Next Target: The State University System

Crackpot reform is not just for K-12 anymore. On the the way to their corporate dystopia, the Grover Whitehursts of the world want to make public univerities the new corporate vocational schools, as well as the new corporate R&D units that will be directed and funded by corporations that dole out money to university researchers who depend upon them to make a living.

Wonder how high the flames must get before academics will put down their Foucault and their monocles to their look outside the tower windows?

From the Austin American-Statesman:

Voucher-style funding, bonus pay for teachers among recommendations.

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, May 22, 2008

Gov. Rick Perry urged regents of the state's major public university systems Wednesday to pursue a series of higher-education reforms outlined at a conference in Austin that was organized by his office and a conservative think tank. The proposals included new requirements for tenure, bonus pay for teachers and a funding model that would essentially amount to vouchers for students.

"I'm not saying these are a dictate to you. One size does not fit all." But "the time is right for these types of reforms to go forward," said Perry, who appointed all the regents to their positions.

Officials described the Governor's Higher Education Summit at the Inter-Continental Stephen F. Austin Hotel as a first-of-its-kind joint meeting of the governing boards of the University of Texas System, the Texas A&M University System, the Texas Tech University System and other university systems. The nonprofit Texas Public Policy Foundation, which favors limited government and free markets, helped organize it.

Regents generally offered muted reactions to the proposals, and the president of a statewide faculty group questioned the business-oriented flavor.

"There's a lot of food for thought," said John White, a Texas A&M regent. "I don't think we're looking for revolutionary change."

H. Scott Caven Jr., chairman of the UT regents, said further discussion is warranted. "I haven't formed any firm opinions about any of the recommendations," he said.

The proposed initiatives, billed as "breakthrough solutions," included requiring evidence of teaching skill before granting tenure to some professors, awarding bonuses to faculty members and teaching assistants who get the best evaluations from students and separating budgets for research and teaching to focus on excellence in each category.

Many of the proposals would be controversial, and some would need legislative approval.

The proposal for voucher-style funding is a case in point. Lawmakers currently allocate tax dollars to public colleges and universities to subsidize undergraduate and graduate education based on formulas that take into account the number of students and other factors.

The proposal calls for placing much of that money directly into students' hands, thereby emphasizing their role as the customers of higher education. All students qualifying for in-state tuition would receive the same amount of money, regardless of family income. Need-based financial aid would be on top of that.

Perry has suggested a similar approach in the past, to no avail. In January 2001, shortly after becoming governor, Perry touted an advisory panel's recommendation to wean institutions of higher learning from most of their direct appropriations.

Another proposal — to create a national accrediting agency that would focus on graduation rates and other results — couldn't be implemented by the regents. But they were asked to add their voices to calls for such an agency.

The proposals were outlined for the regents by Jeff Sandefer, co-founder of the Acton School of Business, a satellite campus in Austin of Hardin-Simmons University, a private school in Abilene. Acton has put in place a number of the proposals, such as linking faculty pay to student evaluations.

Retired House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Dallas, also addressed the group. He criticized faculty senates as "an imbecile institution" and urged regents to sharply reduce the role of faculty members in university governance.

"Our universities are not fulfilling their essential mission in our culture, which is to teach our children," Armey said.

Some people attending the conference questioned the proposals. Charles Miller, a former chairman of the UT regents who led a panel on higher education for U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, said that heavy-handed treatment of top researchers could cause them to flee.

Lynn Tatum, president of the Texas conference of the American Association of University Professors, who did not attend, said he was troubled by the tone of the recommendations.

"Many of these initiatives appear to derive from a business model rather than an educational model," said Tatum, a senior lecturer in the honors college at Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco. "In fact, students are the product. It is society that has employed faculty to provide thinking, well-rounded, educated adults."

rhaurwitz@statesman.com; 445-3604

'Breakthrough solutions'

Seven proposals, billed as 'breakthrough solutions,' were floated at the conference:

Post student satisfaction ratings and other information to publicly recognize the best teachers.

Award bonuses to professors, teaching assistants and other instructors based on students' ratings of how well a course delivered on its promises.

Split research and teaching budgets, paying teachers for the number of students they teach and paying researchers according to research dollars they receive.

Require evidence of teaching skills before awarding tenure to faculty members.

