Tony Bennett's Chewytrain Lands in Camden

by Doug Martin

One of the most embarrassing moments of Tony Bennett’s rein as Indiana’s corporate school chief (and there were many) was when his partner Dale Chu (better known as @chewytrain), happy as a teenage girl at a Jonas Brothers' concert (one of the Jonas Brothers, by the way, loves to perform at for-profit school Rocketship events), tweeted his admiration of the filthy rich out to privatize education at a Jeb Bush/Rupert Murdoch shindig in San Francisco.

The Ivy Leaguer and former charter school principal who resigned with Bennett in Florida after it was revealed that Bennett changed the grade of a donor’s charter school in Indiana, Chu is at it again, this time in Camden, New Jersey, where the corporate school takeover has been in full swing, as Jersey Jazzman has detailed, since Chris Christie, a former Edison Schools lobbyist, and Chris Cerf, Tony Bennett’s con man at Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, has made it an agenda.

In fact, there is a possible investigation brewing in nearby Newark, thanks to Christie and Cory Booker, the former corporate Democratic mayor and waterboy for Walmart and the Bradley Foundation's Black Alliance for Educational Options.  

Chu is now pulling in $160,000 ($10,000 more than he made in Florida) as the project director of the Camden City Schools  (page 83 in PDF box) where he’s doing “teacher talks” this month because, according to Chu, only three high school students in the entire city of Camden are college-ready. 

So that Jeb Bush would know about this Camden student "failure," Chu tagged him in one of his tweets.  As I recently mentioned to the good folks in Clay County Indiana, Jeb Bush was really the Indiana supt. of education when Chu was here, inviting friends at Charter Schools USA and Edison Learning to take over so-called "failing" schools and lobbying for online learning outfits like Pearson’s Connections Academy which invaded a community-led rural charter school to rake in millions.

As Rutgers professor Stephen Danley has pointed out, Camden "parents and residents must choose between crumbling district schools and shiny charter schools" in "a manufactured crisis caused by the refusal to fund repairs of district buildings."

Chu must be happy.  The powers-that-be in the Christie/Jeb Bush clan have at least opened up the bridge for Chewytrain to come, cash in, and weep in admiration of the 1 percent again.