In her opening remarks this morning at a hastily convened Joint Senate & Assembly Education Committee hearing, New Jersey State Senator M. Teresa Ruiz (D-29) announced her position that the decision regarding how to handle the state’s move away from the bungled PARCC assessment should be made “behind closed doors.”

She. Really. Said. That.

Behind closed doors.

She wants to throw our kids under the bus behind closed doors.

In secret.

Privately.

So that there will be nothing you or I can do until it’s too late.

Apparently Senator Ruiz, a George Norcross-Steve Sweeney aligned Democrat-in-Name-Only, is no longer going to hide her Trump-like inclination to govern secretly. By fiat. This is Democracy, 2018-style: policy that affects your kids and mine should be made behind closed doors.

It seems clear that Senator Ruiz wants deals to be made behind closed doors so that the parents, teachers, and community members with whom she disagrees can be shut out of the process. She literally wants to slam the door in our faces, just as her allies in the Christie administration did for eight years. Little wonder, I suppose…given that she seems to be the last cheerleader standing for the PARCC assessments.

So, let’s rewind.

Who is Senator Ruiz hiding from?

• Is she hiding from the approximately 100 parents, students, teachers, school board members, and other New Jersey citizens who testified on January 7, 2015 regarding the mess PARCC created in our schools?
• Is she hiding from the hundreds of parents, educators, students, and community leaders who spoke before the Governor’s PARCC study commission in the winter of 2015? With the lone exception of the NJPTA, which coincidentally accepted a large grant from the pro-PARCC Gates Foundation, the hundreds of testimonies before that commission universally opposed PARCC. (Nevertheless, the Commission’s final report completely ignored their perspective.)
• Is she hiding from the standing room only crowd that testified in February 2015 at the Assembly Education Committee in support of two PARCC opt-out bills that she later refused to allow to be heard before her Senate Education Committee?
• Is she hiding from the full-house crowd that attended a May 18, 2015 Senate Education Committee hearing that she finally scheduled to consider some watered-down PARCC bills?
• Is she hiding from the parents and educators who took the time in the fall of 2015 to attend the bogus “Listening Tour” sessions organized around Chris Christie’s cynical presidential-run inspired renaming of the Common Core standards?
• Is she hiding from the parents and educators who took the time — in May 2016, in June 2016, and again in the fall of 2016 — to travel to the State Board of Education to oppose the asinine regulations that will — if left unchanged — make PARCC ELA-10 and PARCC Algebra I the only paths to graduation for hundreds of thousands of New Jersey students starting with this year’s high school sophomores?
• Is she hiding from the parents and educators who turned out — again and again — at every step along the way to oppose expanding New Jersey’s standardized testing mandates as well as the graduation requirements built (as even she agrees) in violation of the clear language of the state statute around those expanded testing schemes?
• Is she hiding from the parents, students, and educators who finally showed up in April 2017 at Senate President Sweeney’s office to demand that he direct Senator Ruiz to do her job and post SCR132 for a vote? (If Senator Ruiz had ever been willing to allow her committee to consider it, this resolution would have declared the PARCC graduation requirement regulations inconsistent with the authorizing legislation as PARCC calls for use of Algebra I and ELA 10 tests, but the graduation requirement statute requires an 11th grade test. Even Senator Ruiz, in an April 2017 letter, agreed that the regulations should be amended to make them comply with the graduation statute.)
• Is she hiding from the over 2,000 New Jersey parents, teachers, students, and concerned citizens mobilized by a Save Our Schools New Jersey action alert who sent emails to the New Jersey Board of Education supporting the new regulations last week before the vote on the regulations was tabled?
• Is she hiding from the annoyed, angry, frustrated, and sad parents, educators, and students who have become cynical as can be about government precisely because of her obstructionism and the obstructionism and lack of open communication of those like her?

Why, exactly, does Senator Ruiz think she needs to hide behind closed doors? Is it because she can no longer hide behind Chris Christie?

All Commissioner Repollet’s revised PARCC graduation regulations really do is to effectively maintain the status quo for graduation exit exams — i.e., they provide our young people in the class of 2021 and beyond with the option to rely on the current smorgasbord of standardized test options (SAT, ACT, ASVAB, Accuplacer, etc.) to satisfy the state graduation testing requirement available to the class of 2019. The only other real change they make is that they seek to eliminate the wasteful additional high school PARCC exams (those for ELA 9 and 11 as well as those for Geometry and Algebra II) given that much of that material is assessed on the current smorgasbord of optional tests.

Senator Ruiz objects to this approach for two reasons. First, she argues that some high school kids don’t take APs and college entrance exams, and she thinks those high school kids should be tested a lot too (PARCC Algebra I and PARCC ELA 10 apparently aren’t enough for her). What is missing from the Senator’s analysis, however, is how more time prepping for additional tests is going to help those kids become better readers, writers, thinkers, and speakers. What I am left to wonder is whether Senator Ruiz wants to keep high school kids so busy preparing for and taking successive PARCC tests that they won’t have time to question why legislators like her think that governing should take place behind closed doors.

Second, Senator Ruiz and her even more clueless sidekick Assemblywoman Lampitt argue that changing the current regulations would create additional chaos in New Jersey’s public schools. But what Senator Ruiz and Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt fail to consider is that it is the current regulations — with their upcoming PARCC or bust trigger for the class of 2021 and beyond — are what are poised to create chaos of epic proportions among New Jersey’s public school students. As of now, only 29% of New Jersey students are positioned to graduate using only PARCC (as opposed to using PARCC plus the smorgasbord of additional options). If these regulations are indefinitely tabled as Senator Ruiz and Assemblywoman Lampitt demand, I look forward to watching them face hordes of angry new 18 year old voters who are not going to be granted high school diplomas in 2021… right when both of them will be seeking reelection.

Unlike Senator Ruiz and Assemblywoman Lampitt, who spent today’s hearing grandstanding, Governor Phil Murphy’s appointee, Commissioner Repollet, actually has New Jersey’s students’ best interests at heart. Commissioner Repollet’s interim regulations are meant to give us some breathing space while the Department of Education — and not career politicians — engages in thoughtful vetting of new assessment options. The Commissioner’s make-haste-slowly approach (as exasperating as it is to parents like me, who want to throw tantrums and demand that PARCC be eliminated NOW) will allow New Jersey’s current sophomores and below to step away from the precipice on which the current regulations have placed them, and puts New Jersey’s students before loyalty to the testing companies. New Jersey’s students would be far better served if Senator Ruiz backed off from her fact-devoid, Trump-style hissy fit and actually demonstrated some of the critical thinking skills she claims PARCC can assess. But sadly, that is far too much to ask of machine-controlled politicians like Senator Ruiz.