Gov. Christie and Legislature Fail to Fund School Formula, Create Crisis for Newark’s Schools | janresseger

Gov. Christie and Legislature Fail to Fund School Formula, Create Crisis for Newark’s Schools | janresseger:

Gov. Christie and Legislature Fail to Fund School Formula, Create Crisis for Newark’s Schools

The Prize—Dale Russakoff’s book about the plan put in place by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and then Newark Mayor Cory Booker to charterize Newark’s schools and recruit Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to pay for it—is listed by the NY Times as one of the top 100 books of the year.  It is a fascinating tale of political intrigue and the imposition of the ideology of “school disruption” on the public schools in a very poor community. In September, this blog covered The Prize here and here.

Russakoff’s book isn’t, however, as strong on the gritty fiscal realities for the Newark Public Schools, though the book does demonstrate many of the ways Christie’s overseer superintendent, Cami Anderson, squandered a lot of Zuckerberg’s money, nearly a quarter of it on expensive consultants. Right after Thanksgiving,  the Education Law Center released a report that clarifies the financial realities for the Newark School District that are harder to patch together from Russakoff’s book.

Mark Zuckerberg’s one-time gift of $100 million to underwrite the Christie-Booker charter school experiment pales compared to what the Education Law Center’s new report explains is a $132 million shortfall in state funding for the current school year due to Governor Chris Christie’s refusal to fund the state’s court-ordered school finance plan: “Newark last received the increases required by New Jersey’s school funding formula—the School Funding Reform Act… in 2011-12, when the State Supreme Court ordered Governor Christie to restore the $42 million cut from Newark’s budget in 2010.  Since then, the Governor has refused to fund the formula, resulting in an over $132 million shortfall in state aid to Newark Public Schools in 2015-2016.”

Complicating Newark Public Schools’ problems has been the rapid expansion of charter Gov. Christie and Legislature Fail to Fund School Formula, Create Crisis for Newark’s Schools | janresseger: