Category: Ridgewood Schools

October 18,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, in an effort to provide more freedoms to New Jersey’s charter schools, the Christie administration has proposed new regulations for the alternative schools that would include essentially waiving many of the state’s certification rules for educators in the highest-performing Charter Schools.

According to Education chief Kimberley Harrington a former classroom teacher and school administrator ,easing certification rules for teachers would be five-year pilot program.

Some practices are already taking place , but others, like a proposal to offer a new, wide-open “alternate route” for educators will only be available to the top-performing charters.

There would be some requirements in experience and knowledge, but under the new proposed regulations, these schools could hire teachers and administrators without the same Certification demands for coursework or other training.

The new regulations would also provide greater freedom for charter schools to using operating funds to secure facilities and also to grant access to closed local district buildings.

Harrington claimed that the moves are meant to provide more leeway for innovation while maintaining the state’s oversight of the schools.

The new rules come in conjunction with Governor Christies new education funding push called the “Fairness Formula ”

On October 4th the Governor said ,” On every level this is an obscenity. We’re paying a king’s ransom for a lousy education. We’re lying to families that in the main are underprivileged, and we’re denying these children a chance at a better life, to a better education, and at the same time we are absolutely fleecing you. Because you’re sending more of your income tax dollars to failing school districts, and because you’re getting less to your school district, you’re having to pay even more in property taxes than you otherwise should. And, by the way, the bloated governments in these Abbott districts aren’t saving money for their districts because we’re sending them so much. No, remember, they’re only paying 25% of their property taxes towards education, where’s the other 75% going? 75% is going to local and county government, you aren’t even saving them money in the process. For 30 years, the Supreme Court has foisted upon us a failed theory, which is more money equals better results. Well everybody, we don’t have to theorize about this anymore. We’ve had 30 years of evidence, and the education in the main with the exception of 4 of the 31 districts is just as bad or worse today than it was 30 years ago. Only 4 of the 31 districts have graduation rates at or above the state average, the other 27 are below, and often, as in Asbury Park, well below the state average. This experiment has failed, yet we have been conditioned by the educational establishment in this state to believe that if we ever talk about less money rather than more, new rules, new ways of teaching, new ways of approaching this rather than the old ways, that we are anti-teacher, that we’re anti-student. What could be more anti-student than this system?”

In New Jersey ,Abbott districts are school districts in the state that are provided remedies to ensure that their students receive public education in accordance with the state constitution. They were created in 1985 as a result of the first ruling of Abbott v. Burke, a case filed by the Education Law Center. The ruling asserted that public primary and secondary education in poor communities throughout the state was unconstitutionally substandard. The Abbott II ruling in 1990 had the most far-reaching effects, of ordering out sized funding to the(then) 28 Abbott districts at the average level of the state’s wealthiest districts.

On average, 52% of property taxes statewide are spent on the school tax and in many districts it is as high as two-thirds. Consider some of these most-successful school districts that spend exponentially less per pupil, despite their local residents being burdened by higher property taxes and little return from their state taxes.

Clearly more school choice is going to be one of corner stones of the new education formula . The Governor’s proposal is an attempt to solve New Jersey’s two most pressing issues,  failure of urban education and unsustainable property taxes. Both of which continue to drive middle-class tax payers and businesses out of the state .

New Jersey property taxes are currently the highest in the nation, predominantly caused by billions in tax dollars being poured into perennially failing urban school or Abbott districts.

The Governor’s Fairness Formula is an equal per-pupil funding plan that would provide tax fairness for all residents and better public education opportunities for every New Jersey student, no longer condemning certain students to failure due to their zip codes.

Graduation rates prove that educational success cannot be bought with excessive spending for chronically failing school districts. Abbott districts, receiving five times more per pupil than non-Abbott districts, have graduation rates that have been consistently 10 percentage points below the state average, according to New Jersey Department of Education data