NJ Education Report

Timothy Lee, in “Affordable Housing and Social Engineering in New Jersey,” points out an political inconsistency that also applies to NJ’s public education system. Lee describes (he’s pinch-hitting for Megan McArdle in The Atlantic) “the Conservative antipathy” towards the Mount Laurel decisions, which obligates NJ towns to provide a minimum amount of low-income housing in order to allow a circumscribed number of poor people to live in more prosperous towns. He includes an email from a spokesman from the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, who explains,

Forcing high density, low income housing into every town in New Jersey is hardly the epitome of a free market. Quite to the contrary, it is social engineering and central planning run amok and everything conservatives rightly oppose. This isn’t about property rights, per se. It’s about a renegade, activist court imposing its policy preferences against the plain language in the state constitution. Citizens are free to live where they please so long as they are successful enough to do so. And New Jersey communities, through a democratic process, ought to have the right to determine the destiny and character of those communities. Mt. Laurel has stripped this away.

Lee begs to differ. He points out that the Mt. Laurel decisions actually made NJ’s housing market more free, more able to react to market forces of supply and demand, because “market forces would be providing more high density housing if the law allowed it. The court is simply nudging towns toward allowing builders to meet market demand.”

NJ’s local towns, infused with the home rule ethos, love exclusionary zoning – keeps the riff-raff out and all that –and that is inconsistent with a free market. Lee: “Apparently ‘social engineering and central planning’ isn’t so bad when it’s enacted in wealthy suburbs.”

You could say the same thing about NJ’s exclusionary public education system, with one exception: the judicial remedy was far more modest. The Mt. Laurel decisions require wealthy NJ towns to allow access for less privileged people. At minimum, new developments must include a small number of low-rent units. However, the Abbott decisions – the Mt. Laurel cases of public education — only require that we send more money to poor schools. Access is off the table. If the Court had followed the Mt. Laurel model it would have issued an edict that wealthy suburbs must open up some minimum number of seats – low-rent units, if you will – to kids who under any other circumstances wouldn’t be able to attend school there.

The Abbott cases merely funnel money, not actual children. Americans for Prosperity derides the Mt. Laurel rulings because “[c]itizens [should be] free to live where they please so long as they are successful enough to do so,” and Mt. Laurel contradicts social Darwinism by letting a few of those not “successful enough” to have access. But the Abbott rulings don’t even go that far, leaving that desideratum of the conservatives in place: you are free to go to school in wealthy suburbs as long as your parents are successful enough to buy a house there.

We know that improved educational opportunities have a lot to do with access. The Mt. Laurel decisions, to the dismay of some conservatives, picks away at past exclusionary practices regarding residency in NJ and presents a tiny window of inclusion. The Abbott decisions don’t go nearly that far: they’re about compensation for denial of access. Maybe the Justices need to consider a new strategy.