This brief provides a first look at the “Fairness Formula,” Chris Christie’s school tax reform plan. In this analysis, we show:
The “Fairness Formula” will greatly reward the most-affluent districts, which are already paying the lowest school tax rates as measured by percentage of income.
The “Fairness Formula” will force the least-affluent districts to slash their school budgets, severely increase local property taxes, or both.
The premise of the “Fairness Formula” – that the schools enrolling New Jersey’s at-risk students have “failed” during the period of substantial school reform – is contradicted by a large body of evidence.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Chrities oversize britches have always been on fire, as a major liar.
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Everyone who is shocked Chris Christie doesn’t support public education is either incredibly naive or completely captured by his support for charters and vouchers.
To an outsider it was clear Chris Christie doesn’t support public education. This is a person who went out of his way to scream at public school teachers and used that to great political effect. He’s always been about setting the public against public schools. If they’re really shocked he’s now desperate and trying to turn better-off public school parents against poorer public school parents they were blind.
Nice twist he’s come up with though. The reason he should underfund poor public schools is because of charter schools! Charter schools as a weapon against public schools. Good going, ed reformers! Nice work. You’ll now manage to damage both sets of schools.
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His kids went to private schools… I know because my granddaughter went to private school… and was friends with his daughter, her classmate.
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testing
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Susan Lee Schwartz
July 6, 2016 at 10:26 am
His kids went to private schools… I know because my granddaughter went to private school… and was friends with his daughter, her classmate.”
Unintended consequences for ed reform, right? They allied with him because he was promoting the agenda on charters and vouchers and labor. Ooops!
I give Kasich credit. He’s been a net loss for public schools but he’s better than the ed reformer governors in NJ and Kansas and MI. At this point it’s about limiting the damage they can do. They’ll be long gone to lucrative private sector careers and we’ll all be paying to undo it.
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Christie is not a deep thinker. Equal is not always fair since it costs more money to do a good job to educate the poor. Using local property taxes to pay for education always short changes urban districts. Christie’s plan would drive up taxes in the communities with the least ability to pay. Jersey Jazzman blows a hole in Christie’s myopic plan which is one more step of disinvestment in the common good. http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/
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By the way, Mr. “deep thinker” is against equal pay for women because The Bible says women must submit to their husbands. Of course, he fails to realize we don’t live in a theocracy. All the money spent on Christie’s education was a waste. The man is ignorant.
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Excellent link, thanks. RE: his thinking, I expect Mr C thinks very deeply about politics, his image, etc. He has street-smarts & he’s shrewd. I don’t believe anything he may say to justify his positions any more than I believe Trump’s off-the-cuff drivel. It’s all for show.
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Of the Heroes of Ed Reform, Governor Division, is there a single one who won’t leave as a net negative for public schools?
That’s not even counting Rahm Emanual, who is so completely useless he can’t even get money for operations in the city he runs. That’s 90% of what mayors do- they get funding.
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I so agree. I remember on e upon a time thinking Jerry Brown was a politician I admired. (He is the only govr who sprang to mind when I scanned memory for current govrs: positive vibes :). Yet on ed issues he bows to Broad & is just another meme in the echo chamber.
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Isn’t this the problem with the “backpack voucher” ed reform is moving towards?
They really believe that won’t be a net loss for poor communities? Seems ridiculously naive to me, especially for people who spend so much time lobbying state lawmakers.
I would bet my house the “backpack voucher” ends up as more inequitable. I’m right too. It’s already happening under ed reform governance. I know ed reformers think school board members are provincial dopes who went to state schools and have low SAT scores but they should attend a meeting – see how this really works 🙂
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The result would be to further stratify educational access and enhance segregation.
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Sorry, Chiara, pls define “backpack voucher”. Does this mean that each student takes his local per-pupil expenditure to any school in his area [public or private]? Is his ‘area’ the district? And, does the disconnect w/BOEd imply that district BOEd has control only of public schools (& those rare charters that are established under local BOEds)?
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This is kind of an amazing piece, even for the ed reform echo chamber.
It pretty much states that public schools are doing worse since President Obama took office. A lot of political filler and nonsense, but that’s the gist.
It then blames public schools for this result.
It is literally impossible for these people to be wrong. Any poor results of their policies are attributed to public schools. It’s circular. Public schools are the problem, so public schools are the problem with ed reform.
The President got bad advice. His education legacy won’t be any better than Bush’s, and the only people who admire Bush’s are ed reformers.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-cunningham/reformers-and-educators-c_b_10824822.html?utm_hp_ref=education&ir=Education
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Obama’s education legacy is worse than GW Bush because he led us to expect change, not more of the same
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YES. And President Obama has to take full responsibility for RACE TO THE TOP which allowed massive blame to be set at the feet of experienced teachers.
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Cunningham’s article anchors at this para: “At the end of the day, the best and only hope for meaningful accountability is if parents demand it. It’s more likely, however, that parents will continue to vote with their feet and enroll their kids in charter schools or private schools or homeschool them. Today, about 1 in 6 school-age kids has opted out of the traditional public school system and the numbers are growing. Parents have tasted choice and they are not going backwards.”
