NJ Education Report

The New Jersey State Supreme Court yesterday rejected the State Legislature’s attempt to declassify Abbott districts by enacting the 2008 School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), which claimed to fairly distribute aid to poor students regardless of where they live.

(For a synopsis of the ruling, see here.)

Back in May 1997, the Court ruled that so-called Abbott districts – the 31 poorest urban school districts in New Jersey – had to be funded at the level of the most wealthy districts in the state. The two sides have spent the last 20 years in court, one side charging a lack of adequate funding and the other side charging too much funding, in addition to corruption and waste. Last January the Legislature passed SFRA, claiming that the Abbott designation was no longer necessary because the spending gaps between rich and poor districts didn’t exist any more.

According to an article last April in the Daily Journal,

Over the past decade, per-pupil spending in the Abbott districts rose 72 percent from $9,559 to $16,407, while that spending in the two wealthiest class of districts rose 53 percent from $9,026 to $13,703.

However, David Sciarra, Director of the Education Law Center and lead attorney for the Abbotts, argued,

The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that urban children are entitled to equal and adequate school funding, and that funding must reach the classroom for their benefit. The new formula is not new at all. Sadly, it brings back unequal funding, with no accountability for how school funding is spent.

What exactly is “equal and adequate?” It sounds a lot like what we guarantee special education students: FAPE, or Free and Public Education. But it’s not. The line parents of special needs kids hear is, “we have to give you a Ford, not a Cadillac” (true story, though with the recent Detroit travails…). But the courts ruled over twenty years ago that poor urban kids in NJ deserve an education equal to that of kids in wealthy districts: a Cadillac.

Not that this is a bad thing. But with demographic changes in NJ, poor kids live all over the place. Just for a reality check we surveyed the DOE’s list of district DFG’s (the State’s designation of socio-economic level, which ranges from a low of A to a high of J) and counted all the school districts that are labeled either A or B. Grand total? 109. In other words, about 15% of school districts in NJ are poor. What to do about educational equity in a state that funds schools through property taxes? Give lots of cash to poor districts. The rest is history.

It might be useful for our esteemed legislators and lawyers to unearth the real problem here. As long as NJ clings to the mythology of home rule – that our State’s character is defined by addiction to the opium of small, locally-controlled towns – our educational system will be inequitable. Corzine’s solution, SFRA, which was supposed to distribute money not through district designation but through number of impoverished kids, was a nifty if hastily executed solution. But it doesn’t come close to the magic wand needed to erase the inadequacy engendered by our municipal madness.