Charter Schools & the Public Good: Jersey City Version
As I’ve discussed in several recent posts, I’m increasingly concerned with how charter school expansion has played out both in our cities and in our suburbs. My one post that perhaps best captures my overarching concerns is here. It seems that increasingly, no matter where I look, my worst fears are realized. As I’ve explained numerous times – I began my work on charter school policy with positiv
NJ Education Spending & the Collapse of Equity [Update]
Posted on November 4, 2013
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A few years back, I wrote this post to try to clear up the multitude of falsehoods I kept hearing about New Jersey taxes and spending.
Well… not much time to write a great deal of explanatory text today… but here are a few updated figures. Tax figures are from the state and local tax query system of Taxpolicycenter.org. Note that these figures only go through FY 2011, as do Census data on local public school district spending used in the retreat from equity post above.
But before I go to my updated slides, note that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also recently produced a report on education spending since 2008, finding that New Jersey was among those states that either in percentage terms or on a per pupil basis, had seen reductions in inflation adjusted elementary and secondary education spending.
So, here’s New Jersey spending on education since 1990, beginning with STATE DIRECT EXPENDITURES on k-12 and higher education. Note that the peak of state direct spending on k-12 was in 2006, following the largest scale up of “Abbott” funding (from 1998 to 2005ish). Since that time, first with the adoption of the School Funding Reform Act (for comments on problems with