The following editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal on January 11, 2023. You can access the full piece by clicking HERE. In Hoboken, charter schools outperform the traditional public schools by similar numbers as those that appear in this article.
Children in charters far outperform district peers in the cities with the biggest charter presence.
Do students matter to politicians, or do they only care about the adults in unions who finance their campaigns? That’s the question for New Jersey Democrats, especially Gov. Phil Murphy, who has to be willfully blind to ignore the evidence that charter schools in his state are improving education performance for his state’s neediest children.
In Newark, 25.9% of charter students of all races across all grades reached proficiency on math tests compared to 13.3% of district students. In Jersey City, 54.1% of charter students were proficient in English language arts compared to 41% of district students. In Camden, 25.1% of charter students were proficient in English compared to 9.8% of district students.
Overall, charter students are 43% more likely to be at grade level in English and 47% more likely to be at grade level in math than district students, the charter school association calculates. The nearby chart lays out the comparative data.
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With this kind of disparity, you’d think anyone in public office would be calling for more charter applications to teach more students. But this is New Jersey, where Democrats are led by the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.
There are 85 charter schools in the state that teach 60,000 students. That compares with about 1.3 million district K-12 students in the state. Since Gov. Murphy took office in 2018, charter schools have applied for more than 12,500 seats; only 5,500 have been approved, according to the charter association. In 2022 only 455 out of 1,980 seats were approved for the state’s highest-performing charters.
This is despite parents demonstrating their support for charter options. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reports that New Jersey charters gained more than 3,000 students during the pandemic years, while district schools lost nearly 40,000. Some 28,000 students are on charter wait lists. About 13 charters have applied for some 2,700 more seats this year, the New Jersey Children’s Foundation estimates.
The Murphy Administration is expected to make decisions on the next charter applications by February. The Governor, who is in his second term, should be granting every decent application in sight and making it easier to attract more. But at least he can grant the current applications. Why even run for office if you’re going to take orders from teachers union chief Becky Pringle?
