Jon Corzine’s deathbed conversion to unfettered charter school expansion during Thursday night’s gubernatorial debate is a little confusing if you’ve been following the rhetoric. Just three weeks (see here), Corzine surrogate/running mate Loretta Weinberg defined charter schools this way:

Part of our public school system, and part of what both the Governor Corzine and I believe in, and that is the expansion of charter schools in New Jersey. They are the laboratory for new innovative educational techniques.

Weinberg’s terminology echoes NJEA’s code for charter schools: short-term educational experiments that, if successful, get incorporated into traditional public schools. For example, a charter school might be founded to apply an innovative math curriculum to investigate whether it should be implemented across the state. After a time, give the innovation a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Mission accomplished. The charter school has served its purpose and is dissolved.

Yet Thursday evening Corzine seemed to reject NJEA’s circumscribed mission of charter schools and sign on to a more reformist agenda, touting the increase in enrollment in charter schools from 14,000 kids to 22,000 and this summer’s approval by the DOE of 8 new charter schools.

Has Corzine morphed into Newark’s Cory Booker/N.Y.C.’s Mike Bloomberg/Boston’s Thomas Menino, a believer that traditional public schools in poor urban areas are less effective than charter schools? Is NJEA going to rescind its endorsement?

Not likely. A July 2009 study by the Hall Institute of Public Policy itemizes the reasons why N.J.’s charter school growth is so sluggish:

1) Charter schools in Jersey are granted terms of only 4 years (right in sync with NJEA’s short-term experimental labs of innovation), and then they must reapply.
2) New Jersey is the only state in America to invest in one person, our Commissioner of Education, the sole authority to approve charters. Other states use multiple boards to grant authorization which lends transparency and speed to the process.
3) Unlike other states, N.J. public school districts affected by the charter can appeal the authorization of the charter to the DOE:

By 2005, New Jersey had authorized 91 charter school applications and had received 237 in total. Despite the availability of appeal, the number of charters in New Jersey has never grown over 67, the number reached in 2005. No great augmentation of the charter school count has occurred since the beginning of charter schools in New Jersey.

In other words, it’s immaterial whether Corzine or Christie or Daggett get up on a podium and say that they think charter schools are their best pals. Until the State Legislature sloughs off the NJEA-driven constraints to charter school expansion embedded in the process for approval and authorization, charter school expansion is just a talking point for a talking head.