Governors Brendan Byrne and Tom Kean were interviewed by the Star-Ledger editorial board. Both concurred on the failure of the Abbott formula, which pours money into 31 poor urban districts, and on New Jersey’s general profligacy with education tax dollars:
Q: One of the few areas relatively unscathed in the proposed budget cutting was education. Do we also need to look for cuts there, or is education too important a priority?
BYRNE: Education is a magic word, if not a holy word, so nobody takes a hard look at education dollars. I talked to someone who has intimate knowledge of the Newark education system, and he said it was practically impolitic to do that. We have to stop looking at anything as a sacred cow and start taking things apart and examining them.
KEAN: Over the years, we’ve probably wasted more money on education than any other item in the budget. Millions and millions have been put into schools whose test scores have gone down instead of up. Education has to be treated as everything else in budget. We have to make hard choices, and do better with less.