His “1 in 6 is near-accurate”: 10%.privates, 5.1% charters, 3.4%. But privates account for over 1/2 of his “1 in 6”– a longstanding stat which probably has little to do with ‘ed-reform’ policy. Meanwhile, private K-12 enrollment has declined from 12% to 10% over the last 15 yrs, & is projected to decrease to 9% by 2021 [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jack-jennings/proportion-of-us-students_b_2950948.html]. Perhaps his “and growing” refers to growth in charter students & homeschoolers– perhaps by 2021 they will account for half (instead of less than half) of ‘parents voting with their feet’.
Cunningham here lies w/stats, as so many do to ‘prove’ a point.
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Chris Christie’s politics has been to pit one group of people against the majority. He condemned the Public Workers (mainly Teachers) for their pensions, pay and health benefits by overstating their benefits in an attempt to turn the taxpayers against them. Every time he spoke, he would state some mistruth that taxpayers would take as fact and journalists would quote as fact. The spokespersons for the various Unions would dispute his lies but the coverage would either end up in an opinion column or not at all.
Now with his “Fairness Formula”, Christie is attempting the same strategy. He is pitting the more wealthy districts against the poorer districts. He is hoping to get support from the wealthier districts by promising them tax savings while condemning the poorer districts.
At the same time Christie released his statement on the “Fairness Formula” the Government released a web site emphasizing all of Christie’s propaganda with even an interactive map which showed all the tax savings for the individual “well to do” towns. If you happen to live in a “poorer” district it simply states:
The Fairness Formula may not result in a decrease of property taxes for your town, however there are other solutions to lowering municipal government costs.
Join the movement for your path to lower property taxes now.
http://www.nj.gov/governor/taxrelief/pages/yourtax.shtml
Christie is promising pie in the sky tax savings to middle and upper classes in exchange for condemning the lower class. He is deviant and it is a sign of today’s ALEC politics!
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This is the MO of “Fountainhead” loving politicians everywhere. While the clear connection is seen among conservatives, the Democrats are no better when they go along to get along. They pit the young against the old, the rich against the poor, black against white to forward their disinvestment in the common good. It is the will of the oligarchs.
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Thanks, Diane. Here’s a link to the brief itself:
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War is peace. Unfairness is fair. Chris Christie is a deep thinker.
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Chris Christie in his ‘Fairness Policy’ is simply suggesting we turn the clock back to pre-Florio school funding policy– the school-funding policy which presently causes NJ to score highest in any state comparison of ‘fairest’, ‘most-equitable’ per-pupil funding.
I well remember when, as a late-’80’s denizen of Bklyn, looking to move to NJ (because husband’s corp moved from NYC to NJ), I learned of the new NJ funding formula which would inevitably mean higher prop taxes in towns w/n commuting distance of the new corp location. This affected our county selection [avoid highest prop-tax county Essex]. But at the same time as parents of young kids, it assured us that NJ was a state which prized education as a high public good. So different from NYC, where we could earn hi-middle-class income and yet pay rock-bottom RE taxes, thus assuring the underfunding of our zoned schools!
Naturally, we suffer, to an extent, as a result of our 24-yrs-&-counting of this NJ policy. We would prefer to stay in this house & town for which we pay so dearly in RE taxes. We may have to downsize or even move elsewhere in retirement. But facts are, most do, & not just in highest-prop-taxes-NJ.
Nevertheless we gained much by being denizens of a state which highly prized public ed in our day. Our 3 kids were not ordinary: 2 of 3 were IEP, & 1 of those, due to congenital illness, required the ultimate in SpEd & college-counseling help– & it was forthcoming, in spades. The 3rd was also non-mainstream & found a home in our hisch’s ‘sch-w/in-a-sch’ project-oriented program. The 3 despite all odds thanks to our distr pubsch sys support made it into college & flourished.
Meanwhile we had that back-pocket knowledge that for every dollar we paid in REtaxes, not only were our non-std kids flourishing [for you must realize that a huge proportion of NJ students– our kids’ pubsch peers–are children of Wall St & BigPharma– some of the smartest students in the nation] 50% or more was going to poor inner-city districts.
I have a local gf (now retired) who for decades taught middle-sch math in Newark. She was a phenom, & I have no doubt there are many more like her: middle-class folks [her husband worked for the state as a scientist] who landed an affordable home near Newark when the buying was good, & chose to spend their adult careers in social service. Our paths crossed, in a sense, in 2003: my eldest tho becoming ill, had assayed Graphic Arts in a 1/2-pubsch, 1/2 vo-tech program [another superlative NJ pubsch curriculum/ career path paid w/our hi-RE taxes]. His project scored hi & placed him in a county awards program which we attended. What I will never forget about that awards ceremony is that it was celebrated by an incredibly-talented jazz [band & vocal] performance by kids from poor inner-city Newark schools who owed their superlative pubsch music programs to the diversion of hi-income pubsch districts to lo-income Newark sch districts.
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