by Merrick Carey
1994
Speaking in 1933 to a country stricken by depression, President Franklin Roosevelt said, "The nation asks for action, and action now." Today, many areas of our nation are suffering from a different kind of depression: an education depression. Yet the consequences for America may prove no less catastrophic than the Great Depression of the '30s unless we take action, and action now, to solve it.
Unlike the economic crisis of sixty years ago, today's education depression doesn't affect all areas equally. In fact, some wealthy suburban schools are doing fine. Other areas, especially the older inner cities, are suffering from a near-total educational collapse. Along with a few other progressive cities and states, Jersey City is taking action under the dynamic leadership of its mayor, Bret Schundler. He intends to reinvent Jersey City's schools by breaking the government's monopoly stranglehold on the system. If the state legislature passes Schundler's comprehensive reform proposal, it will amount to an FDR-style New Deal in education for the poor and middle class families of this working class community.
Why is such bold action necessary? Because the public school system in Jersey City has failed its children. Student achievement had fallen to such dismal levels five years ago that the state simply seized control of the system, hoping to improve the situation. Since that time, over $75 million per year in new state funds have been poured into city's schools. Yet instead of improving, students are dropping out at almost the same rate (over 50%), while achievement test scores have hardly budged. Strangely enough, the same union officials who vehemently opposed the state takeover now say it is working well and shouldn't be changed!
Without radical change, Jersey City's problems can only grow worse. The numbers of school age children are rising, and homeowners cannot afford to pay higher taxes to build new schools and support a growing education bureaucracy.
Mayor Schundler's "Schoolchildren First" plan is the radical change Jersey City needs. It would offer students a diversity of options including an array of alternative government-run schools, charter government schools and private schools. Under Schundler's plan, each student through grade twelve who attends a privately managed school would receive a base grant of $900.00 with supplemental grants in some cases. To make that these publicly and privately managed choice schools, unlike our current public schools, are held accountable, the state would establish academic standards, assess student achievement on an annual basis and provide criteria for high school exits, all in order to evaluate the students' progress year by year. Not only could parents have criteria to measure their children's educational development compared to other students, but now they would have the choice of moving their children to other public, charter or privately managed schools demonstrating superior results.
One advantage of Bret Schundler's "Schoolchildren First" choice program is that it is only a pilot program limited to Jersey City. Whether other localities will want to adopt a similar program will depend on Jersey City's track record. And unlike the current union-dominated school systems, which greedily threaten to shut down every few years unless they get more tax dollars, Schundler's educational "new deal" will not increase costs. Its effect would be to leave more dollars per pupil in the city's public school system, relieving the increasingly overcrowded conditions, without increasing taxes.
In fact, the Jersey City Education Association is so frightened of this common sense approach and of restoring family control over education that, when the City Council and Mayor Schundler tried to register peoples' opinions on school vouchers with a nonbinding referendum, it sued in court to keep the question off the ballot (and unfortunately won).
School choice is not a partisan issue. Conservative Republicans have locked arms with liberal Democrats to pass voucher programs in places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) has said that "To my knowledge, ours is the only industrial democracy in the world that does not routinely provide aid to non-public schools as part of its educational system." And Governor Christie Whitman (R-NJ) prioritized the Jersey City plan in her inaugural address: "We should give Mayor Bret Schundler the green light to test school vouchers and invite the top school experts in the nation to measure the results."
The voters get it, inner city parents get it, political leaders in both parties get it, and from their own perspective the New Jersey Education Association gets it. The real question is whether the state legislature understands what is at stake. For Trenton's lawmakers to flee in craven fear from the NJEA would be to abandon the poor and the powerless to the "malefactors of wealth and power" of our time, the teachers unions. It is high time the Legislature dismissed the threats of the NJEA and their brethren the education establishment, and took a stand for the parents and taxpayers of New Jersey. Let's hope they have the courage to give Jersey City the "new deal" in education that will put the city permanently on the road to recovery.
Merrick Carey is President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution in Arlington, Virginia. He previously served as Press Secretary to Congressman Jack Kemp, Chief of Staff to Congressman Jim Courter and Director of International Affairs for Governor Tom Kean.