Last week  New Jersey Superior Court Judge Robert Lougy ruled, in a long-running case about the state’s highly-segregated school system, that the state has failed to provide a remedy to a practice of assigning students to school based on their ZIP codes. 

“[H]ome rule and neighborhood schools are not set in stone,” Justice Lougy wrote. “They remain viable as long as they serve public policy; to the extent that they protect and prolong racial segregation, they are anathema to public policy. As the Court has further emphasized, home rule and neighborhood schools impose no obstacle to and do not dilute or diminish the Commissioner’s exercise of her obligation to fight segregation in public schools.”

This threat to red-lined school districts (racial/economic discrimination through housing)—even a threat leavened by the Judge’s admonition to the plaintiffs that they were dramatically overstating district-to-district segregation and his refusal to cite specific remedies—has some defenders of home rule worried.

That’s why yesterday Senator Jon Bramnick introduced an amendment to the state constitution to “protect the rights of New Jerseyans to send their children to neighborhood schools.” It is very important to pass SCR-67, he explained. “The court decision by Judge Lougy may take away that option when the case proceeds to trial.”

How could this ruling  intrude on parent rights to send their kids to schools based on their street addresses?  Education Law Center’s David Sciarra explained that the state might have to create school choice programs, improve county-wide programs, and consolidate K-8 and K-6 districts into K-12 districts. 

This seems unlikely. 

Here’s why.

• We already have a interdistrict school choice program, where schools with open seats can accept students from other districts within their county at the expense of the sending district plus some state funds. While the program is very popular with families, it’s chronically underfunded. Without the state’s contribution, the program hibernates.

If we let children from, say, Trenton, attend schools in nearby Princeton or Lawrence, how will that square with the state’s school funding formula, where wealthier districts garner much of their school funding from local property taxes? Will the state pony up $25K or so that Princeton spends per pupil for that Trenton student? 

• Yes, we have some wonderful county magnet schools that regularly make the list of the best public schools in the state. But these elite schools are even more segregated than the districts they draw from. Will the commissioners who control Monmouth County’s magnet, High Technology High School— rated the #1 school in NJ and with an enrollment of  1% of students who are economically-disadvantaged (that’s comes out to one student)—respond to  that “improvement”?

• School consolidation is a great idea. Lots of governors try to make it happen. While there is one happy case in the last decade, home owners (and school board members) bristle at the concept of weakened power and, well, integration. That’s why NJ has 670 school districts, more per square mile than any other state in the nation.

Interestingly, the plaintiffs in the case before Judge Lougy (Latino Action Network, the NAACP New Jersey State Conference, Latino Coalition, the Urban League of Essex County, and the United Methodist Church of Greater New Jersey) claimed in their documents that the state’s public charter school sector increases statewide segregation. Of course, it’s the opposite: charters have a wider catchment area—the zones from where they draw their students—so they actually provide a remedy to ZIP code-assigned districts and can be intentionally diverse. 

What is the remedy? Countywide school districts, just like in Maryland, which would require a drastically rewritten school funding formula that no legislator or governor has the stomach for. 

Senator Bramnick should worry about something else. 

Here’s his amendment, with the new language in bold:

Amend Article VIII, Section IV, paragraph 1 to read as follows:  The Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the 15 instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five 16 and eighteen years.  No student shall be compelled to attend a public school other  than the public school nearest the residence of the student, which  public school is located within the school district in which the student resides and provides the course of study pursued by the student.