By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Governor Chris Christie chose Hillsborough on Tuesday as the site to announce his support for school funding reform, signaling it could be his legacy battle in his last 18 months in office.
The governor tied what he called disproportionate amounts of money going to poorer, usually urban, schools as the cause for the state’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes. He said 31 districts under the control of the N.J. Schools Development Authority take 58 percent of the billions that will flow from the state government to local schools.
“I’m ready for this fight,” he said. “It’s unacceptable to me that we fail to say this out loud.”
There are 31 SDA districts, also called Abbott districts after a 1985 Supreme Court case that resulted in a judgment that the schools be funded at the same level as the state’s wealthiest districts. The decision hinged on the state constitution’s clause that mandates a “thorough and efficient” education for all students.
The governor said the 31 districts receive more money than the other 546 school districts in the state. Yet, the SDA districts are underperforming educationally, he said, especially when compared to charter schools in the same area.
The governor called for state aid to be determined solely on a per-pupil basis, with each school district receiving $6,599 per student.
If that were to become the case, Hillsborough, for instance, would receive at least $15 million more in state aid. Local school leaders complain in every budget cycle that state aid has remained flat at about $25 million (in a $122.7 million budget) in the last five years after having been cut dramatically by about $5 million in the 2010-11 year. The flat line on aid puts additional pressure on our taxpayers, Superintendent Jorden Schiff said at budget time.
The governor spoke in front of a bank of television cameras and about 100 people in the Commons of the high school. Some state legislators sat in the front row, and seats were taken by local partisan activists. Around the edges stood teachers and education association representatives.
State Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, who lives in Hillsborough, said the governor’s concept was one he could back.
“I can support it because it is fair,” he said. “The questions we still have to deal with are whether the plan will be acceptable to the Supreme Court. One of the factors has been every community’s ability to pay.
“The bottom line is what we currently have is terribly flawed and blatantly unfair and needs to be corrected, he said. “This is a mountain that needs to be moved and this governor has moved them before.”
State education association leaders immediately criticized the governor’s comments. NJEA President Wendell Steinhauer said in a press release the proposal “would result in a huge step backward to the days when poor families in economically challenged communities were left to fend for themselves.
He said Gov. Christie has never fully funded the state aid formula, so there is no way to assess its effectiveness.
“New Jersey has a progressive school funding formula that acknowledges the need to invest the most resources in students who have the greatest needs. Gov. Christie has made a mockery of that formula and the values it represents since he took office. . . By sending equal dollar amounts per pupil to each district, regardless of need, his plan would subsidize those who have the most at the expense of those who have the least. That is the opposite of fair; it’s despicable.”
Gov. Christie said school funding and high property taxes were “two separate but intertwined crises that must be dealt with.”
He said the Supreme Court had ruled that money alone would solve the education problem. They were “wrong, very wrong,” he said, and called it “30 years of failed governmental engineering.”
New Jersey spends the third-most of all states on K-12 education, he said. Of the $9.1 billion in state aid for the upcoming school year, $5.1 billion will go to the 31 SDA school districts with $4 billion for the remaining 546 districts, he said.
Over 30 years, 58 percent of state aid has gone to 5 percent of the districts, he said. That also computes to 23 percent of state’s students getting 59 percent of the aid, he said.
“It’s absurd, unfair and it’s not working,” he said. “The inequity is appalling.”
He said the money has not brought greater achievement, citing graduation rates in SDA districts like Asbury Park, New Brunswick, Newark and Trenton that were much lower than state average. In many instances, even graduates of many districts need remedial courses before they can begin a college career, he said.
Spending does not equal achievement,” he said. “It never has and it never will.” Despite the money, “failure is still the rule,” he said.
SDA districts spend far less than the state average of their local property taxes on schools, yet don’t have lower total tax bills because more local property taxes often go to pad a municipal government’s spending, he said. He cited the city of Trenton for having the president of the PBA and ASCME receiving municipal pay to work only for the unions, he said, and said some SDA towns put “uncles, nephews and nieces” on the local payroll.
He cited estimates of what the reallocated state education budget could mean. He didn’t note Hillsborough as an example; the closest he got was nearby Readington Township, where he said the per-pupil formula could result in a nearly $2,000 drop in average local property taxes.
Hillsborough Board of Education President Thomas Kinst called the governor’s speech “an intriguing proposal,” especially for a district like Hillsborough, which receives an average state aid of about $3,400 per student.
“We’ll watch how it progresses in the legislature and see how it comes out,” he said.
The governor said he wanted to make the Legislature defend the indefensible, especially when it seems poised to put a referendum on the 2017 ballot that would force the state to make quarterly payments into the woefully underfunded pension and health benefit funds for municipal workers and teachers.
He said the Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, has taken to use the mechanism of changing the state constitution, which goes to public vote, on things like the minimum wage or open space funding only as a way to get around his veto as governor.
