Saturday, October 2, 2010

Not so fast, Mr. Zuckerberg, Mayor Booker, and Governor Christie!

It appears that the Governor does not have the legal power to grant the mayor any power--let alone executive power--over the Newark Public Schools:
David G. Sciarra, the director of the Education Law Center, a Newark-based organization that represents poor urban schoolchildren in a lengthy equitable-funding lawsuit against the state, said that no New Jersey law permits a mayor to run schools, and that approval by the state legislature would be required for such a change. Nearly all the state's 600 school districts have elected school boards; a handful have boards appointed by mayors.

In addition, a 5-year-old law governing state intervention in struggling school districts vests authority over those districts in the governor's appointed state commissioner of education, not the governor or a mayor, say experts and current and former lawmakers.
"There is no provision for the mayor to have that kind of control. The [state] commissioner [of education] is really the one who is given that authority by the law," said Craig A. Stanley, a former Democratic state assemblyman who co-authored the 2005 law...

Paul L. Tractenberg, a Rutgers University law professor who is an expert on education law, called the Christie-Booker proposal "an effort to totally blur the lines" of authority over Newark schools.

"It's a basic, established principle of law that you can only delegate the authority you actually have, and I don't think the governor has the authority to operate the Newark schools," he said.
The response of Derrell J. Bradford, the executive director of Excellent Education for Everyone, co-founded by Booker?
"These people are punks."

2 comments:

  1. Don't let the law get in the way of what you want to do. I've been in politics long enough now to realize that when a politician wants something they won't let something as simple as a law get in their way. Public opinion will be used to bully their way into what they want. At this point in time in this country public opinion appears to be more important than rule of law. And many politicians are willing to overrule the rule of law to get what they want.

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  2. Jim has more to say on this here: http://notestoleicester.blogspot.com/2010/10/rule-of-law-versus-public-opinion.html

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