Tom Moran in today’s Star-Ledger describes the raucous scene in Newark last week at a community forum. Newark teacher union President Joseph DelGrosso said that Superintendent Cami Anderson’s reform plans were an insult to Rev. Martin Luther King and compared the State’s control of Newark Public Schoools to slavery:

“You robbed them of their ancestry once,” shouted DelGrosso, who is white. “Why not again?”

DelGrosso’s on a tear. At last week’s Senate Education Committee’s meeting to hear public input regarding Sen. Teresa Ruiz’s tenure reform bill, DelGrosso said that eliminating LIFO (the archaic system that lays off young teachers before older ones, regardless of classroom effectiveness) would turn teachers into “serfs.” Now Cami Anderson (married to an African-American man, by the way) is a racist, presumably because some of Newark’s teachers are black.

Nothing like a some measured, incisive discussion to start off the week.