Even New Jersey, the State with the Best Funded Schools, Needs a 2nd Federal COVID-19 Relief Bill
In the midst of the COVID-19 recession, even New Jersey, the state with the nation’s best school funding system, can’t maintain its constitutional obligation without additional federal help through the relief package which was first proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives in May. U.S. Senate Republicans have refused to consider a second COVID-19 relief bill through the whole summer and into the fall, but discussions had revived in recent days. Just yesterday, however, President Trump seemed to kill any chance that a second federal relief package will be forthcoming before the November election.
In New Jersey, the state supreme court has held New Jersey’s legislature accountable for fulfilling its constitutionally defined responsibility to fund the state’s public schools. In his 2013 book, Improbable Scholars, David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, describes the long series of decisions in New Jersey’s state constitutional case of Abbott v. Burke: “Beginning in the early 1990s, additional help came from an unexpected source—the New Jersey Supreme Court. Over the past half-century, those justices have acquired a reputation for the boldness and controversiality of their opinions… None of the court’s decrees has made a bigger splash or taken a bigger bite out of the state treasury than the epic school finance case Abbott. v. Burke. In twenty-one decrees issued over the course of nearly three decades, the justices have read the state’s constitutional guarantee of ‘a thorough and efficient system of education’ as a charter of equality for urban youth. That 1875 provision, and the court in its historic 1990 ruling, Abbott II, meant that youngsters living in poor cities were entitled to an education as good as their suburban counterparts… Money cannot cure all the ailments of public education…. But the fact that New Jersey spends more than $16,000 per student, third in the nation, partly explains why a state in which nearly half the students are minorities and a disproportionate share are immigrants has the country’s highest graduation rate and ranks among the top five on the National Assessment of Education Progress, the country’s report card. The additional money also helps to account for how New Jersey halved the achievement gap between black, Latino, and white students between 1999 and 2007.” (Improbable Scholars, pp. 83-85)
However, pledges to rectify inequity depend on annual appropriations that sometimes don’t keep up with the promises. Even New Jersey has fallen behind in recent years. While New CONTINUE READING: Even New Jersey, the State with the Best Funded Schools, Needs a 2nd Federal COVID-19 Relief Bill | janresseger