New Jersey Policy Perspective just issued a new report on the state’s school funding formula. The authors, Bruce Baker and Mark Weber, do a good job explaining the way NJ allots state aid per K-12 student,, codified in the 2008 School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), and praise the Murphy Administration for fully funding the formula. However, they argue, we need to do better: With the State Education Department adopting more challenging learning standards and assessments of student proficiency (they’re referring to NJ’s version of the Common Core,) the “current law does not provide all the resources students need to reach these new standards because it is still aligned with outdated learning goals.”

I have two gripes. First, throughout the (very readable) analysis, Baker and Weber reiterate that “research conclusively shows that school funding has a significant effect on student success.” That’s true! Spending adequate dollars is necessary—but more money is not sufficient on its own to lift student outcomes, as I’ve argued before. For instance, if the Education Department declines to requiree our elementary school teachers to use the Science of Reading during literacy instruction, our students won’t learn how to read.

Second, Baker and Weber recommend that New Jersey’s goal, in order to achieve “both racial justice and educational adequacy,” should be to attain the student outcomes of Massachusetts, the state with the highest K-12 student proficiency rates. Sure, we can settle for national averages—they call this “Standard One”– but we should be shooting for more ambitious “Standard Two,” which is where Massachusetts lands. In order to do that, they calculate (see page 9 of the report), we could lower the “adequate” cost per pupil in our wealthiest districts from $16,731 to $15,060 and raise the adequacy level of our poorest districts from $21,324 to $28,591. Sure, that’s more than Massachusetts spends but, they assert, “there are substantial differences between the two states in poverty and English Language Learner rates, labor costs, urban density, and other factors that affect school costs.”

Is that true? It’s hard to tell from the report because the authors don’t give numbers for these variables. So here they are:

• The poverty rate among NJ K-12 students is 13.2%. The poverty rate among MA K-12 students is 12.3%.

• The English Language Learner rate in NJ is 7%. The English Language Learner rate in MA is 9.5%

• The average hourly rate for school staff in NJ is $21.15 per hour. The average rate in MA is $23.15 per hour.

I love the idea of aspiring to reach the student proficiency levels in Massachusetts (where, by the way, their Education Department raised the bar on their high school diploma-qualifying test just as New Jersey lowered it and has mandated that every school use “evidence-based practices for literacy instruction”). But let’s get our facts straight.

*Historical Note: In 1990 the New Jersey Supreme Court issued its second ruling in the long-running Abbott v. Burke school funding litigation, which has led to our current school funding formula. In that ruling Chief Justice Robert Wilentz, writing for a unanimous court, noted “the convincing proofs in this record that funding alone will not achieve the constitutional mandate of an equal education in these poorer urban districts; that without educational reform, the money may accomplish nothing; and that in these districts, substantial, far-reaching change in education is absolutely essential to success.”