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New Jersey reax

Alliance president Clint Bolick gave advance warning yesterday, and our lawsuit in New Jersey is now a reality.  A list of news stories can be found here, but here are a few other links.

Education Week’s web-only link (subscription required):

In a series of school finance lawsuits over the past 30 years, New Jersey courts have mandated remedies such as increased spending, mandatory preschool, schoolwide curricula, and state-financed school construction in the state’s poorest districts. Courts in Kansas, Kentucky, New York, and several other states also have sided with plaintiffs who have argued that the states inadequately finance their schools.

In other words, the remedies employed until now have focused on the system rather than the students, which is what distinguishes this lawsuit.  The most recent school finance lawsuit, Abbott v. Burke, called on the state to increase funding to poorer school districts.  And boy oh boy was funding increased: as pointed out in our press release, New Jersey schools now enjoy some of the highest per-pupil spending levels in the nation.  In every school named in the lawsuit, per-pupil spending clocks in at more than $10,000, and in some cases, more than $20,000.  (For that price, they could just as easily attend junior college full-time.  But I digress.) 

So what’s the reaction of the Education Law Center, the group behind Abbott?  Neal McCluskey over at Cato at Liberty takes a look:

This morning, in a story about the disastrous Camden, NJ, public schools, I’m afraid I got my answer:

Camden schools — despite their ongoing problems — have taken positive steps by offering preschool programs, reducing class size and other efforts, said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center.

“It’s easy to criticize and have some silver-bullet solution that’s untested and unproven,” Sciarra said. “There’s a positive agenda that we need everyone, including the school-choice activists, to get behind.”

I suppose I could hope that when Sciarra attacked a “silver-bullet solution that’s untested and unproven” he was referring to pouring more and more money into improvement-invulnerable public schools, but that’s been tested repeatedly…and constantly found to be a failure. Unfortunately, I guess that means I have my answer.

Meanwhile, the AP is a bit overboard with this headline: "Parents Sue Schools to Have Public Pay to Send Kids Elsewhere".  Ignore the fact that a) these parents are taxpayers too and b) whatever they end up paying to send kids elsewhere will almost certainly be cheaper than what the state has been paying in Abbott funding that hasn’t produced results.  And the lede kind of sums up the tone of the article:

In an assault on New Jersey’s education system – and ongoing efforts to fix it – a group of parents has filed a lawsuit calling for using public money to send students in two dozen New Jersey communities to private schools.

So we’re committing "assault" on the school system and sabotaging efforts to fix it–efforts which, we are to infer, were going along just fine until our dastardly attack?  The folks in Camden might beg to differ.