As talks seeking to settle a lawsuit that could reshape public education in New Jersey move into their second year, most voters say that they’ve heard nothing about the case. According to the latest results from the FDU Poll, Garden State voters say that they’d accept the building of regional magnet schools to create greater racial integration, but don’t think that New Jersey is segregated in the first place.

“Schools are a major driver of property values, so messing with the school system is touching the third rail,” said Dan Cassino, Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the Executive Director of the FDU Poll. “Anything that reduces local control is going to face a lot of opposition.”

The lawsuit, Latino Action Network v. New Jersey, was brought in 2018, and slowly made its way through the court system until late last year, when New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin pushed for the case to be resolved in mediation, rather than by a judge. The two sides have now been negotiating over a settlement for more than a year, blowing past deadlines to reach a settlement while saying that there has been good progress in the talks.

Despite the potentially enormous repercussions of the case, the ongoing legal proceedings have fallen under the radar for most New Jersey voters. Only one in six New Jersey voters (16 percent) say that they’ve heard “a lot” (5 percent) or “some” (11 percent) about the case, with the majority (65 percent) saying that they’ve heard “nothing” about it.

“This case has been going on for years, with a lot of it behind closed doors,” said Cassino. “Eventually, though, we’re going to get an announcement that could fundamentally reshape public schools in New Jersey, and it’s going to take a lot of people by surprise.”

According to expert analyses, New Jersey is the seventh most segregated state in the country for Black and Hispanic students, but New Jersey voters simply don’t see it that way. Only 17 percent of New Jersey voters say that Garden State schools are more segregated than those in other states, with 30 percent saying that schools here are less segregated than elsewhere in the country. Black voters (30 percent) and those living in the Urban Core counties (21 percent) are more likely than others to recognize the segregation in New Jersey schools.

While only one in six (17 percent) of New Jersey voters say that the state in general is relatively segregated, far fewer (9 percent) say that the schools in their area are segregated by race. The majority – 79 percent – say that there’s “a good mix” in their local schools.

“One of the real problems with addressing racial segregation in Jersey schools is that people just do not think it’s happening,” said Cassino. “It’s hard to sell people a solution when they don’t think there’s a problem in the first place.”

In the survey, voters were presented with three possible options for increasing racial integration in New Jersey schools. Of these, the creation of regional magnet schools was the most popular, with 60 percent of voters saying that they would find it acceptable. Fifty-two percent of voters say that they would be OK with the mergers of adjacent school systems, and only 35 percent say that transfer systems requiring schools to accept transfers from more diverse school districts would be acceptable. There is already a voluntary transfer system in place that allows students to move to other public schools, but schools have a limited number of seats made available for this purpose, and very few are available at any time.

While support for regional magnet schools is high across the political spectrum, Republicans and conservatives in the state are much less likely to say that school district mergers or transfer systems would be acceptable ways to reduce segregation. Sixty-two percent of Democrats and 61 percent of liberals say that they would be fine with merging school districts, but only 42 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of conservatives in the state agree. This gap in party is partly driven by differences in how Black and Hispanic voters view the proposals: Black (65 percent) and Hispanic voters (64 percent) are much more likely to support school district mergers than white voters (47 percent) are. Similarly, only 31 percent of white voters say that they would support mandatory transfer systems, compared with 53 percent of Black voters.

“Regional magnet schools are the most popular solution because they don’t do anything to disrupt the existing school systems,” said Cassino. “But it’s also not clear how much they would do to solve the deep underlying problem facing the state.”

Potential mergers of school districts also face a hurdle from how New Jersey voters view their own districts, relative to the surrounding school systems. Thirty-eight percent of voters say that their school district is better than the neighboring districts, while only 12 percent say that their school district is worse.

“If you think your schools are worse than the schools next door, a merger might seem like a good thing,” said Cassino. “But people are much more likely to think that their schools are better, so a merger would mean trading down.”

Methodology

The survey was conducted between October 20 and October 27, 2024, using a voter list of adult New Jersey residents carried out by Braun Research of Princeton, New Jersey. Voter lists were obtained from Aristotle International of Washington, DC. Respondents were randomly chosen from the list, and contacted via either live caller telephone interviews, or text-to-web surveys sent to cellular phones, resulting in an overall sample of 806 registered voters in New Jersey. 221 of the surveys were carried out via live caller telephone interviews on landlines, 302 on live caller interviews to cell phones, and the remainder (286) were done on a web platform via weblinks sent via SMS to cell phones. Surveys were conducted only in English. Respondents were considered likely voters if they (a) were registered to vote in the state, and (b) said that they planned to vote in the Senate race.

The data were weighted to be representative of the population of New Jersey voters, according to data from Pew Research. The weights used, like all weights, balance the demographic characteristics of the sample to match known population parameters. The weighted results used here are balanced to match parameters for sex, age, education and race/ethnicity.

