NJ Education Report

‘I don’t understand why all of a sudden there’s this big buzz around our posture on charter schools,’ he said. ‘It takes my breath away. Sometimes people write the article before they check the facts…For the life of me, I don’t get it. But some people have an agenda.’

That’s Gov. Phil Murphy last week when when asked to comment on his Department of Education’s rejection of multiple proposed charter school expansions, some of which had previously been approved.

He doesn’t “get it”  or “understand why” parents like Rakeemah Jordan, whose two 8th-grade boys attend Newark’s Philips Academy, are distraught that the DOE flip-flopped and reversed an expansion into high school for this top-notch K-8 school.

Happy to help, Governor! I think you’re mixing up Philips Academy Charter School Network in Newark with the school your children attended, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Let’s think hard now: First of all, they’re spelled differently; notice the extra “l” in the fancy prep school? You see, the public charter in Newark is not a satellite of the private school in New England.

How are they different, you’re no doubt wondering? Let’s start with this: Philips Academy Charter School is free to parents just like any other traditional public school! But Phillips Academy in Andover, the elite New England private school your kids attended, is not free: in fact, as you may remember, tuition there is $61,950 per student a year. 

Are you starting to “get it”?

Let’s take another example: At the Newark charter 2% of students at the Newark school  are white or Asian but at your children’s school, 80% of students are white or Asian. That’s different too, right?

You see, your administration just denied Ms. Jordan’s two sons the opportunity, as Star-Ledger editor Tom Moran wrote this weekend, to continue to “get plenty of attention in classes that average about 15 students, and eat vegetables at lunch grown in a school garden,” a school where student proficiency in reading is the same as the statewide average and math proficiency is 13 points higher.  But your flunkies at the DOE  decided to bar Phillips Academy from starting their long-planned high school so her boys may be stuck at  Malcolm X Shabazz High School, where a mom at a recent school board meeting described the escalating violence that puts  her son in “imminent danger” and where nine out of ten students fail reading proficiency tests. 

Did you really intend to shut down educational opportunities for families like the Jordans, choices that, without Newark’s charter sector, would be only available to wealthy residents like you who can afford to buy their way into better schools? I can’t believe that–after all, you’re banking on your progressive image to vault you into higher office, right?  By denying this sector’s ability to grow–my goodness, you turned down 10,000 seats despite avid demand!–you’re opening yourself up to charges of, well, just look at social media:

The Ledger’s Moran speculates, 

The hidden hand in all this is the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union and the biggest spender by far on both of Murphy’s gubernatorial campaigns. Teachers at most charters are non-union, and the NJEA has pressed Murphy to freeze all expansions, even if it forces another 10,000 poor families back to struggling district schools.

I get that, Governor. You know the value of a dollar, given your 23-room mansion in Umbria and your Goldman Sachs roots. NJEA is the gift that never stops giving, as long as you toe the line and stifle any threat to the union’s market share. 

But can you see the problem here? It’s a bad look: your public sees your well-heeled family awash in educational opportunities while Ms. Jordan scrambles for a fighting chance and a safe environment for her sons. That can’t be your intention. Maybe your Deputy Chief of Staff can ask her former colleagues at NJEA (where she was Associate Director of Government Relations) to grant you permission to approve a teeny-tiny expansion to one of the Tier 1 charters (the highest grade on the DOE accountability rubric) that your DOE nimrods just rejected. Who knows? Maybe NJEA honchos will throw you a bone and say “yes.”

Ms. Jordan and her boys would appreciate it.

Just keep your Phils straight!