I'm reading an article in PolitickerNJ, a site that has atrophied and shriveled since it lost Wally Edge, and am once again pulling the hair out of my head.
Darryl Isherwood wrote the following insanity:
As it is currently implemented, the school funding formula is all about taking money from taxpayers to give to "certain taxpayers" to educate their kids. What Giordano objects to is using it for private schools.
Isherwood equates the state providing extra tax dollars to communities where education is more expensive with using tax dollars to pay for private education with no public oversight.
This exhibits a dramatic ignorance of what publicly funded education is about. He's swallowed the right wing idea that it's about taxpayers getting a bang for their buck, and in particular taxpaying parents.
I'll repeat myself: It's not about the taxpaying parents.
I am gravely concerned that Governor Christie's proposed FY 2012 State Budget fails New Jersey's most vulnerable populations - Senator Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen)
Immediately on the heels of the Pension and Health Benefits bill comes the Battle of the 2012 Budget which must be fought and concluded by the end of next week. And the battle lines are being drawn. This year Senate President Sweeney (D- Gloucester) and Assembly Speaker Oliver (D- Essex) have proposed more robust alternatives. Their plan envisions adding more than $1 million to Governor Christie's proposed budget.
Their plan includes:
Millionaire's Tax - increase tax from the current 8.97% to 10.75% on income over $1 million.
Earned Income Tax Credit - restore it.
School Funding - fulll formula funding for every school district.
Disgust toward recent Democratic leadership should not get in the way of supporting alternatives to Christie's budget proposals. Christie brandishes the veto pen so negotiation and even support from Republican legislators will be needed for an improved outcome.
Add your thoughts on alternative budget proposals and on needed strategies.
Update: In a press conference shortly after the ruling, Christie called the ruling "disappointing" but not "unexpected", based on a failed legal and educational theory. Money doesn't equal results. Says he will must comply with the constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Christie will leave it to the Legislature to find the money. Hat tip to both @GingerGibsonSL and @lisafleisher in the press conference.
As Deciminyan noted, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled today that the state must restore $500 million back to public education next year, far less than the $1.7 billion they might have ordered. And an out for a Governor who has both threatened simply to defy the Court if it ruled against him, and who has claimed New Jersey simply doesn't have the money to fully fund the state's schools under the funding formula approved by the court in 2009.
The majority opinion written by Associate Justice Jaynee LaVecchia said Christie's deep cuts to NJ's education spending have been "consequential and significant" and must be rolled back. That $500M is to be directed to the state's poorest districts for the fiscal year beginning in July. Link to Supreme Court opinion.
It's going to be much harder for Christie to defy the Court over $500 million, and less credible than it might have been to some voters if he claims New Jersey can't reach that deep into its pockets: $500 million is not too far from the $400 million he intentionally botched in New Jersey's failed efforts to get federal Race to the Top money. But Christie might defy the court anyway. Push comes to shove today, and he's threatened to defy the Court over this several times. And defying the state's Supreme Court is a curious position for that state's chief executive, who as an attorney has sworn to uphold the law.
Christie is scheduled to talk to the press in just a few minutes. In a way, this decision allows Christie to further pit poor people in NJ's cities against the wealthier suburbanites who make up his base. But how far is he willing to take that? How much deeper a wedge does he want to drive. If the Governor fights this $500 million into NJ's cities, this could very well be Christie's Let them eat cake moment.
Today's decision arises from a lawsuit by the Newark-based Education Law Center, claiming that Gov. Christie's slashes to state funding of its public schools were unconstitutional, violating the state's constitutional requirement to provide "T & E," the "thorough and efficient system of free public schools". The Supreme Court ruled today, in essence, that Christie's cuts did in fact leave the state unable to provide "T & E" education, but with the poorest districts left most vulnerable to those cuts, and the remedy directed to those districts.
Yeah, I mean it. Public schools are not there for the children, were not created for the children, and are not the sole province of the children.
Public schools are there for the country, society, economy, republic. America created the concept of publicly funded and mandatory schooling to 16 years old in order to have an educated and skilled adult workforce, community and electorate. Schools are a general public good, benefiting the entire society by ensuring the American people know how to think and communicate.
Children and parents do gain additional benefits from our public education of kids from five to sixteen. It reduces the cost of child care so parents can work, gives kids socialization and education so they can support their families, provides exercise and food so they can grow healthily, etc.
But these are ancillary benefits to public education, not the intended result. more below
Judge Peter Doyne, the special master appointed by the New Jersey Supreme Court to handle ongoing Abbott v. Burke litigation, issued an opinion earlier today finding that students in poor urban schools suffered the greatest impact from school funding cuts to poor urban schools in Chris Christie's first budget. Doyne distills the record, which is thousands of pages long, and his findings of fact on page 93 of the opinon:
1. If the SFRA formula had been fully funded for FY 11 an additional $1.6 billion would have been required;
2. Despite the State's best efforts, the reductions fell more heavily upon our high risk districts and the children educated within those districts;
3. The aid reductions have moved many districts further away from "adequacy"; and
4. The greatest impact of the reductions fell upon our at risk students.
The special master's hearings and opinion constitute the record upon which the Supreme Court will base its decision in this most recent round of the Abbott litigation, and the court is likely to give a great deal of weight to his recommendations. Barring a dramatic shift in the court's approach to school funding cases, the court will probably declare Christie's cuts unconstitutional.