SPSSINC RAKE, an SPSS extension module that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables using the GENLOG procedure, was used to produce final weights. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the final results. The use of these weights in statistical analysis helps to ensure that the demographic characteristics of the sample approximate the demographic characteristics of the target population. The size of these weights is used to construct the measure of design effects, which indicate the extent to which the reported results are being driven by the weights applied to the data, rather than found in the data itself. Simply put, these design effects tell us how many additional respondents would have been needed to get the weighted number of respondents across weighted categories: larger design effects indicate greater levels of under-representation in the data. In this case, calculated design effects are approximately 1.3.

All surveys are subject to sampling error, which is the expected probable difference between interviewing everyone in a population versus a scientific sampling drawn from that population. Sampling error should be adjusted to recognize the effect of weighting the data to better match the population. In this poll, the simple sampling error for 806 registered New Jersey voters is +/-3.5 percentage points, at a 95 percent confidence interval. Including the design effects, the margin of error would be +/-4.1 percentage points, though the figure not including them is much more commonly reported.

This error calculation does not take into account other sources of variation inherent in public opinion studies, such as non-response, question wording, differences in translated forms, or context effects. While such errors are known to exist, they are often unquantifiable within a particular survey, and all efforts, such as randomization and extensive pre-testing of items, have been used to minimize them.

The FDU Poll is a member of the AAPOR Transparency Initiative and is devoted to ensuring that our results are presented in such a way that anyone can quickly and easily get all of the information that they may need to evaluate the validity of our surveys. We believe that transparency is the key to building trust in the work of high-quality public opinion research, and necessary to push our industry forward.

Weighted Telephone Sample Characteristics

806 Registered New Jersey Voters

Figures do not include individuals who declined to answer demographic items.

Man

49%                 N = 392

Woman

51%                 N = 410

Some Other Way

1%                  N = 5

18-30

17%                N = 135

31-44

25%                 N = 203

45-64

36%                 N = 289

65+

22%                 N = 180

White

69%                N = 557

Black

13%                N = 104

Hispanic/Latino/a

12%                N = 95

Asian

5%                  N = 36

Other/Multi-racial

1%                  N = 9

No college degree

61%                N = 495

College degree or more

39%                N = 324

Region Classifications

Northwest: Hunterdon, Morris, Somerset, Sussex, and Warren Counties
Northeast: Bergen and Passaic Counties
Urban Core: Essex, Hudson, Mercer, Middlesex, and Union Counties
South: Burlington, Camden, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem Counties
Coast: Atlantic, Cape May, Monmouth, and Ocean Counties

Question Wording and Order

First off, we’d like to ask you a few questions about the upcoming Senate Election

P1. [Shuffle order of top candidates] In November’s New Jersey Senate election, do you intend to vote for Andy Kim, the Democrat, Curtis Bashaw, the Republican, for someone else, or do you not plan on voting?

1. Andy Kim, the Democrat
2. Curtis Bashaw, the Republican
3. Someone else
4. Not going to vote
5. [Vol] Don’t know/ Refused

And how do you feel about the candidates?

P2. Would you say that you have a favorable view of Andy Kim, an unfavorable view of him, or do you not know enough about him to say?

1. Favorable
2. Unfavorable
3. Don’t Know
4. [Vol] Refused

P3. Would you say that you have a favorable view of Curtis Bashaw, an unfavorable view of him, or do you not know enough about him to say?

1. Favorable
2. Unfavorable
3. Don’t Know
4. [Vol] Refused

[Intervening questions held for later release]

Shifting gears, we have some questions about New Jersey schools.

S1. In general, do you think that New Jersey schools are more, or less, racially segregated than schools in other states, or do you think it’s about the same?

1. More
2. Less
3. About the Same
4. [Vol} DK/REF

S2. Now let’s talk about your local school district. In the area where you live, would you say the schools are segregated by race or is there a good mix of different races?

1. Segregated
2. A good mix
3. [VOL] Don’t Know
4. [VOL] REF

S3. In general, do you think that the schools in your town are better than those in neighboring districts, worse than those in neighboring towns, or about the same as those in neighboring towns?

1. Better than neighboring districts
2. Worse than neighboring districts
3. About the Same as neighboring districts
4. [Vol} DK/REF

S4. Because of a lawsuit alleging that schools in New Jersey are racially segregated, the state government is exploring ways to try and reduce that segregation. There are a number of options: which of the following ways to reduce racial segregation in New Jersey schools would you find acceptable?

[Shuffle Order of options, accept all that respondent says are acceptable]

1. Building regional magnet schools: parents from across the area could choose to send their children to specialized schools.
2. Merging of school districts: adjacent school districts would be merged to create bigger, more racially diverse schools.
3. Transfer systems: Racially diverse students could transfer to less diverse schools in other towns, who would have to accept a certain number of them.

1. Acceptable
2. Not acceptable
3. [VOL] DK/Ref

[Further Questions Held for Future Release]

Release Tables