Provide each student with a personalized 'learning contract' before he or she enrolls that discloses the graduation rate and starting salary for the average student in that major with equivalent SAT scores.

Provide each in-state student with a voucher of sorts — a scholarship funded by legislative appropriations that currently go directly to public colleges and universities.

Support efforts to create a new national accrediting agency that would focus on results, such as knowledge gained between the freshman and senior years.

South Bronx Middle School Students Boycott Test

from the NY Daily News:

Students at IS 318 are protesting 'meaningless' tests.

Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing.
More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday's three-hour practice exam for next month's statewide social studies test.

Instead, the students handed in blank exams.

Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.

"We've had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year," Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. "They don't even count toward our grades. The school system's just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams."

According to the petition, they are sick and tired of the "constant, excessive and stressful testing" that causes them to "lose valuable instructional time with our teachers."

School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella.

The afternoon of the protest, the principal ordered Avella out of the classroom, reassigned him to an empty room in the school and ordered him to have no further contact with students.

A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking "actions [that] caused a riot at the school."

The students say their protest was entirely peaceful. In only one class, they say, was there some loud clapping after one exam proctor reacted angrily to their boycott.

This week, Lopez notified Avella in writing that he was to attend a meeting today for "your end of the year rating and my possible recommendation for the discontinuance of your probationary service."

"They're saying Mr. Avella made us do this," said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. "They don't think we have brains of our own, like we're robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests."

Two days after the boycott, the students say, the principal held a meeting with all the students to find out how their protest was organized.

Avella on Tuesday denied that he urged the students to boycott tests.

Yes, he holds liberal views and is critical of the school system's increased emphasis on standardized tests, Avella said, but the students decided to organize the protest after weeks of complaining about all the diagnostic tests the school was making them take.

"My students know they are welcome in my class to have open discussions," Avella said. "I teach them critical thinking."

"Some teachers implied our graduation ceremony would be in danger, that we didn't have the right to protest against the test," said Tia Rivera, 14. "Well, we did it."

Lopez did not return calls for comment.

"This guy was far over the line in a lot of the ways he was running his classroom," said Department of Education spokesman David Cantor. "He was pulled because he was inappropriate with the kids. He was giving them messages that were inappropriate."

Several students defended Avella. They say he had made social studies an exciting subject for them.
"Now they've taken away the teacher we love only a few weeks before our real state exam for social studies," Tatiana Nelson said. "How does that help us?"

jgonzalez@nydailynews.com

Michelle Rhee Seeks Permanent Supply of Temp Teachers

Michelle Rhee wants to make teaching in DC more attractive by destroying the teachers' union. If she can buy up the contracts of those teachers who think this might not be such a great idea, then she and Fenty can sail with their plan to return workers' rights in the Nation's capital to the 19th Century, as they drag the schools in the same direction--back to the good times when privileged white women gave up so much to do the teaching in the Negro schools, and when memorization, recitation, and toeing the line were the orders of the day. From WaPo:

By V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 21, 2008; B02

The Washington Teachers' Union is discussing a proposed three-year contract from the school system that would eliminate seniority, giving Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee more control in filling vacancies, a union member familiar with the talks said yesterday.

Without seniority, Rhee could place teachers based on qualifications or performance rather than years of service, said the union member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. The union member said Rhee sought the provision as a recruiting tool so she could offer talented candidates the position of their choice. She would be able to fill positions with less experienced teachers.

Under the proposed contract, teachers would give up seniority in exchange for annual raises of about 6 percent, more personal-leave days and more money for supplies, the union member said. In the last contract, which expired in the fall, teachers received a 10 percent raise over two years.

Rhee "does want to infuse some new blood [into the schools]. She wants to make it attractive for young people coming in to advance," said the union member, adding that the union's negotiating team will meet with her tomorrow or Friday. "We've come to realize we're going to have to give in to her."

The union member said Rhee had also wanted to eliminate tenure, subjecting teachers to dismissal without cause. In March, Rhee fired 98 central office employees after the D.C. Council gave her the authority to make several hundred of them "at-will" staff members. . . .

Teachers Who Deserve to Be Fired--But Won't

From Wired, ht to Raw Story:

One in eight U.S. high school teachers presents creationism as a valid alternative to evolution, says a poll published in the Public Library of Science Biology.

