My new Spotlight column is out today. It starts here:

News from Newark Public Schools is alarming. Earlier this month state legislators who sit on New Jersey’s Joint Council of Public Schools tag-teamed an all-out assault on Superintendent Cami Anderson: “You need to get your house in order,” sniped Senator Ron Rice; “I’m so angry,” said Sen. Teresa Ruiz; “You make the assumption that you are the sharpest tool in the shed,” taunted Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver. Afterward, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka sent a letter to Anderson demanding her “immediate resignation.” 

Earlier in Anderson’s tenure, the School Advisory Board unanimously issued a no-confidence vote and a week later the City Council unanimously approved an otiose moratorium on all school-reform initiatives. The Newark Teachers Union pronounces defiantly (if illogically) on its homepage, “Cami’s height of hypocrisy and indifference towards the work that teachers do has reached an all time low.” 

What we’ve got here is a kind of inverted cult of personality, a superintendent-as-villain meme, convenient for tweets and screeds and political pandering but useless as a strategy for thinking about how to improve educational opportunities for Newark’s 40,000 students.

Read the rest here.