News broke yesterday that the Murphy Administration’s Department of Education granted approval for 11 high-performing public charter schools to offer more grade levels and seats for students throughout New Jersey. The approval rate was 78%, which means almost 3,000 additional students, almost all low-income and of color (out of the 28,000 on wait lists), will have access to high-performing schools. 

Families and school improvement advocates broke into cheers.

Why?

Because after last year’s debacle, with the DOE’s denial of nine expansion requests from the highest-performing public charter schools in the state, expectations were low. 

Yet this appears to be a new DOE, one truly worth celebrating.

What’s changed from last year to this year? Harry Lee, head of the NJ Public Charter School Association, told me this year the DOE’s Charter School Office used data to make “performance-based decisions” and exercised “thoughtful consideration.” The system worked the way it’s supposed to work, with expansion applications assessed in the context of student academic success, plus the fiscal and operational functions of the schools in question. “We’re ecstatic,” he said.

Yes, the system worked—kudos to the DOE!— but I think there’s an added element here: all the work parents have done over the last year: holding rallies in Trenton, sending thousands of emails to the DOE’s Charter Office, speaking out in op-eds, and starring in videos in order to explain the impact of losing access to schools like Achievers Early College Prep in Trenton and being hurled into the abyss of Trenton Central High School. 

Twelve months of parent activism embarrassed the system and yielded results. 

So let’s celebrate the parents whose energy and intelligence made this happen and the DOE for making data-based decisions. (It didn’t hurt that, after the pandemic pause in testing, 2022 student assessment scores showed for Black and brown children enrolled in NJ public charter schools were twice as likely to meet proficency levels as those in district schools.)

Today’s Politico interviewed Kyle Rosenkrans, executive director of the New Jersey Children’s Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes cooperation between Newark’s traditional and charter schools, who said “Murphy has made a stark political shift in his treatment of charters.”.

Murphy’s first term in office, Rosenkrans said,  produced “tons of head-scratcher decisions where charters were on the losing end,.”  But in his second term, “the decisions are matching up to the quality of the applications, and that’s precisely how chartering is supposed to work,” he said.

“Politically, my hope is that Murphy is reexamining the Obama sort of political playbook that said public charter schools can play an important role in prominent progressive, Democratic leaders’ educational strategy because they’re serving low-income families of color and those families are a key part of the democratic coalition,” Rosenkrans said.

Maybe we can all hope for Phil Murphy 2.0?