In the recent "Race to the Top" funding competition for hundreds of millions of dollars initiated by the Federal Government, Florida recently won one of the top 10 spots to get about $700 million (details HERE). The State of NJ LOST about $400-million in education funds from being one of the top 10 finalists because their Education Dept team screwed up and inserted the wrong budget information in the application.
Then, the head of the NJ Education Dept. lied and blamed the Obama Administration for not being flexible. HOWEVER, the Feds had a video of the meeting where the missing data was discussed, indicating that the problem was New Jersey's incomplete application, and not the Feds.
So, the NJ Governor FIRED the Education Dept head.
Just show, you can't ever trust the Feds to take the blame without some darned video showing up to show you are wrong.
Lesson Learned" Don't lie about your mistakes to your government leaders.
vj
New Jersey Schools Chief Fired After Grant Error
By SHARON OTTERMAN
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey fired his education commissioner on Friday, just days after the governor said a clerical error had cost the state a $400 million federal education grant.
The mistake in the grant application caused the state to forfeit almost five points in the competition, known as Race to the Top; the state lost out on any money by three points out of a possible 500. On Wednesday Mr. Christie defended his administration’s actions, insisting that his education secretary, Bret D. Schundler, had provided the correct information to federal reviewers in an interview two weeks ago. The governor then went on to criticize the Obama administration for not accepting the revision.
But federal officials on Thursday released a video of the interview showing that Mr. Schundler and his staff had failed to produce the information when a reviewer requested it. Mr. Christie, asked in a radio interview on Thursday evening about the video, said he would be “seriously disappointed” if it turned out he had been misled.
That evening, the governor’s chief of staff, Richard H. Bagger, called Mr. Schundler to ask for his resignation, Mr. Schundler said in an interview on Friday afternoon. “I said I know that I serve at the will of the governor, so if he would like me to leave I would leave.”
But Mr. Schundler said that on Friday morning he had asked Mr. Bagger if he could instead be fired, so he could collect unemployment benefits. He had been paid $141,000 a year in the job.
The firing shook a department that has been at the core of Mr. Christie’s aggressive approach toward the state’s bureaucracy since he took office in January. Among his early showdowns was a loud fight with the state’s teachers’ union over reductions in school financing, part of large, across-the-board cuts to balance the state budget. The appointment of Mr. Schundler, a former Jersey City mayor and a staunch supporter of charter schools and vouchers for private schooling, was itself a message from the governor.
But Mr. Schundler found himself at odds with the governor in May, when Mr. Christie overruled a compromise Mr. Schundler had negotiated with the teachers’ union over matters related to the Race to the Top application. The governor ordered a quick rewriting of the application over the Memorial Day weekend, and the lack of union support for that final version actually cost the state more points than the clerical mistake that went unnoticed.
But it was the mistake — the state submitted budget information for 2010 and 2011, rather than 2008 and 2009 — that caught the spotlight, since it caused New Jersey to finish 11th in the competition, which had 10 winners.
In a televised news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Christie said he accepted blame for the error and no one would be fired for it. He asked for an apology from President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, because the reviewers had not been more flexible.
“Commissioner Schundler gave them, in the interview, the numbers for ’08-’09,” Mr. Christie said. “But they still didn’t give us the credit for the points.”
But the video, made available on the federal Education Department’s Web site, shows Mr. Schundler and his team caught off guard by a request for the correct data. After 30 minutes of tense searching through paperwork, an assistant commissioner acknowledged the team could not produce it.
In a statement on Friday, the governor said he had “ordered an end to Bret Schundler’s service as New Jersey’s education commissioner” because he was “extremely disappointed to learn that the videotape of the Race to the Top presentation was not consistent with the information provided to me by the New Jersey Department of Education and which I then conveyed to the people of New Jersey.”
Mr. Schundler said he had been upfront with the governor’s office. “Consistently, from before and after the press conference, I did not mislead the governor at all, I tried to correct an error,” he said Friday night. “The bottom line is rather than say ‘I erred in my comments to the press,’ he’s firing me saying I gave him bad information. I gave him good information.”
But Mr. Christie’s office disputed that, pointing to a letter Mr. Schundler wrote that day to Mr. Duncan in which he said he had “confirmed verbally” the missing information in the interview.
The governor’s office said in a statement, “We regret that Mr. Schundler continues to sully his own image by engaging in revisionist history.”
Mr. Schundler said earlier Friday that the administration had agreed to his request to be fired, because if he resigned, he would be ineligible for unemployment benefits. “I do have mortgage payments, I do have a daughter who has just begun in college, I do have bills to pay,” he said.
The governor’s office depicted a slightly different version of events. “Mr. Schundler indicated Thursday he would resign in the morning; this morning, he refused to sign the resignation letter and was subsequently terminated,” Michael Drewnick, the governor’s press secretary, said.
The firing comes at a time of shrinking budgets, teacher layoffs and a reduction of services and electives in many districts across the state, as well as a legal battle over the state’s financing formula for low-income and minority students, said Patrick McGuinn, a political science professor at Drew University.
