Swift & Change Able

It’s a bit of a stretch to make sweeping generalizations about what yesterday’s election results mean for President Obama’s overall policy agenda, let alone what they mean specifically for education. Not that it will stop people from trying.

Last week, Erik Robelen of Education Week speculated that a Corzine defeat might bode ill for Obama’s education reform initiatives such as merit pay.

But last night’s results probably have very little to do with education or Obama. Still, there may be some lessons. Some points to consider:

● Obama remains popular in New Jersey with an approval rating of 62%, well above his current national average which has been hovering in the low 50’s.

● Corzine’s approval rating has been stuck in the basement all year, and was already low even before Obama took office - high 30’s to low 40’s since mid-2008. Corzine never went above about 40% in pre-election match-ups with Republican candidate, now Governor-elect, Chris Christie. The race became close only because Christie’s numbers went down after a barrage of negative ads, disappointment with Christie’s highly unspecific policy agenda, and the entry of independent candidate Chris Daggett.

● Corzine’s education policies were 180 degrees from Obama’s proposed education reforms. Other than presiding over what is arguably the best early childhood education program in the nation, Corzine’s education policies were astonishingly stale and regressive. His most visible and self-touted "reform" in recent memory was a change in the state funding formula, which shifted money away from high-poverty urban districts to high-growth suburbans. The latter didn’t notice, and community leaders in the former were not appreciative. Bad policy, bad politics.

● Corzine let a number of other weak points in the state education system - especially in high schools - fester (see our review: here). For many observers, the Governor’s neglect of these issues crossed over sometime during his term from failure-to-notice to refusal-to-act. 

● Corzine alienated key Democratic constituencies (on issues like the environment as well as education, jobs, and taxes), and at the very least his failure to address deplorable conditions in high-poverty, high minority schools in Democratic strongholds did not help. In the primaries, Corzine only garnered 70% of the Democratic vote in places like Camden, home to some of the state’s worst schools, against candidates who were neither well-funded nor well-known. County-by-county turnout results which will emerge over the next few days will provide further clues.

● As recently as a week ago, Christie bragged about the fact that on issues like charter schools and merit pay, his policies were closer to Obama’s than were Corzine’s. If one really wanted to really go out on a limb, one could say that Corzine’s defeat was if anything an endorsement of Obama’s education policies, rather than a rejection of them.

● Democrats in New Jersey now have time to regroup and figure out how to come up with a fresh education agenda that addresses the state’s shortcomings and appeals to voters. Smart money says that agenda will be much more reform-oriented than the one state Democrats have embraced the last 4 years.

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On twitter, @Dyrnwyn aka Derrell Bradford of E3 put it this way: "I’d argue that Corzine’s ed reform failure is 1 of embracing the adults over the kids…it’s that simple."