New Jersey saw its municipalities and state agencies spend $96 billion in taxpayer dollars during the 2008-2009 fiscal year, nearly double the expenditures of a decade ago — and outpacing the 74 percent increase in spending among all states in the same period.

But by year’s end, New Jersey may end up as reputed for spending cuts, clampdowns on lavish public pensions and staring down affiliates of the mighty National Education Association, as for Miss America, its famed turnpike, and the Jersey Shore. Most-surprisingly, it is happening in a most-bipartisan manner.

RiShawn Biddle, editor of Dropout Nation and co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era, in the American Spectator.