Today I will blog about Phil Murphy and his view on Education. Just as a side note this will be the last one for awhile on this candidate, I will do a blog on the Republican candidate Kim Guadagno next week.

From his campaign website–

Phil Murphy is committed to ending New Jersey’s reliance on PARCC tests and eliminating standardized testing as a requirement for graduation. If elected, he would direct the state Department of Education to work with educators to create an assessment that would meet the federal reporting requirements of ESSA. He also would eliminate passage of a standardized test as a graduation requirement.

Phil believes that standardized tests have a role, but we should not be overly reliant on them. And as he has said throughout his campaign, “Good teachers and good students can have bad test days. Too much emphasis is being put on a single test, as opposed to weighing a student’s progress through years of instruction.”

All well and good that he wants to end PARCC testing and it is wise of him to support the elimination of standardized testing as a requirement for graduation. The only hitch here is the fact that we as a society have been over emphasizing tests as an indicator of a good education, can we persuade the federal Department of Education to accept this view or not? Plus his statement that by using PARCC it puts too much emphasis on a set of tests and not on the student’s whole testing record; so kudos to you Phil Murphy.

Now on how Mr. Murphy would lower the cost of education in this state, again per his website–

Phil believes that if we want to keep our state economically competitive and successful, our leading export can no longer be high school seniors. He is committed to making college affordable for every New Jersey student. Specifically, he will:

• Increase state aid to institutions of higher education, including community colleges, to lower tuitions and fees.
• Expand access to community colleges for high school students and create new vocational training programs to provide alternative pathways to success.
• Provide loan forgiveness to STEM graduates working in STEM jobs in the state and create incentives for private sector employers to provide student loan relief as a core employee benefit.
• Help New Jerseyans stuck with student loans at above-market rates by offering state-based refinancing at lower rates through a new public bank.

Going point by point all I can say is this, where will all the money come from to pay for all that Mr. Murphy proposes, you have to remember that we as the taxpayers are being bleed dry as it is and adding more to the taxation plate will break the preverbal camel’s back. What he wants sounds nice until you realize that the money to pay for these proposals would come out of our already depleted pockets.

On his ‘Getting Education Right’ statements they are as follows-

Rather than blaming educators, Phil will work with them to develop an education system that prepares every child to succeed in a 21st century economy by:

• Restoring and funding the only school funding formula that has been upheld by the Supreme Court;
• Working to expand free pre-K to all families in NJ;
• Ending high-stakes testing and replacing PARCC with shorter tests that provide real-time feedback to help educators correct problems immediately;
• Implementing a state-of-the-art STEM curriculum;
• Expanding access to community colleges for high school students and creating new vocational training programs to provide alternative pathways to success; and
• Giving local communities a stronger voice in education decisions by working to end state takeovers and abandoning the top-down approach of the Christie administration.

Again where is all the money going to come from to pay for these ideas?

Now onto the last topic, ‘Making New Jersey Affordable Again’ –

Phil will put working- and middle-class New Jerseyans ahead of the special interests. His focus on growing the economy will generate more resources for the state to invest in making New Jersey a more affordable place to live. In addition, Phil will work to make New Jersey more affordable by:

• Easing the property tax burden by funding our schools, restoring rebates for seniors and low-income residents, and incentivizing towns to share services;
• Lowering the cost of college by using state investments to reduce tuition and fees, refinancing existing debt at lower rates, and forgiving debt for graduates employed in STEM-fields;
• Restoring disciplined transportation funding to ensure that our roads, bridges and rail are functional and not overly reliant on tolls and fares; and
• Stabilizing health care premiums by capping out-of-network costs and funding women’s health care.

Here again is the dual problem of patronage and political shenanigans which cost all of us a lot of money. If Mr. Murphy thinks that he can stop all of this, I do not believe him at all. Many past governors have also tried to stem these problems and failed, can Mr. Murphy do what others could not? The answer is the probability of him succeeding is very low and I would not ever place a bet that he can do what he wants to do.

That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike