NJ Education Report has received confirmation from the New Jersey Department of Education and the Governor’s Office that the next Education Commissioner will be Kevin Dehmer. This Thursday, February 1st, Assistant Commissioner Christopher Huber will start serving as Acting Commissioner until Dehmer is on board.

Dehmer is currently  Executive Director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Before that he was Assistant Commissioner and Chief Financial Officer of the DOE. Earlier in his career he headed  numerous offices within DOE and helped design the state’s school funding formula in response to the Abbott v. Burke rulings that required the state to fund 31 low-income school districts at the same level as wealthy districts. In 2020, when then-Commissioner Lamont Repollet resigned, Gov. Phil Murphy appointed Dehmer Interim/Acting Commissioner of Education. 

Dehmer was in the hot seat as schools reopened after COVID-19 school closures. For example, at a September 2020 Senate Budget Committee hearing, he made the mistake of using the notoriously inaccurate US News and World Report school and state rankings to boast that NJ had the best schools in the country, even while the DOE had decided to not bother collecting data on student learning loss.  Senator Teresa Ruiz shot back,

“If we don’t have baseline data to show to us what is it that we need to do,” Ruiz responded, “we will be perpetuating a fraud of being No. 1 in the country. And that has got to stop.”

Dehmer holds a master’s degree in public policy and was an Eagleton Institute graduate fellow in politics and government.