Most Republicans realized that the special master is simply doing his job—namely, answering the questions the Supreme Court asked him by finding facts based on evidence applying the law as set out in statute and caselaw—and therefore directed most of their criticism at the Supreme Court. But one Republican State Senator aimed his infantile rant against the ruling not only at the State Supreme Court, but the special master as well. That Senator is Mike Doherty, and as a lawyer, he should know better. He must understand that the Special Master, like lower court judges, has no authority to overrule the State Supreme Court or ignore its opinions. Yet Doherty would have the Special Master disregard a quarter century of precedent from the same Supreme Court that appointed him.
Doherty may think the Abbott cases are bad precedent. He's entitled to his own opinion, one that the Christie administration surely shares and will probably argue before the State Supreme Court. But he shouldn't attack the special master in the press for doing his job.
One thing to keep in mind when thinking about why we didn't get $400 million offered to us by the feds is that we were on the bubble exactly because the Christie application sucked. Had the application not been so bad that we were on the edge of acceptance, the error made in the Christie application wouldn't have meant anything.
A second thing to remember is that there was once an application - negotiated by the Christie administration's Commissioner of Education Bret Shundler and the NJEA - that would have scored high enough to get the $400 million. That application also didn't have the error that cost us $400 million. But Christie threw a another hissy fit when he heard about it on the news instead of from Shundler, and tossed that application out.
Instead of just changing the parts he didn't like, Christie appears to have started from scratch as part of his hissy fit. As a result a question that was simply factual and had no bearing on the NJEA-Shundler negotiations was removed and replaced with the wrong information. And that led to the loss of $400 million during a massively problematic fiscal era.
Now, for some reason, people like Christie and Bob Braun want to blame the feds. There's some need in the media to make all things equal, and even in a situation where it's obvious what happened they need to blame both sides equally.
But there are only two explanations I can see for this disaster. The first is that Christie intentionally tanked the application in an effort to continue hurting the public schools to the extent where vouchers appear to be the only solution. Or that Christie intentionally mis-wrote the answer to that question in order to hide funding cuts by the previous administration in some effort to improve his own standing or image. I find conspiracy theories like this not terribly realistic, in no small part because Christie's not that clever.
The more likely is that it was Christie's need to be in control, his hate of the NJEA and his inability to play well with others that lost this money. Essentially his pissy temperament - the same one that got him in trouble as a Freeholder and was so respected by the media as US Attorney - just cost every resident of the state of New Jersey $45. It's incompetence of the worst kind - willful and unnecessary.
Essentially, we lost the money because Governor Chris Christie is an asshole.
The Supreme Court's new Abbott Decision (PDF) came out today and Governor Corzine's new school funding formula was upheld. The Abbott cases held that students in poor, urban school districts were not getting the quality education required by the state constitution. The result, until now, was that certain "Abbott" districts received "parity aid," or "an amount equal to the average regular education per pupil expenditures in the State's wealthiest districts." They could also get additional funding above this.
It would be an understatement that this formula has been controversial. If nothing else, you can imagine that the people in, say, the 32nd poorest district are frustrated that the 31 Abbott Districts get so much more aid. Needless to say, the whole issue ties into long running urban-suburban battles and deep racial resentments.
So, Department of Education worked on a new School Funding Formula for many years, and in January 2008 Corzine's new plan passed the legislature over urban opposition. Corzine needed a decisive vote from a retiring Republican in a lame duck session. In the new plan, the formula potentially gives aids to all public schools based on need. As the DEP site documents explain, there are now two types of aid from the state: Wealth-Equalized is "is allocated according to each district's ability to raise enough local revenue to support their adequacy budget." Additional "Categorical aid is allocated regardless of a district's ability to raise local revenue" -- that is, based on the the number of special education students, security costs, transportation, etc. You can see the 2009-2010 aid for your school district here.
But is it constitutional? That's the key question that was answered today, and the answer is yes (for now.) From the decision (my emphasis):
The legislative and executive branches of government have enacted a funding formula designed to achieve a thorough and efficient system of public education for every child, regardless of where he or she lives. The political branches are entitled to take reasoned steps to address the pressing social, economic, and educational challenges confronting the state, without being locked in a constitutional straightjacket. A costing-out study such as that engaged in by the State is rife with policy choices that are legitimately in the legislature's domain. In the record below, each value judgment attacked was demonstrated to have been made in good faith, and on the basis of available factual data informed by advice from experts whose testimony revealed that they had the interests of the pupils in mind. The Court sees no reason or basis for it to second-guess the extraordinarily complex education funding determinations that went into the formulation of the many moving parts to this funding formula. The Court recognizes, however, that it does not have the ability to see ahead and to know with certainty that SFRA will work as well as it is designed to work. Although there is no absolute guarantee that SFRA will achieve the intended results of its design, the Court concludes that SFRA deserves the chance to demonstrate in practice that, as designed, it satisfies the requirements of the State Constitution.
