A day earlier than usual, true, but I’m taking a week off.

Proof of the achievement gap among Jersey’s wealthy and poor districts: The Courier Post reports that Cherry Hill School District, rich and high-performing,” just completed studies that show that “when students transfer from a lower-performing district [to Cherry Hill], it can take five years for an achievement gap to disappear.”

Peggy Noonan hearts Chris Christie.

The NEA hearts House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey.

Seven of Newark’s low-performing schools, totaling 3,500 students, will become a special enterprise zone called Global Village School Zone, modeled after Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone (New York Times).

The Philadelphia Inquirer supports superintendent salary caps.

Joseph Summers in the Trenton Times makes the case against Race To The Top:

RTTT places public education in great peril. It aims not to reform public education, but to revolutionize it. In so doing, it is setting unattainable standards for schools to meet. The result, of necessity, will be the diminution or elimination of public education. Moreover, for the Obama plan to “succeed,” it must depend on the grossly distorted use of private and federal power and money.

In The Lobby on what Gov. Christie predicted at a rally in Ocean City: “He told the crowd to “expect drastic public employee pension and benefit reforms this fall, saying of an initial round of changes that affected new hires: ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’”

NJ Spotlight interviews Executive Director of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators, Richard Bozza, who confirms that he was on the “short list” to be Gov. Christie’s education commissioner. “He also served on Christie’s transition committee for education, one that incidentally didn’t propose a cap on superintendent salaries. So, what if he was chosen for the job? ‘I’d rather stay away from that topic. There’s nothing I would say that would help.’”

Also, John Mooney looks at charter considerations in one of NJ’s most wealthy districts (Glen Ridge) and one of NJ’s poorest (Newark).

The Asbury Park Press concludes that there’s no way that NJ can meet its pension obligation.