The emerging consensus is that Phil Murphy's handing of New Jersey's schools during the pandemic explains the state's surprisingly close gubernatorial election. riceid reports that this education rebellion was a long time coming
Is he listening? N.J. Gov. Phil Murphy with pre-K students. Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP/Shutterstock On Wednesday night, 24 hours later than expected, news organizations announced that Phil Murphy had been reelected governor of New Jersey. The narrow victory was a dumbfounding rebuke of the state’s Democrats, who went into the election with the drink-clinking serenity of the ensemble in the first act of the Poseidon Adventure.
In 2015, when my son was 3, I moved to the suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, because, well, of course I would. One year later, an election was held, and Donald Trump won it. Everyone in town was very upset. There were marches and vigils. When an elderly Trump supporter was arrested for tagging a storefront across the street from my local coffee shop with MAGA graffiti, it made national news.
But Murphy was nowhere to be seen. The former Goldman Sachs man had won high marks from the public for his handling of the public-health emergency, implementing McKinsey-tested interventions and offering genial Irish eulogies for the dead, signing off with “God bless ‘em.” But when it came to education, he dodged the argument, delegating all the reopening decisions to beleaguered superintendents and school boards, citing the principle of local control.
The present superintendent, a brand-new guy, had been handed the job of reopening the schools over the mayor’s organization’s objections. The teachers union refused to come back to the classroom, even after vaccines were widely available, and the two sides ended up in court. In the wake of the lawsuit, the mayor placed three new appointees on the board, kicking off one of the only parents of school-age children on it.
But where was the manager? Last June, at the end of the school year, Murphy made a regulatory change that effectively prevented districts from using remote learning this fall, and all the kids went back to school, wearing masks, just as they maybe could have done 12 months earlier. Murphy’s aides concede that the delay was politically damaging, although they also say it could have been worse if the governor had not acted decisively when he did.
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