No Time for Divisiveness in School Funding Debate.
BY ASSEMBLYWOMAN MARLENE CARIDE
I was quite surprised to read Asw. Patricia Egan Jones’ op-ed last week regarding the Assembly’s school funding efforts, but my surprise turned to disappointment when I read Asms. John Burzichelli and Adam Taliaferro’s op-ed this week.
Facts still matter, even when it comes to New Jersey’s school funding debate. School funding is unquestionably the top issue in New Jersey, and has been for many decades. How best to treat all children fairly while ensuring a thorough education for the poorest children has proven to be difficult, to say the least. The fact that schools account for most of our property taxes makes this issue even more complex.
Emotions understandably run high, but considering the task at hand, the last thing the taxpayers and children of New Jersey need is the spreading of misinformation and falsehoods. Yet, that is what we have been getting for the last several months.
As chair of the Assembly Education Committee, I am deeply disheartened to read the distortions printed by some of my colleagues about the Assembly’s alleged lack of work to improve school funding throughout New Jersey.
I have heard plenty of bizarre things in the State House, but claiming the Assembly has failed children by ignoring school funding is the new champion. That sentiment is completely false. Asw. Egan Jones and Asm. Taliaferro, members of the Assembly Education Committee, both attended the numerous public hearings we held throughout the state concerning the issue of funding our school formula. To criticize Speaker Vincent Prieto and our committee’s work is not only disrespectful to our other committee members, but also to the public for whom we all serve.
Let’s consider these facts:
· The Assembly Education Committee held public hearings throughout the state on the how to best fix school funding.
· Speaker Prieto has proposed a plan to provide immediate help starting July 1 to the most financially distressed school districts, to boost funding for special education, and to expand preschool, while working toward a long-term fix.
· The resolution passed by the Senate regarding school funding does not remove so-called adjustment aid or growth caps.
· The Senate resolution also does not contain a school funding formula.
· The Senate resolution has no specifics whatsoever.
· Asm. Burzichelli, Asw. Egan Jones and Asm. Taliaferro have never asked me to post the Senate resolution for a vote.
As I have been saying for months, please read the Senate resolution. It will not take you long. The Senate resolution merely creates a commission to study school funding without input from those elected by the people to represent them in the Legislature. Nothing more!
According to the widely respected Education Law Center, should New Jersey decide to cut adjustment aid to schools, 200 school districts in New Jersey, including such diverse districts as Toms River Regional, Freehold Regional, Vernon Township, Lower Cape May Regional and East Orange would all lose funding. It would truly be a tragedy to see so many children hurt. And while the Jersey City school district has been repeatedly used as a punching bag, for the record, the Jersey City school district is $94 million below its adequacy budget, the amount required to provide a thorough and efficient education to its children. Let’s get our facts straight.
As we move toward the July 1 deadline to pass a state budget, everyone would be best served by putting egos and regional politics aside and instead working on helping all the children in New Jersey. The focus must be on all of the children and all of the taxpayers, not on this awful counterproductive divisiveness promoted by some.
Marlene Caride is a Democrat who represents the 36th Legislative District in Passaic and Bergen counties. Caride is also the Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman.
Let’s be very clear here… We do not have an education problem in this State. We KNOW what an excellent Public Education LOOKS like. Standardized testing has always exposed an underlying socioeconomic problem. That requires an entirely different set of tools to solve. Funding formulas exist only to serve the needs of money. We have both a State Constitutional requirement and a moral requirement to “provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five and eighteen years.” The good districts that are accountable to the communities that they serve spend about $20,000 per student per year. Extrapolate that to 1.5 million kids and after bringing facilities up to speed, that should cost about $30 billion per year. As we start to accountably pulse in $2.5 billion per month from whatever sources necessary, State Treasurer Scudder should be building out a dynamic cash flows model. The first place to look is at the cost of living. In some of these districts that we are trying to help, the home ownership rate is less than 40%. Who knows what the local commercial real estate ownership rate looks like? If the money that we spend is all flowing out to Jared Kushner-types that own all of the housing, the big problem is going to be readilly apparent. If we begin to get credit flowing to people who need it and develop real long-term stakes in the community and local opportunities for work that pay real living wages, we are going to build up dynamics in the local economy, fill the bucket (so-to-speak), stop the leaks, and LOWER our collective taxes. With strong leadership from Chairwoman Ruiz and Chairwoman Caride to make the accountable investments that need to be made, we should be able to get locally sustainable systems up and running inside of three years and create a pro-Growth economic model for the rest of the country to follow. This ain’t rocket science… our measurements do not need to be exact… but we do need to start accounting for what is truly important and planning for Growth.
Public Education is just one part of the puzzle. We have been distracted by the forces that would want to yield to standardized test scores and standardized credit scores, privatize our public assets, and develop unaccountable and unaffordable luxury housing. That era is definitively OVER. Time to move forward. Locally accountable banking is going to be a big part of the solution.
Our best days are clearly in front of us here in The Garden State. We are indebted to Chairwoman Caride for her leadership.
Sweeney’s resolution, SCR-119 doesn’t contain a formula because it doesn’t need to. SCR-119 is a tweak of SFRA, not a wholly new aid law.
And while SCR-119 doesn’t literally call for the elimination of Adjustment Aid and the State Aid Growth Limits, the legislative intention is clear that the commission was supposed to do exactly those things.
” 1[2.] 3.1 a. It shall be the duty of the commission to study:
(1) the impact of the adjustment aid and State aid growth limit provisions of the “School Funding Reform Act of 2008” (SFRA), P.L.2007, c.260 (C.18A:7F-43 et al.), on the fairness of the school funding formula, to make recommendations for revising those provisions in order to provide full funding of the “School Funding Reform Act of 2008” over a five-year period, and to bring fair and equitable funding to all school districts for enrollment growth over a multi-year period;”
Also, Jersey City is below Adequacy because of its own insufficient local taxation, which is over $200 million below its Local Fair Share. It is not the state’s fault. SCR-119 also contains language about a change to the tax cap law that would allow Jersey City and other aid-losing districts to make up for lost aid through higher local taxes.
What Caride does not admit is that the State of New Jersey is broke and there is no feasible way NJ can bring the underaided districts up to fairness without redistributing Adjustment Aid.