Of more than 900 teachers who responded to a poll conducted by Penn State University political scientist Michael Berkman and colleagues, 32 percent agreed that creationism and intelligent design should be taught as scientifically unsound. Forty percent said such explanations are religiously valid but inappropriate for science class.

However, 25 percent said they devoted classroom time to creationism or intelligent design. Of these, about one-half -- 12 percent of all teachers -- called creationism a "valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species," and the same number said that "many reputable scientists view these as valid alternatives to Darwinian theory." (The full study makes for interesting reading: Evolution and Creationism in America’s Classrooms: A National Portrait.

Longtime Wired Science readers know that I'm less bothered than many science writers at the possibility of evolution being under-taught in science and biology courses. So long as a teacher imparts a sense of wonder and curiosity, the details will follow. However, teaching creationism or intelligent design alongside evolution, as if religious explanations had even a fraction of the scientific validity of evolution, is unacceptable -- it promotes fatally flawed, uncritical thinking.

What to do?

The study's authors note that courtroom victories -- classroom creationism has consistently been struck down in U.S. courts -- is apparently insufficient to guarantee an accurate depiction of evolution. Nor will rigorous state science standards, like those recently passed in Florida, do the trick. Instead they recommend teacher certification requiring the completion of an evolutionary biology course. . . . .

More Debunking of the "Boys' Crisis"

From the NYTimes:

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: May 20, 2008

The American Association of University Women, whose 1992 report on how girls are shortchanged in the classroom caused a national debate over gender equity, has turned its attention to debunking the idea of a “boys’ crisis.”

“Girls’ gains have not come at boys’ expense,” says a new report by the group, to be released on Tuesday in Washington.

Echoing research released two years ago by the American Council on Education and other groups, the report says that while girls have for years graduated from high school and college at a higher rate than boys, the largest disparities in educational achievement are not between boys and girls, but between those of different races, ethnicities and income levels.

In examining a range of standardized test scores, the report finds some intriguing nuggets about the interplay of family income, race, ethnicity and academic performance. For example, it finds that while boys generally outperform girls on both the math and verbal parts of the SAT, the male advantage on the verbal test is consistent only among low-income students, and that among black students, there was no consistent advantage by sex from 1994 to 2004.

And while boys of all races and ethnicities generally outscored girls of the same group on the math section, the gap by sex for black students was only about half as large as other groups.

The report points out that a greater proportion of men and women than ever before are graduating from high school and earning college degrees. But, it says, “perhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace.”

Linda Hallman, who became executive director of the university women’s group in January, when the work was well under way, said the report was an effort to refocus attention on what she said were the real problems of education for poor and minority children, and away from a distracting debate about a so-called boys’ crisis. Ms. Hallman said the group’s members were concerned about arguments by conservative commentators that boys had become disadvantaged and were being discriminated against in schools intended to favor girls.

“Many people remain uncomfortable with the educational and professional advances of girls and women, especially when they threaten to outdistance their male peers,” the report says , citing Christina Hoff Sommers’s 2000 book, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.”

Ms. Hallman said, “To have this distracter out there, about the boys’ crisis, took away from our mission, from pushing forward for what we were trying to achieve, which is to be a leader in dealing with the education crisis that affects girls and boys without many resources.”

The report may provide new fodder in the battle over whether boys and girls need different methods of teaching.

“There’s still a lot of debate about whether there’s something we should be doing differently in teaching boys and girls,” said Sara Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington, who has written on gender equity. “The people on the feminist-leaning side of the debate see the conversation about a boys’ crisis as a strategy to advance the single-sex education agenda. I’m not sure that’s correct. I don’t think the kind of data we have about boys’ and girls’ achievement tells us anything useful about single-sex education.”

The report finds that, generally, boys and girls of similar backgrounds have similar academic success. And the five states in which boys score highest on the tests known as the nation’s report card are also the highest-scoring states for girls, it says.

Watching Spellings

From Politico's blog, The Crypt:

May 16, 2008

Miller, Kennedy ask GAO to Watch Spellings on Student Loans

Congressional Democrats, who have been skeptical in the past at whether Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has taken sufficient action to protect student loans from the credit markets' woes, have asked the Government Accountability Office to monitor the Bush administration's management of the issue.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) who chairs the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions committee and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) who chairs the Education and Labor committee in the House, sent the letter to the GAO Thursday.

