NJ court seeks more information on school funding (NJ)

January 14, 2011

New Jersey’s state Supreme Court assigned a lower-court judge to help sort out whether Gov. Chris Christie was within his constitutional rights last year when he cut aid to local schools by about $1 billion.

Pete r Doyne, a Bergen County judge, was given until March 31 to report back to the high court in the latest chapter in a decades-long legal saga about a high-income state’s obligations to children and schools in its poorest cities.

In a series of decisions over the last two decades in a case known as Abbott v. Burke, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state needed to do more to improve schools in the poor districts.

As a result of the Abbott decisions, school districts in places like Camden, Newark and Asbury Park are among those with the highest costs per student, though their students’ test scores lag far behind those in the suburbs.

The high court’s last ruling in the case came in 2009, when the court found that a new school funding formula designed by the administration of former Gov. Jon Corzine was allowable — but only if it was fully funded.

In Corzine’s last budget, schools did not get all the increases called for by the formula. And last year, Christie’s first in office, the governor cut aid to schools by about $1 billion to help fill an $11 billion state budget gap.

The Education Law Center, a Newark-based group that represents children in poor cities, took the state back to court over the cuts, arguing that even a one-time cut could put the state’s public education system back on the path to budget disparity.

The state Supreme Court heard arguments on the matter last week.

Nancy Kaplen, a state assistant attorney general, told the justices that the state didn’t have enough money to give the schools more.

Christie believes broader changes to education — such as eliminating lifetime tenure for teachers and makin g it easier for children in struggling schools to transfer to better-performing public or private schools — are needed to solve education problems that an infusion of state money into cities has not been able to fix.

His spokesman, Michael Drewniak, said Thursday that the administration believes that the cuts to school aid were done "in an equitable and legal manner and should be upheld."

During last week’s hearing, the justices seemed to be wrestling with whether the state of the economy and other budget priorities should be a factor in determining how much the state would allocate to schools.

They also posed questions about the idea of appointing a special court master to examine whether the cuts this year were, in fact, hurting students.

David Sciarra, the executive director of the Education Law Center, supported that idea, while Kaplen said it might not yield much useful information.

Still, that’s what the court decided to do in Thursday’s order signed by Justice Virginia Long.

Doyne, Bergen County Superior Court’s assigning judge, was given until March 31 to convene a hearing on the issue and report the facts and his recommendation to the high court. The state and the Education Law Center have two weeks after that to respond.

Doyne was told to look at the impact of the cuts on districts with high, medium and low concentrations of low-income children.

He scheduled a court session for Tuesday to discuss a hearing schedule with lawyers.