New Jersey spent 35 years and $100B trying to fix school inequity. It still has problems.
New research suggests the state’s failure to fully fund its approach to education spending has left a significant gap between white and Latinx students.
TRENTON, N.J. — New Jersey spent more than three decades and over $100 billion targeting money to its most struggling school districts in an attempt to rectify generations of inequity in its education system.
In the end, it just solved one problem and created another.
The funding helped level the playing field for Black students, ensuring children in the state’s poorest cities got the same amount of funding as those in some of the wealthiest towns. But new research suggests New Jersey’s failure to fully fund its approach to education spending after achieving those goals has left a significant gap between white and Latinx students.
New Jersey’s 30-year experiment shows how hard it is to truly fulfill promises to make public schools equitable, something that has been a cornerstone of protests this year after George Floyd’s killing in Minnesota that brought attention to racial and socioeconomic inequities across the U.S. The progressive policy became the subject of never-ending court battles, rancorous debates from Democrats and Republicans alike over who deserves state resources and a cost driver for the state budget, a third of which now goes to education aid.
Instead of making continual progress on funding, New Jersey is "backsliding," says researcher Bruce Baker.
“For the last decade, it’s really kind of fallen apart,” Baker, professor at Rutgers University‘s Graduate School of Education, said of school funding in New Jersey. “New Jersey schools now are about as equitable as they were in the early 1990s.”
New Jersey employs one of the most ambitious school funding approaches in the nation, using a complicated and controversial formula to redistribute state tax revenue to ensure all of its roughly 600 districts spend enough to meet the needs of every pupil.
But it hasn’t been enough. The state’s failure ever to fully fund the formula left many middle-of-the-road communities with fewer resources than either the poorest or richest districts. CONTINUE READING: New Jersey spent 35 years and $100B trying to fix school inequity. It still has problems. - POLITICO