Miller and Kennedy co-authored the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act to make certain that students are not prevented from attending college next fall due to unavailability of private loans for tuition.

The letter requests that the GAO monitor the administration's oversight of school's transitioning from the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) into the Direct Loan Program which is federally run.

A request for comment from the Department of Education has not yet been returned.

UPDATE: Education Department spokeswoman Samara Yudof e-mails:, "[We] are working across the administration on an efficient and effective approach that can be implemented as quickly as possible to ensure that students continue to have access to Federal student aid to help pay for college."

Florida's Subterfuge

From Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

May 15th 2008
These initiatives never use the word “voucher.”
Florida’s upcoming vote on private school vouchers and other forms of aid to religion is starting to attract national attention – and early signs are that this is going to be a hard-fought battle.

The Washington Post ran a story on the fight today. Although several Florida newspapers have covered the issue in depth, this is the first piece I’m aware of that puts it in national context.

If you’re joining us late, here’s what’s going on: Florida, like about 37 other states, has a provision in its state constitution barring the diversion of tax funds for religious schools and institutions. The state also has a provision mandating a high-quality free public school system.

Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, used an obscure state tax commission to engineer two initiatives onto the November ballot that would rewrite those provisions and legalize school vouchers and other forms of aid to religion in the state.

Every poll I’ve seen on vouchers shows that they are unpopular. Thus, these initiatives never use the word “voucher.” Instead, voucher proponents are arguing that unless this provision is removed, the state won’t be able to work with religious groups to help those in need.

Patricia Levesque, the tax commission member (and Bob Jones University graduate) who promoted the ballot initiatives on Bush’s behalf, told The Post that the current constitution threatens the state’s ability to work with religious groups to provide social programs like substance-abuse education, prisoner reentry and foster care.

“[W]e’re going to have hundreds of millions of dollars of programs that the state will have to take over because we won’t have faith-based providers participating anymore,” Levesque said.

These are scare tactics, pure and simple. Voucher opponents point out that the state has worked with religious groups on secular social service projects for years with no problems. Levesque, who served as Bush’s education policy chief and now runs two pro-voucher groups for Bush, is trying to slip a massive voucher plan past the voters by disguising it as a benign “faith-based” program.

Voucher supporters don’t have a very good track record when it comes to rewriting state constitutions. Voters have repeatedly rejected voucher referenda at the polls, usually by sweeping margins. But the voucher gang has learned from past defeats and is getting a lot more devious, promoting language that never mentions the “v-word” and portraying themselves as defenders of religion.

To make matters worse, they’ve packaged one of the initiatives with a school funding requirement designed to mislead voters into thinking public school classrooms will get more money if the proposal passes. What a scam!

If the Bush crew gets away with this in Florida, you can bet they’ll move on to other states and eviscerate church-state language there.

The voucher boosters have signaled they intend to play hardball in Florida. They won’t hesitate to use deception. Our challenge is to make sure Sunshine State residents have the facts and understand all that is at stake.

By Rob Boston

The Freddy Krueger of School Reform Dies Once Again

From Arizona, read all about it:

A state appellate court ruled Thursday that two voucher programs for foster and disabled children attending private schools violate the Arizona Constitution by using public money to help private and religious schools.

The 3-0 ruling Thursday by a Court of Appeals panel in Tucson reverses a trial judge's ruling that upheld the programs enacted in 2006 at the urging of “school choice” supporters. . . .

Obama Closer to Daley than to Wright

by George Schmidt
4/30/08

Rev. Jeremiah Wright is speaking for the majority of Black people who live in America's most segregated city, Chicago. Let's just put this in a few additional perspectives. Chicago, today (2008) has more all-black public schools than all of the cities of the Old Confederacy combined. There are 300 segregated all-black pubic elementary and high schools in Chicago today. That is the product of the policies of 50 generations of Daleys -- and of the people who ally themselves with the Daleys to rule this city in a certain way.

