Newark Mayor Cory Booker, NJ’s odds-on favorite for its next U.S. Senator, speaks at Rider University on education reform:

“How can we have a democracy in which we create, in a sense, an educational apartheid, where kids born in certain zip codes get great educations and kids born in other zip codes are trapped in schools?…Every single day the urgency of fixing this problem stares me in the face. There is true understanding in Newark that the system has failed the genius of our children. So for me, it’s ‘what is going to work to get my kids the same educational opportunities that I (had) growing up in a more affluent area of the state.'”

The Record, reporting on Booker’s remark at the American Legion Boys State final assembly, notes that “[t]he Ivy League-educated Booker agrees with the governor on merit pay for teachers and school vouchers, which the unions oppose. In fact, nearly $50 million of the Zuckerberg gift was used to fund the first-ever performance-based contract in a New Jersey public school district. Booker and the governor also support an expansion of charter schools in communities where public schools are failing, and tenure changes, which were negotiated statewide to win the unions’ endorsement.”