Back in February, a Harvard study found that New Jersey ranked 43rd out of 50 states in a pretty damning metric: student math score improvement between 2019 and 2024.
We all know what happened in 2020.
New Jersey’s education system was broken before 2020, but Governor Murphy’s ill-advised pandemic lockdowns laid bare the cracks. Governor Murphy’s answer has predictably to focus on niche Leftist social priorities (like barring teachers from notifying parents if children try to change their “gender identity” at school) and throwing money at blue districts. The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) is doing its part to address the crisis by sinking $40 million into a Super PAC to advance the quixotic gubernatorial campaign of its president, Sean Spiller.
Sometimes, it’s also easier to attack the competition than reform your own house.
About one week ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a “story” (functionally an opinion piece) decrying the lack of state oversight over homeschooling in the Garden State.
On Thursday, the State Senate Education Committee will convene in Room 4 at 11:00am to consider S1796, legislation which would (1) require parents to renotice the school district annually of their intention to homeschool and (2) instituting a mandatory public reporting requirement without any discernible privacy safeguards. Specifically regarding #2, per the bill’s statement, “[t]he bill also requires a school district to annually compile and make available for public inspection on its website information concerning the number of children who reside in the district who are being home-schooled and the grade levels of those children.”
You see what’s happening here, right? The bill’s requirements might not seem onerous on their face, but the real question is why homeschooling is being treated as “the problem” at a time when our public schools are clearly failing hundreds of thousands of children.
We, of course, know the answer. Homeschooling is a threat to the education establishment much like private institutions. Pre-pandemic (2019), something like 2.8% of American kids were homeschooled. That percentage reached 5.4% between 2020 and 2021. By 2023, the Washington Post estimated that between 1.9 million and 2.7 million U.S. kids were receiving in-home instruction representing a significant surge from the pre-Covid reality.
Remember: who is going to pay for Sean Spiller’s $40 million vanity project if public schools lose their monopoly?
So Trenton will stop at nothing to make sure they don’t. They want your kids in school, at their desks, fattening the establishment’s warchests and having their heads crammed full of the garbage which will hopefully produce a new generation of loyal statist voters. If you didn’t realize it before, then you can’t say you were never told after reading this post.
