Gov. Murphy, This Is How We Fix New Jersey’s Literacy Problem
January 22, 2024
BREAKING: JerseyCAN Announces Dramatic Expansion To Address New Jersey’s Literacy Crisis
January 23, 2024Trump and Murphy: Perfect Together, Says Lakewood Lawyer
“If Donald Trump were being sued for educational default, his strategy would be the same strategy: Let’s delay and complicate and find ways to evade the issue.”
That’s Paul Tractenberg, founder of Education Law Center and long-time advocate for disenfranchised students, criticizing the Murphy Administration’s fiscal oversight of Lakewood Public Schools. A hagiographic article in the Star-Ledger recounts Tractenberg’s crusade to get Murphy’s Department of Education to adjust the state’s funding formula for a city where, among 52,269 K-12 children, only 5,000 low-income and Latino students actually attend district schools. The rest attend private Jewish day schools and the district has to pay for transportation and special education. That leaves less than half the annual operating budget for public schools.
Advocates have pleaded for the state to adjust the amount of aid it gives to Lakewood but the Department of Education instead gives the district “loans” it will never pay back. This year alone the DOE gave Lakewood $50 million (although it asked for $93 million). Tractenberg says Murphy is simply waiting to the end of his term so he can hand the problem to the next Governor, which he calls “a breathtaking default of responsibility” and a Trumpian evasion of a knotty problem.
Echoing Murphy’s behavior, Acting Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan—who is leaving in a week—has failed to deliver a court-ordered report on how to deal with Lakewood’s impossible math problem. She had previously insisted that the funding formula worked fine. The Court begged to differ:
“The panel said Allen-McMillan’s reasoning was flawed and that she did not sufficiently weigh Lakewood’s low test scores, limited class offerings, high dropout rate and other lagging performance indicators, despite some improvement in those areas. ‘As legal support for her conclusion,’ the decision stated, ‘she compared the above observations with the conditions described in Abbott II, a case concerning stark physical deficiencies in school facilities — students being taught in coal bins, eating lunch in the corridor, and using bathrooms without hot water.”’
Of course, it’s not just about money. As other districts teach us—Asbury Park and Newark come to mind—you can have tons of cash with rock-bottom student achievement.
“It’s not only how much money is spent but how well it’s spent,” said Christopher Cerf, a former state education commissioner and former superintendent of Newark schools. “Certainly, more and more spending shouldn’t be viewed as the be-all and end-all. … The answer can’t always be more money to the exclusion of all else.”
In other words, adequate money is necessary but not sufficient to equitably serve the 5,000 students stuck in Lakewood Public Schools. Tractenberg agrees: “The bottom line is policing a remedy will be a challenge but, unfortunately, that may be more often the case in complex educational litigation than not.”
After all, Lakewood has had state fiscal monitors for a decade (at a cost to taxpayers of one million dollars) with no solution in sight, save a rewrite of the school funding formula that no legislator wants to take on or a special carve-out for Lakewood’s special needs.
Yet that opens the door to more carve-outs as ultra-Orthodox families move to nearby towns like Toms River, Howell, Jackson, and Brick, where budget allocations are starting to be driven by transportation and special education costs, just like in Lakewood.
How does this end?
It’s a mystery.
[photo credit] Flickr: Phil Murphy
2 Comments
The solution to the Lakewood problem is simple. First, the governor (D or R) and senator Singer (R), et al need to grow a backbone but they can’t because they won’t be re-elected without the Orthodox vote which guarantees re-election. Oddly, legislator Rabbi Avi Schnall was elected as a D in Lakewood, which happens almost never. He was the first since 1990. More on Avi coming. The Rs spend every waking moment criticizing everything the Ds do relative to funding, yet no Rs are silent and never mention or challenge Lakewood’s: 1) Illegal placement of “special needs” students who have no special needs except to be taught in Orthodox Hebrew schools with the most outrageous tuition rates in the country and paid for by the district/taxpayers; 2) District employee and attorney Michael Inzelbuch’s $1 million/per year salary PLUS hourly fees and expenses for additional school district work; and 3) Forming a transportation consortium that controls nonpublic school transportation which is unnecessary because it is already funded under New Jersey administrative code 6A: 27 at $1,165.00/student for every nonpublic student in New Jersey. However, Lakewood, in addition to students who are parentally placed under 6A:27 guidelines also pays for the transportation for the illegally placed “special needs” students in religious schools. If you’re wondering who runs the transportation consortium, none other than legislator Avi Schnall. With the right superintendent, Board of Education and politicians with backbones, this problem could be resolved in 6 months. The borrowing would end, the illegal special needs placements would end and there would be plenty of revenue without loans to educate the 5000 public school students.
For purposes of the Alcantara lawsuit, we have assumed that the multiple State monitors continuously assigned to Lakewood for almost 10 years (at public school district expense) have done their job and assured that all spending is proper. The monitors have stated publicly many times that Lakewood’s problem is a “revenue” problem, not a “spending” problem. Consequently, our focus in the lawsuit has been on getting the State to direct added certain, predictable and non-discretionary State education aid (not repayable loans) to the Lakewood school district so that its public-school students’ fundamental constitutional right to a “thorough and efficient education” can be met. Of course, the district and, ultimately, the State have the obligation to ensure that all school district funds are properly and effectively spent, and, to the extent that is not being done, something should be done about that on an expeditious basis.