John Mooney

The Foundation for Newark’s Future, the fund created from Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark public schools, will soon commit approximately $15 million to the city’s charter schools -- nearly doubling its overall outlay so far.

As students continue to sign up for New Jersey’s first experiments with online charter schools, one leading legislator is asking the state to slow down.

What with its size and Facebook fortune, Newark gets all the press. But Camden is quickly becoming ground zero south for the Christie administration’s push for education reform.

A year into New Jersey’s teacher evaluation pilot, the Christie administration is moving on to the next job to go under the microscope: the school principal.

The sudden move this winter by a vast majority of New Jersey school districts to November elections has drawn much of the public’s attention, but don’t tell that to a handful of districts still heading to the polls this Tuesday.

With No Child Left Behind essentially off the books, welcome to New Jersey’s new age — and labels — for school accountability.

John Mooney, founding editor of njspotlight.com, looks ahead to this afternoon's budget address by New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie.

With the Obama administration Thursday waiving New Jersey from No Child Left Behind, the state was in effect given the green light for its own plan for how public schools will be monitored, assisted, and in the case of those that don’t improve, overhauled and potentially shut down.

The last time negotiators for the state-run Newark Public Schools met with the district’s teachers union, the $100 million Facebook gift was not yet national headlines and Superintendent Cami Anderson was still an administrator in New York City schools.

A month after being honored on the floor of the state Senate, New Jersey’s school superintendent of the year is headed to New York, another consequence of the Christie administration’s cap on school administration salaries.

John Mooney, education writer and co-founder of njspotlight.com, reviews the highlights from yesterday's State of the State address by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. 

With every detail of its process under scrutiny, the Christie administration said yesterday that 17 of 42 applications for new charter schools in the state have made the first cut in the latest review, while the remainder have been eliminated, at least for now.