This weekend’s links are below for your reading pleasure. If you come across any interesting links, then please share them with us in the comments section below. Enjoy!

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The one thing that struck me the most about the headquarters building is that it’s pretty much a fortress. I mean, it’s built like it could withstand any major natural disaster or attack. I honestly think that if a foreign country attacked the capitol, the USED building would be left standing – mocking the foreigners and their wimpy weapons. But that’s just the impression you get from the outside. Once you’re inside you see that it’s really just functional office space. I liked the mission statement of the USED, which was put up right on the wall for everyone to see when you entered the building. Take a look:

The USED's mission statement - give it a read

Pretty good mission statement for the USED, huh? I was down in Washington, DC for a conference on charter schools which I won’t get into in this blog entry. However, I couldn’t help but think that I actually helped build the impressive structure in which the charter school conference was being held in thanks to all of my student loan payments. It was a weird feeling – not necessarily a bad feeling, but one that made me take a step back and think, “Well, here’s the place where my checks have been going for the past few years.” It was just an interesting feeling.

What was not a good or interesting feeling, though, was the physical pain that I endured as I rode Amtrak’s Acela down to Washington, DC. Believe it or not, these asshats actually sold more tickets for the Acela than there were seats for the passengers. Sure, you’ll never get any official response from the Acela people saying that it was standard practice to do that or that they were sorry (apologizing is an acknowledgement of guilt). However, the conductor on the train – who was a very nice guy, by the way – told me and the fifteen other seatless passengers that this was common practice. It was outrageous. So, I rode down to the nation’s capitol sitting on this:

Imagine sitting on this for two and a half hours

Yeah… not comfortable at all. Anyway, I visited one of my two major student loan lenders last month. And while I don’t think that I’ll ever willingly or happily visit the headquarters building of the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority (NJHESAA), I’m actually going to be really close to some of their associates starting tomorrow. Turns out that NJHESAA and my company will both be exhibitors at the New Jersey Charter Schools Association conference in Atlantic City this week. I don’t know if we’ll be anywhere near each other, but I feel like being in the same room as those people is going to drive me nuts. Frankly, I have half a mind to walk up to their booth and ask them why they felt the need to treat a highly intelligent, good-natured person (me) like a dumb, moronic piece of garbage every time I called them. And that same half of my mind wants me to ask them why they wouldn’t contact the credit agencies to report their mistaken even after admitting that they made a blunder when they reported that I made a late payment when no payment was actually due. Those idiots lowered my credit score for a few months until I had to go out of my way to get that stupid mistake wiped clean from my record. Idiots.

Anyway, enough of that tangent. The point of this entry is that I visited the USED headquarters building in Washington, DC and I was pleasantly pleased with the visit. I hope that they do their customers well as they continue to ramp up their student loan production.

Let’s see if I can do it!

Do you know people who blindly follow everything that the leaders of their chosen political party or political point of view say? You know – that friend of yours who never thinks that anything a Republican/Democrat (depends on your friend’s point of view) does is worth any good at all. These people bother me. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of these brainwashed people from both sides of the aisle emerge over the national debt debate. There are conservative minded people who think that the government should stop spending money, period. There are liberal minded people who think that the debt ceiling should have no limit because they don’t think it matters. And then there are the vast majority of Americans who believe that something needs to be done that includes both spending cuts and getting rid of loopholes that allow the ultra wealthy to not pay their fair share in taxes.

In other words, there are people who understand that compromise is the right way to go and there are people who have a blind allegiance to whatever one political party says.

Those people with the blind allegiance frustrate me.

However, forget about the national debate over the debt limit for a moment. There’s an example much closer to home that frustrates me even more. Here in New Jersey we have a very healthy charter school system. For those of you who do not know what a charter school is – it’s a free, public school just like any other public school. There are two primary differences between a charter school and the traditional public school system. The first is that a charter school does not operate under the thumb of the local Board of Education. They’re independent and not beholden to the sometimes crazy local politics that shape local Boards of Education.