As the Star-Ledger emphasizes, the formula will be reviewed after three years for "fairness."
To me, this is seems entirely appropriate. School funding should be in the hands of legislature (and local school districts) when possible and I hope this formula helps public school students thoughout the state get a good education. What do you think?
Students attending New Jersey public colleges are now paying as much as 65 percent of the cost of their education after state aid dwindled during the past four years.
You can view the whole report here. It's not surprising that students are carrying more of the load, but the burden of debt they will be walking out of school with can be staggering.
The report notes that students are spending more, and arguably getting less, as less money is spent in the classroom and slightly more is being spent on administration and support services. As colleges also work to provide more scholarships and financial aid, it is often the students themselves who are subsidizing those funds through higher tuition and fees.
And they're paying those higher tuition fees with more difficult to secure loans.
"The privatization of higher education has most benefited those (colleges) with a research mission which have multiple revenue sources and the most endowments," Wellman said. "Students are spending more and arguably getting less as less money is put into the classroom. There is a slow erosion of funding to instruction."
She said the colleges cannot solve the financing issue on their own, and there must also be recognition of the role of lawmakers in the process.
"State spending on higher education has been on a glide path for 20 years," she said. She said New Jersey has a reputation for spending large amounts on kindergarten through twelfth-grade education, but far less on higher education. As a result, students are paying a higher proportion of their college costs.
To implement the SCI's recommendations for effective state oversight of public higher education, the measure would reestablish a cabinet-level position responsible for the oversight the state's public higher education network, the first such post since the former state Department of Higher Education was disbanded in 1994. The new Secretary of Higher Education also would serve as executive director of the Commission on Higher Education, which would see its own membership increase from 11 to 15.
We'll have to see where this legislation goes and if it really helps solve the problem if passed. Senator Sweeney wants to see colleges and universities get a piece of the bailout to help relieve pressure. Unless changes are made, the cost increases will continue falling on the backs of the students. That's going to keep making higher education a much heavier lift.
If you're a college student in NJ, you just can't catch a break these days. Today's news concerns interest rates on loans:
According to figures released Thursday, N.J. Class loans will be available for 7.62 percent, up from 5.9 percent last year. Still, state officials said they were pleased with the new rate, given the turmoil in the financial markets, the paper said.
Two of the biggest public universities in New Jersey -- Rowan and Rutgers -- this month approved overall tuition and fee increases of about 8 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively, for the 2008-09 year. The average increase in tuition and fees at public universities in the United States last year was 6.6 percent, according to the College Board.
Students at the Hudson County Community College will be hit with an 8.1 percent tuition hike in the fall, while New Jersey City University students will confront a 7 percent hike, officials said.
Another factor contributing to the problem are the state budget issues which lead to cuts in state aid:
This fiscal year, state aid to New Jersey colleges and universities was cut about 10 percent and contributed to an overall 7.5 percent increase in tuition. State aid support has been inadequate for years, and higher education officials contend this makes it difficult for the state to expand and take in more state students.
Over the past 15 years, tuition at public colleges and universities in New Jersey has outpaced the rate of inflation as well as the growth in median family income. Given the dismal conditions of the state and national economies, higher education is unlikely to receive significant funding increases to prevent additional tuition increases.
Not being able to afford or receive an education will only hurt the economy further, but I don't see a reversal in this trend on the horizon. Thurman Hart even talked recently about education being key to energy policy. None of these issues exist in a vacuum and while I don't know what the breaking point is, if we keep going in this direction we may find out.
Unable to get urban Democratic Senators to support Corzine's new school funding plan, Democrats looked to buy votes from the other side:
They finally got three of them - Martha Bark, Gerald Cardinale and Joseph A. Palaia - to change their votes by promising to introduce legislation early in the next session to increase subsidies for special education students. Ten senators who had voted on the measure on the first ballot did not participate in the second vote. They can officially enter their votes later, though.
In a bill that calls for $7.8 billion in state spending, it took in the end a relatively modest $20 million to persuade them.
That's $6.7 million/vote that each of those Senators cost the taxpayers. And that's in addition to the more than $500 million that was added earlier to grease the skids.
I'm not arguing that this new funding plan isn't equitable or an improvement over the prior funding formula. The truth is I simply don't know because there was never an open and honest debate. Educating our children may be our most important responsibility. Yet for purely political convenience, this entire process was conducted with shameful irresponsibility.
Two things caught my eye in Trenton yesterday. First of all, it's Patriot Week, a chance to celebrate NJ's role in Revolutionary war history. Second, the school funding formula which still has my wee mind reeling.
Since I hate to choose -- and with some time-travel magic -- I morphed the two into one videoblog.
