New Jersey gets ‘A’ for Fairness with Education Funding (NJ)

October 14, 2010

The grades are in- and New Jersey has gotten an "A" for fairness for giving additional support to high-poverty districts.

The National Report Card on school funding was created to critique state school funding systems on how well they provide opportunity for all children. The report tracks the funding systems based on four criteria: how much is spent, how the money is distributed based on poverty concentration, how much of the state’s GDP is spent on education, and the percentage of children who attend public and private schools and their income differences.

The report covered 2005 to 2008, the first year of New Jersey’s new school funding formula, which aimed to bring extra dollars to middle-income communities with growing numbers of poor students, such as Bergenfield, Hackensack and Clifton.
New Jersey is one of six states that did well on all four along with Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Vermont and Wyoming.

The Press of Atlantic City reports New Jersey got an "A" for its funding levels and distribution, scored second in the nation in percentage of revenue given to education, and scored 21st in the ratio of students in public and private schools.

The report, called "Is School Funding Fair?", gave only seven states an A or B on the measure of how much they channel resources to poorer, rather than wealthier, areas.

It found New Jersey typically allocates around $3,000 more to districts with very high poverty levels than those with low poverty. The report rests on the assumption that it is fair to give high-poverty schools more support to cover the extra needs of at-risk students and English-language learners, such as early education, after-school programs, and remedial help.

According to NorthJersey.com, New Jersey scored well on all four of the study’s indicators. Overall, states in the country’s South and West fared worse than those in the Northeast.

The report, co-authored by Bruce Baker, associate professor at the graduate school of education at Rutgers University, looked at data from before the recession took hold and most states slashed education funding. In the past year, New Jersey cut state aid to districts by more than $1 billion.

Schoolfundingfairness.org reports Dr. Baker noted that an important goal of the National Report Card is to open a serious conversation in all 50 states and in Washington, D.C. about increasing the fairness of state finance systems to ensure that they provide sufficient resources to low income students, particularly those in school districts with concentrated poverty.

But according to NJ.com, the data evaluated for the funding formula report card do not reflect the $820 million cut Gov. Chris Christie made to education spending this spring, The Education Law Center is waiting for action from the state Supreme Court on a challenge it filed in June contesting the legality of Christie’s cuts.