Cami’s recent removal from Newark Public Schools. Anderson is the New Jersey appointed Newark Public Schools superintendent who just left Newark in the wake of widespread protests for all the damage she’s caused to the students and schools she was hired to serve and protect.

Asked about the politics surrounding Anderson vacating of the position, Booker said “I’m happy with her contributions, things we should all be appreciative of.”

Really – what are those contributions we should all appreciate, Sen. Booker? I’ve only heard bad things about this woman. Such as:

• In May, thousands of Newark Public Schools students walked out of school and together with supporters, shut down Newark’s downtown streets for several hours in protest of all the damage Cami has done
• Newark’s current Mayor Ras Baraka called for her removal on the same grounds
• Cami and Chris Cerf spent millions of dollars on consultancies owned by their friends whose assessments of NPS produced no important outcomes
• National attention for barring the 5 young children of the Tillman family from attending their neighborhood school and a local television story won the family a reprieve from an impossible situation. At the beginning of the 2014 school year, Cami assigned the children to 5 separate schools located in different corners of the city, each one far from home and refused to consider reassignment to make it easier for their parents to escort them to school. After the news report, Cami relented and put them together in a single school closer to home.

The Washington Post handily sums up the overall impact that New Jersey state control has had on NPS:

Christie has the right to decide who runs the Newark school system because it is under state control and has been since 1995. It hasn’t been improved since.