EDITORIAL: We’re Number 1 in public education

New Jersey has the best schools in the nation.

Let that sink in for a moment. That declaration in a new WalletHub survey of the nation’s schools shouldn’t really be a surprise; New Jersey typically ranks highly in these sorts of studies. If you’re inclined to dismiss the work of a personal finance website — with takes the angle of connecting education to future income potential — then how about the recent release of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual Kids Count survey for 2014 that had New Jersey at No. 2 in education behind Massachusetts.

Bottom line: New Jersey’s schools are succeeding better than those in nearly every other state. But that doesn’t quite fit with the agenda Gov. Christie has been trying to sell for the last five years, does it? That’s because Christie has been wrong. Dead wrong.

For five years now, stretching back all the way to his first campaign for governor, Christie has been bashing the quality of the state’s schools, ridiculing teachers, and promoting varied alternatives and schemes designed to reform public education in New Jersey, even while any kind of widespread reform isn’t needed.

He was right about a few things. Tenure was too easy to obtain and keep, and there was no meaningful way to evaluate teacher performance, all of which helped to keep too many bad teachers on the job. The ongoing struggles of students in urban districts make those areas ripe for charter schools, magnet schools and other alternatives in search of an educational model that might better address the challenges inherent in those communities.

But Christie never bothered to talk about these things in the proper context — as areas in need of improvement within the larger framework of a successful public education system. Instead, we were assaulted with themes about dastardly unions, failing schools, and a supposedly wide swath of overpaid, underperforming teachers portrayed as the prime culprit for the state’s high taxes.

Christie found a receptive audience among New Jerseyans unhappy with benefit perks enjoyed by the state’s public workers that had become unsustainably generous. So the teachers were cast as villains, which is entirely unfair.

The WalletHub survey considered not only test scores but a total of 12 categories including student-teacher ratios and dropout rates. The Casey Foundation, a nonprofit child and research organization, ranked New Jersey as the eighth best state to raise a child, a placement fueled mostly by the state’s second-place education rating. Other studies have come and gone, but the results are always the same — the vast majority of New Jersey’s schools are doing just fine.

So our children aren’t suffering at the hands of lazy, disinterested faculty. They’re not coming out of our schools ill-prepared for the world in front of them. They certainly don’t need Christie to fix anything, nor do they deserve to be pawns in some Faustian private-enterprise vision of a schooling future designed more to serve political goals and corporate interests than the students themselves.

It’s our lawmakers who are exploiting our kids. It’s time for that to stop.