The second difference is funding. You know all of that money that you pay in property taxes? Well, that money is filtered through the system in New Jersey a “per pupil” amount is decided for each school district. Ideally, you should be able to track your property tax dollars throughout the system and ultimately say something like, “My 2010 property taxes paid for X students to be educated in the local school district.” Except for charter schools. Yes, they are funded through the same revenue stream as the regular school districts, except they only get 90% of the “per pupil” funding.

Two major differences – independent of the local school board and given less money in an attempt to do a better job at educating your students. Got it? Good!

If you’ve followed the charter school movement in New Jersey, then you know that they are admired by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike. In fact, Governor Chris Christie has ramped up many of the charter school programs that were supported or enacted under former Governor Jon Corzine. There has been a gradual increase in the amount of charter schools operating throughout the Garden State – I think we’re at 70 something schools now. And the most important note to mention about the charter schools operating in New Jersey is that, by and large, they are succeeding.

All you have to do is look at schools like TEAM Academy Charter School in Newark or Camden’s Promise Charter School in Camden or Hope Academy Charter School in Asbury Park and you’ll find students whose parents have rejected the local school districts and are now achieving levels of academic success never before thought possible in these districts. It’s happening, folks – and it’s real. There are a lot of people out there who try to marginalize the charter school movement and their arguments are pretty lame. One of the biggest arguments that I hear goes something like, “Charter schools are private schools! They take money from the public system for a private school!”

That’s totally ridiculous.

Charter schools are totally free, public schools that you can send your child to if you so choose. If there are not enough seats in the charter school to accommodate all of the applicants, then the school holds a public lottery to allocate the seats. It doesn’t get any fairer than that, people.

But what aggravates me the most and what drove me to write this entry is that many of today’s complainers about charter schools didn’t say a word a few years ago when Corzine was governor. Not a word. In fact, many of them lauded the great work that Corzine was doing to support quality charter schools throughout the state. And now we have a very strong, very well-liked Republican governor in a predominantly Democratic state and all of a sudden the supporters of charter schools have become detractors.

It’s sad. It’s pathetic. It’s blind political allegiance.

Mark my words – as soon as a Democrat becomes the governor of this state again, you won’t hear a single peep out of the hate groups that run around these days lambasting Governor Christie’s heroic efforts to support the charter school movement. Those with blind political allegiance will hoot and holler about how great the Democratic governor is and how he or she is fixing all of the problems that Governor Christie “created.”

And amid all of that rubbish there will be nearly no truth.

The truth is that charter schools have succeeded under Republican and Democratic governors alike. The truth is that charter schools have been given a tremendous amount of support under Republican and Democratic governors alike. And the truth is that this state’s politics are so wallowed in people with a fiercely blind political allegiance that those of us with independent voices must continue to shout to be heard above the chorus of blind hatred.

I wonder how long it can last. I wonder how long before someone takes these blind political zealots to task. For the sake of the future of this great state, I hope that day comes very, very soon.

I’m glad that there are more movies and, specifically, documentaries coming out about what’s going on in the inner cities with respect to education. One of the better movies to come out is The Cartel. And while I understand that there are two sides to every story, my gut reaction to the entire education reform and the school choice movement is that one option works and one option fails. Put all of the phony baloney math and statistics aside and look at the results – the overwhelmingly vast majority of charter schools in inner city school districts (and the suburbs for that matter) are tremendous successes while the traditional public schools are failures.

The Cartel tries to give us some reasons why this phenomenon occurs. Here is some information that director Bob Bowdon posted on The Huffington Post regarding his movie and education reform:

Education status quo defenders routinely call school choice “simplistic,” and they mean it in the bad way.

Their bullet points go like this:

The problems of American education are dizzyingly complex. There are issues of absentee parents, bad nutrition, and cultural breakdown. There’s an entertainment culture beckoning our kids to hours of videos games, television shows and gross out YouTube videos. Throw in a diminished economy where even some of the best students can’t find work after graduation, and you get a whiff of the enormous complexity. Why on earth do these reformers believe that (Insert: school choice, charter schools, vouchers, scholarships) would be some magic pill to cure this swirling array of ills? These fixes are simplistic.

Indeed, for many of these people, the very concept of “complexity” is comforting. They believe the best solutions to social problems strike ornate compromises between a wide variety of stakeholders, each of which need carefully designed provisions to preserve their interests.

If they hear news of a 2,000 page health care bill passed by the House (that most Representatives don’t read), they shrug and say, “What’s the problem?” If the 9,400 page federal tax code has obvious loopholes, they want to add more pages to plug them. If a 165-page teachers’ contract spells out the Monday through Thursday workday as six hours, 57 minutes, and 30 seconds, and the rest of us say, “are you kidding me?” — they say, “so?”

Running deep in their psyches: “Complexity is for smart people.”

What they forget is that all the great causes in American history were based on simple questions. Should slavery be legal, or not? Should women have the right to vote, or not? Should we remove our troops from Vietnam, or not? Of course entire libraries of scholarship can be collected about intricacies of these issues; yes, we’re aware of that. The point is that the decisions can all be boiled down to elegantly uncomplicated questions.

Parental school choice, in fact, is a simple concept, and just like movements for abolition, suffrage or withdrawal from Vietnam, its simplicity doesn’t make it a bad idea.

I encourage you to read through Bowdon’s entire post over at the other website. And if you have the inclination, I encourage you to buy or rent The Cartel to see what’s going on in the school choice movement today!

However, last week my time in Chicago was great! I was absolutely stunned at how fun and active downtown Chicago was while I was there. I stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel, which was a first for me, and it was a pretty cool place. It didn’t have any major “rock and roll” stuff going on while I was there, but it is located in the old Carbon and Carbide building which has this amazing art deco vibe throughout. It was pretty cool.

On Sunday evening I walked a few blocks from the hotel down to Millennium Park. This park was really the only “sightseeing” that I wanted to do while I was at the conference because when I was in Chicago in 2004 my group kept driving by the park without actually stopping at it to see what was up. It’s really a nice place and there was a ton of activity for a Sunday night. On Monday, I had a separate conference to attend that was about a mile from my hotel so I walked downtown (over the North Michigan bridge) to get to the conference place and it was fun. It’s been a long time since I walked around a city on a consistent basis and I forgot how much I liked it.

Anyway, I was really pleased with my trip to Chicago and my opinion of the place has changed. The city is clean, vibrant, and has amazing architecture. I’d definitely go back again – and soon! Here are some pictures from my walking and driving around Chicago:

A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.

The board voted 5 to 2 to accept a plan proposed by Schools Superintendent Frances Gallo to fire the approximately 100 faculty and staff members at the chronically underperforming Central Falls High School on the last day of this school year in June.

The plan will also create a new school governance structure and requires the high school’s new teachers to take part in “professional development” that meets federal standards.

How is that for education reform?! The folks who made this decision up in Central Falls, Rhode Island are patriots – these are the type of people who put their necks out on the line to make a decision that would not be popular with the local people or the brainwashed masses, but was absolutely in the best interests of the students.

If you don’t remember, the response to this action was major protests by the teachers saying that they shouldn’t have been fired. Perhaps that would have been a good time for their to bring up the overused catchphrase of, “What about the children?” You see, when teachers protest that they are being fired for bad student performance, they are inherently saying that it’s not their fault that their students have failed; rather it’s the students’ fault that they failed. And while that may be true in a few instances where children don’t want to learn, the undeniable success of the charter school movement proves that you can teach a child to want to learn. A good teacher can lead a child to have a passion for learning.