As we've shared with people here, Barack Obama has had more than enough time to distance himself from Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's corporate version of "school reform." He has not done so. But since the Clintons have praised Daley's "school reform" work going back a decade now, it simply means that Obama and Clinton take the same practical position regarding these realities. Bill Clinton praised Daley's teacher bashing union busting test based privatization oriented "school reform" in two state of the union addresses; Hillary was often with President Clinton when he came to Chicago to meeting with Mayor Daley and praise the rampages against the public schools that were then going on under Mayor Daley and Paul Vallas.

In Chicago, the Business Roundtable has been around for more than 100 years in the form of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club. They have always been part of the attack on democratic equitable public schools here. They wrote "Renaissance 2010," which for the past five years has provided the script for the privatization of more than 50 Chicago public schools (most turned into charters after enormous teacher bashing using phony "data").

Barack Obama has been silent on all of those teacher bashing (and union busting) crimes against public education, and on all of the privatization that began in 1995 here and is accelerating to this day.

From a Chicago point of view, it is one thing to perhaps make nice with Mayor Daley in order to garner votes (and delegates) but quite another thing to publicly criticize Jeremiah Wright and not ever say one word critical of all of the corruption of the Daley administration -- of which corporate "school reform" is just one piece.

Sorry.

The record is getting more and more clear. Those of us who have voted for Barack Obama before and are likely to do so again should at least go into the polling places with a clear eye.

When I heard and read Barack Obama's attack (and it's an attack, people, read it carefully) on Rev. Jeremiah Wright (and the pile on from the media -- "left" to right -- after Barack gave everybody the green light to attack Wright), I was reminded of the attacks (that's a plural) in the media on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in 1967 and 1968, after King came out clearly against the Vietnam War and clearly on the side of working people.

Jeremiah Wright, not Barack Obama, is now in the presence of Dr. King and Dr. King's traditions.

Barack Obama is in the presence of the traditions of Chicago's Daley family, which attacked Dr. King in 1966, 1967 and 1968 here in Chicago (both directly and through media).

Let's just go into this next iteration of "Election 2008" with a clear eye. I write this as a person who has met Barack Obama on numerous occasions, who has voted for him and supported him in many other ways, and who is saddened by the fact that in Barack Obama we are going to elect a corporate Neoliberal, University of Chicago ideologue, who has never opposed Chicago's monstrous neoliberal attacks on working class and poor people -- corporate "housing reform" and corporate "school reform."

We have reasons to oppose some of the work of Jeremiah Wright here at Substance. Wright, for example, is now sponsoring a charter school that will open in September in CPS, part of the overall attack on the city's public schools. But there can be little doubt among people who read what Wright actually said at the National Press Clubs, the NAACP, and to Bill Moyers during the past week that Wright's tradition is more in the traditions of Martin Luther King than Barack Obama's. That may be fine with many people. It brings great sadness to many of the rest of us.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.net

Tearing at the Inadequate Spending Pie in NJ

From Our Children/Our Schools:

A campaign to support high quality education for all New Jersey children
OC/OS Calls for Accountability, Not Posturing, on School Spending

The Our Children, Our Schools campaign supports strong, transparent fiscal accountability for school spending for all districts. OC/OS opposes political posturing about "waste" when it is only used to justify reductions in needed spending for school children. Recent reporting by the Star Ledger and recent statements by some New Jersey legislators appear to fall into this category.

The headline on the Star Ledger’s May 11 front page story, "Audits Find Waste in Abbott Spending: 29% of expenditures found not ‘reasonable’," is not supported by the facts in the story itself or by the recently released audits of Abbott districts (and, significantly, only Abbott districts).

According to the Star Ledger report, auditors hired by the NJ Department of Education examined purchase orders for $290 million out of the total $4 billion that Abbott districts spend. That means they looked closely at about 7% of all Abbott spending. The auditors labeled $83 million of the spending that was reviewed "discretionary" or "inconclusive." It was the Star Ledger, not the auditors, that labeled this spending "waste," "unnecessary" or "not reasonable." It was also the Star Ledger, not the auditors, who projected from this limited review of spending in the Abbott districts that 29% of all spending in those districts was "unnecessary, excessive or lacking documentation."

OC/OS supports full and open examination of all public spending, including the items flagged by the DOE’s auditors. But it is outrageous to declare 29% of spending in the state’s neediest school districts "unnecessary" without public examination of the standards being applied and how they are being applied. Money that is misspent or misused needs to be redirected to student needs, not labeled as "waste" and taken away. Sensationalizing or misrepresenting the problem of "waste" encourages political attacks and harmful budget cuts on our most vulnerable schools and students. It does nothing to improve oversight of school spending.

