Perth Amboy: Lots of Questions

UPDATE: "jrose" has responded to this post; I will assume that's Joel Rose, CEO of New Classrooms. I've asked him to confirm that.

He writes: "At the risk of putting a wrench into your creative conspiracy theory, you should know that New Classrooms has no relationship with Wireless Generation, Rupert Murdoch, or Joel Klein." I've asked him to clarify that, and the relationship between School Of One, which Wireless Generation did work for, and Teach To One, which appears to be the direct progenitor of School Of One.

I've also asked him to clarify whether he maintains a relationship with Education Commissioner Chris Cerf.

As I said: there's not necessarily anything wrong with this deal. But it's a lot of money, and it raises a lot of questions. I think we can all agree that the good people of Perth Amboy and New Jersey deserve a high level of transparency, so I thank Mr. Rose in advance for his candid answers. I will gladly put them into a separate post if he chooses to respond.


Let's see what's happening these days in Perth Amboy, the new center of reformyness in New Jersey.

When we last visited, superintendent and anti-tenure crusader Janine Caffrey was ratcheting up the war between herself and the Perth Amboy Board of Education. Members the board want to fire her, but NJDOE Commissioner Chris Cerf has stepped in and stayed her termination while a mediator reviews the case. As I've pointed out, it's more than a little hypocritical that Caffrey, who calls tenure "...the single greatest impediment to education improvement in New Jersey, without a doubt," is using an appeal to an outside third party to keep her job.

But there was another wrinkle to all of this: during the early days of her troubles with her board, Caffrey was defended publicly by B4K, New Jersey's premiere reformy advocacy group. B4K paid for ads supporting Caffrey that ran in the local newspaper and on websites like PolitickerNJ:



Here's what I said at the time:
In fact, I wonder if, in their zeal to defend Caffrey, B4K has accidentally open a big can of worms. If Caffrey keeps her job, how will we know if there are any strings attached to this undoubtedly expensive public relations campaign? Don't the taxpayers of Perth Amboy deserve to know exactly who is paying for the trashing of their school board officials?
Well, it turns out I made a pretty good point. The problem is that B4K's "partner" is Michelle Rhee's outfit, StudentsFirst. We don't know how exactly they "partner," but they teamed up with great fanfare last year. Derrell Bradford, B4K's Executive Director, implied that there might be financial ties between the two groups:
Bradford said the partnership "should help us fund raise and work on reform in the most productive way possible." He said the two groups will work on "grassroots organizing and political activities in the fall, supporting reform candidates running for election." [emphasis mine]
According to Steven Brill, StudentsFirst gets funding - a lot of funding - from Rupert Murdoch. B4K has yet to say whether any of that funding comes their way or not, but there is little doubt the two groups are very closely aligned.

Murdoch owns a company called Wireless Generation, which was and most likely is still is a technology provider for another company called New Classrooms. Wireless Generation is run by Murdoch's consiglieri, Joel Klein. New Classrooms is run by Klein's former underling at the NYC Department of Education, Joel Rose. Rose started the company in NYC under another name, School of One.

Yeah, it's confusing; I made a chart to keep it all straight:
Here's the kicker: when I first reported on all these connections, it turned out New Classrooms had just inked a $60,000 deal with the Perth Amboy schools to provide an after-school program in math tutoring called Teach To One. New Classrooms was playing up their work in Perth Amboy on their website; clearly, this was the first step in their expansion strategy.

Well, it looks like the stakes are now even higher. According to the PABOE minutes for July 26, 2012 (p. 7), Caffrey has recommended a $575,900 contract with New Classrooms to implement Teach To One at the William C. McGinnis School.

Before we go any further, let's say what we don't know:
  • We don't know exactly what sort of deal Wireless Generation has with New Classrooms these days, although WG says it "developed the algorithm at the heart of School of One," the progenitor of Teach To One. 
  • We don't know the extent of a financial relationship between B4K and Students First.
Here's what we do know:
  • B4K bought ads defending Caffrey.
  • B4K is StudentsFirst's partner.
  • StudentsFirst is funded in part by Rupert Murdoch.
  • Murdoch owns a company, Wireless Generation, that was the lead technology provider for School of One.
  • School of One has become New Classrooms.
  • Caffrey is recommending a contract worth well over half a million dollars to New Classrooms.
We also know:
  • Joel Rose, current CEO of New Classrooms, worked with Chris Cerf for years at Edison schools. Rose came over to the NYCDOE with Cerf in 2006 to work as Cerf's chief of staff. Again: Cerf is the one who intervened between Caffrey and the PABOE to save her job.
  • Both Rose and Cerf are graduates of the Broad Superintendents "Academy."
One other thing: from what I've read, Teach To One/School Of One sounds pretty awful:
We then entered a large room, converted from the school's library, with about one hundred 7th and 8th graders seated at tables, most of them staring at computers and doing multiple choice math problems. I watched as one girl, seemingly in a trance, looked at the screen, and hit A, B, C, D keys in turn, until she got the right answer to a multiple choice question and moved onto the next one. Sadly, no adult but me seemed to be paying any attention to this student to make sure she was trying to think the problem through.
There were also two or three small groups of students, sitting at smaller tables, with rather harassed looking teachers who were trying to teach math, but allowed to spend only about ten to 15 minutes together before time ran out and a signal was made for the students to move back to computers, or to another group led by a different teacher. [emphasis mine]
Of course, school districts buy worthless curricular junk - especially technology - all the time. But nearly $600K for an on-line math course? That a lot of money by anyone's standards.

Again, this was always the problem with B4K stepping into the middle of a public fight between the PABOE and Caffrey. Anything they, their funders, or their partners are connected to is now tainted in Perth Amboy. I'm not saying that there's anything necessarily wrong with this deal; I am saying it raises a lot of questions about the connections between all of the participants.

It would look better for all concerned if Caffrey withdrew this contract and found another technology provider without all the baggage attached. It would look better if Cerf stayed far away from districts that do business with Classroom Innovations, given his ties to Rose. And it would look better if Rhee, B4K, and Murdoch came clean on their financial relationships once and for all.

The reformyists have created a nebulous world where public, non-profit, and for-profit interests converge behind a cloud of connections. We'd all be better off if they drew some bright, clear lines between each other, and let us know exactly what their relationships are.