There are good teachers out there and there are struggling children out there. The red tape of the public school system is outrageous. Now is the time for major education reform – put the power in the people’s hands and bring more charter schools online immediately.

Christie told the The Associated Press in an interview that he will offer more state aid to all school districts whose teachers agree to a wage freeze for the 2011 fiscal year.

There you go. Anyone who says that Governor Chris Christie isn’t trying to work with those teachers and local unions that are sharing in the sacrifice is lying. Now you know that so when you hear someone saying how Governor Christie is attacking the wrong people (teachers instead of bureaucrats in Trenton), you know that the person saying that is a liar.

The offer won’t cost the state any more money. The Republican is offering to give districts all the money the state would save on Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes as a result of the wage freezes.

Sometimes the best solutions really are the easiest ones to accomplish, huh?

Already teachers in several districts, including in West Essex, Boonton, Montclair and Metuchen, have voluntarily offered to freeze wages.

And no one, by any means, who is in favor of education reform in New Jersey thinks that the teachers or the local unions are the problem. A great big “congratulations!” goes out to the teachers in these districts. They are changing education in this state for the better. Thank you!

But if teachers agree to wage freezes, districts could see more than a 7 percent increase in aid. For example, a district that saves $1 million in salaries as a result of wage freezes would receive an extra $75,000 in state aid.

“Maybe that helps to fund another teacher position or two, or a sports program that they might otherwise had to cut,” the governor said.

Are these programs not worth saving? As a former student athlete, I think that they are worth saving and I would hope that local teachers’ unions put their money where their mouths have been (literally) and take a one year pay freeze to support the programs that support their students.

“Gov. Christie is a very shrewd politician, and he’s using crafty political tactics to impose his agenda on the state,” NJEA President Barbara Keshishian said recently in a statement. “But when he turned his attack machine on teachers and school employees, he really stooped to a desperate new low, because our members are not the problem.”

Ms. Keshishian, your teachers are not the problem… the leviathan that your organization has become is the problem. Disassemble the NJEA now and allow countywide and local teachers’ unions to represent the true interests of their members. The time has come for the NJEA to stop getting in the way of the education reform that New Jersey so desperately needs.

Listen up, particularly, around the 1 minute mark when Governor Christie starts talking about the truth about the “it’s about the kids” argument. In the Governor’s own words, “It’s easy to say it’s about the kids when…” Watch the video below to find out how the Governor finishes that line!

Enough is enough of the same old crap in New Jersey’s broken education system. The time has come to fully fund charter schools and to break the unnecessary (and, frankly useless) statewide teachers’ union. There’s no need for a statewide association when countywide and local teachers’ unions are the source of the state group’s power. Break the NJEA now and save the future of education in New Jersey!

If you want to find out more about The Lottery film, check out their website by clicking here. I’m telling you – charter schools are the answer to the problems inherent in the current educational system. Either the current system has to break (unlikely) or we need more alternatives like charter schools.

If I had my way, I’d carve out some time to go back to that shit hole of a bar and do something to “get them” six years after the fact. Bunch of sleazeball scumbags…

Anyway, I’m heading to Chicago for the tenth annual National Alliance for Public Charter Schools conference. On a personal level, I’m a big believer in the ability for charter schools to change the educational dynamic in highly educationally distressed areas of New Jersey and the United States. Professionally, I manage my company’s charter school programs so I’m obviously going to go to the national conference.

I went to this conference last year when it was in Washington, DC and it was pretty good. There are usually thousands of people at the conference so I’m looking forward to seeing some folks that I haven’t seen in a while. Also, the keynote speaker this year is Bill Gates so I’m hoping to catch up with him and hopefully get a picture (unlikely since there is usually a mob of people around the keynote speaker).

This will also be the first time that I am traveling by air with my laptop so I’m not sure what to expect, but I’m hoping that it will be easy going. No worries here, folks. I have some posts already lined up for the next few days and they should automatically appear on the site without any work on my part. Enjoy and I’ll be back next weekend!