Many of the items questioned by the audits appear to be legitimate expenses. For example, the Trenton audit cited missing documentation for a $1.2 million payment to a Puerto Rican Community Day Care center. The center houses part of the district’s pre-school program. While inadequate documentation is a problem that needs correction, it does not make the expenditure "wasteful" or "unnecessary." Similarly, the Trenton audit challenged a $25,803 payment for dues to the New Jersey School Boards Association. State law requires districts to belong to the association.

Other items were categorized as "inconclusive" or "discretionary" because the auditors decided the price paid was too high, or the items were deemed not an educational necessity. Examples include:

$106 for a floral arrangement for a Trenton high school graduation ceremony
$596 for a software packaged titled "Final Cut" for Burlington’s Audio Visual Department
$504 to rent an ice skating rink for an outing for 144 Plainfield students
$1,383 for a field trip to send 13 Bridgeton students to compete in a national Double Dutch Competition
Bridgeton Superintendent Victor Gilson spoke for many in Abbott districts when he challenged the claim that field trips and modest items like T-shirts for school clubs and flowers for graduation were examples of "waste."

"Tell the parents of the double-dutch kids that it's a waste," Gilson told The Atlantic City Press. "We have a major gang issue in Bridgeton, Millville and Vineland. And luckily, we don't have it in the schools. And we don't have it in the schools because we have students engaged in meaningful, active activities. I'd rather kids be in double-dutch than out in gangs in the evening."

Gilson also noted that auditors labeled some items "inconclusive" because they lacked paperwork that wasn't required when the purchases were made. "They went back over two years and held the district accountable for abiding by rules that weren't in place at the time the transaction occurred," Gilson told The Atlantic City Press. "Since that time, the district has followed the rules, but you can't expect someone to follow a bookkeeping rule that wasn't in place."

The misrepresentation of district spending practices reinforces the impression that the audits are being used for political purposes to support elimination of the Abbott remedies, which are once again before the NJ Supreme Court. OC/OS especially thought the timing, front-page position and misleading headlines on the Star Ledger report seemed calculated to do maximum political damage to Abbott districts, coming, as it did, one week after the Education Law Center filed a response to the State’s request that the Court eliminate all Abbott mandates.

The misleading report provided ammunition for Abbott opponents in the NJ legislature. Republican Assemblyman David Rible, R-Monmouth, issued a press release declaring, "While it has never been demonstrated that the spending in these districts actually results in a better education for students, it has clearly been demonstrated that it results in poor spending decisions and rampant waste and abuse of tax dollars."

Such claims are demonstrably false. After many years of Court battles and decades of separate and unequal school funding, the Abbott rulings brought funding equity to over 300,000 poor urban school children for only the past ten years. During that time, more than 40,000, 3- and 4-year olds have been enrolled in high quality pre-K programs, test score gaps between urban and suburban 4th graders have been significantly reduced, and New Jersey has maintained one of the highest high school graduation rates in the country, including some of the highest rates for African American and Hispanic students, despite persistent gaps among groups and communities. Much remains to be done, but these are significant accomplishments that would be seriously undermined by elimination of the Abbott mandates.

One reason OC/OS opposed the new School Funding and Reform Act is precisely because the SFRA reduces accountability for the use of state school aid. It fails to ensure that such aid is directed to proven programs or to support special needs students.

The fundamental problem in our state’s school funding system is that ALL NJ schools receive too little support from state and federal sources. That’s why NJ’s local property taxes are too high, and why urban and suburban school districts are pitted against each other in competition for an inadequate pool of funds.

The new School Funding and Reform Act reinforces these problems instead of solving them. SFRA’s funding formulas are tied to state budget pressures, not to the needs of schoolchildren. It makes schools less accountable for the funds they receive, and removes requirements that aid be used for specific programs and to support students with special needs.

OC/OS calls for improved oversight and public examination of all school spending and for better evaluation of school programs by both the DOE and districts to make sure the educational needs of all New Jersey’s children are being met.

For more information, please contact Sharon Krengel at (973) 624-1815, x 24.

Prepared: May 15, 2008