In New Jersey, System to Help Poorest Schools Faces Criticism

 

If we're not careful, New York, with CFE, will go down this same path, increasing spending enormously with little to show for it.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: money can be an important catalyst for and ingredient of reform, but money without reform is a total waste -- and, worse yet, does HARM, as support for public education evaporates when taxpayers see ever increasing amounts of their money failing to produce better results in schools.

Now a growing number of New Jersey elected officials, educators and parents are calling for sweeping changes to this school financing system, saying that it has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars in the Abbott districts. For every success story like Garfield, where fourth-grade test scores have risen to the state average, there are chronic problems, like those in Newark, Camden and Asbury Park...The vast majority of districts that fall between richest and poorest say they are increasingly bearing the burden of the Abbotts’ getting so much of the money...

 

In the meantime, state education officials plan to audit all 31 Abbotts in the next year after finding that the highest-spending districts were making the fewest gains. Asbury Park spent the most, $18,661 per student, in the 2004-5 school year. Still, slightly fewer than half the district’s fourth-grade students were proficient in state language arts and math tests in 2005. “What we know is lots of money has been spent, and in some places, there is very little to show,” said Lucille E. Davy, the education commissioner...

 

The debate over the Abbott districts has spread outside urban centers to affluent suburban communities from Ridgewood to Cherry Hill, where local officials have repeatedly raised taxes and slashed school budgets to offset their own dwindling share of state aid. Many of them say the huge amounts of money given to Abbott schools versus non-Abbott schools has polarized parents and teachers between school districts.

I am highly skeptical of these statistics:

The results are mixed across districts, but over all, the Abbotts have improved their test scores, particularly in the lower grades. For instance, 66 percent of Abbott students were proficient in the fourth-grade language arts test in 2005, compared with 29.5 percent in 1999, but that still falls below the 85.5 percent of proficient students in non-Abbott districts. The gap is larger on the math test and among students in higher grades.

As the article points out, many of the Abbott districts have benefitted from an influx of affluent families, which would explain a huge increase in student performance:

Critics often single out Hoboken as an example of an Abbott district that should no longer be one, since rapid development has drawn affluent newcomers.

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In New Jersey, System to Help Poorest Schools Faces Criticism

 

By WINNIE HU

Published: October 30, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/education/30abbott.html

GARFIELD, N.J. — The residents of this tumbledown city of 30,000 routinely voted down school budgets over the years, leaving their schools so hard up by the early 1990s that broken windows were patched with cardboard and principals did their own typing because they could not afford secretaries.

 

 

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