What to make of the timing of yesterday’s NJEA/Christie fisticuffs and today’s release of a memo from Ed. Comm. Cerf attacking NJEA’s leaders for sugar-coating NJ’s stark achievement gap between poor and rich kids, and between black kids and white kids? Are we shelving the good-cop bad-cop routine? Is the Administration drawing a line in the sand on the Opportunity Scholarship Act?

Back in December NJEA issued a press release that criticized the Christie administration’s “primary rationale for education reform – the so-called “achievement gap” between white and black students in the state’s urban districts.” Barbara Keshishian, NJEA President called the rationale “a classic straw man,” and said that our recent NAEP scores showed that our African-American kids did just fine because they out-performed other African-American kids.”

The Christie Administration didn’t respond, but apparently the fire’s been a-burnin’; yesterday’s contretemps with NJEA’s Life’s-Not-Fair-So-Sue-Me Vince Giordano may have been the last spark.

Comm. Cerf begins his memo with the accusation that NJEA is “not especially troubled with the significant achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers in New Jersey.” He continues,

The notion of an achievement gap may not be something that matters to the NJEA. But it matters to the nearly 40% of our students who can’t read at grade level in 3rd grade – an indicator closely tied to future success in school. It matters to the thousands of students that drop out of high school or even before high school each year.

And,

Because each of those children has a face and a name, it is astonishing that the most well-funded and vocal education group in the state would say that we should be content with any achievement gap at all. The complacency inherent in not wanting to call a system “shameful” in which a child’s zip code largely determines whether he or she will have a fair chance to be successful in life is the exact reason that this problem exists.

Then, Cerf gets at the heart of the argument that divides even the most ardent education reformers: is systemic change best achieved incrementally or in big leaps? Do you bring a system along through tiny steps and lots of hand-holding, or more boldly and rigorously? Is there a moral dimension when kids are at stake?

Here’s the Commissioner’s take:

Incremental progress might be fine inside the NJEA offices. But it is not good enough for the student that is assigned to a failing school without any choice available to them for a better option. The NJEA would be satisfied to tell that student not to worry about the achievement gap that has determined their destiny – it is just a “straw man” after all. But that student doesn’t care about the incremental progress we’ve made in the last two decades. Not when they are the one that is still left behind.