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Njspotlight.com July 12,13 2010 articles – ‘Will Cap 2.0 Make School Budget Votes Obsolete?‘ ‘Privatize Preschool Education, Administration Argues’
Njspotlight.com July 12,13 2010 articles –
‘Will Cap 2.0 Make School Budget Votes Obsolete? ‘
‘Privatize Preschool Education, Administration Argues’
‘Will Cap 2.0 Make School Budget Votes Obsolete? ‘
Politicians on both side of the aisle question the need for school budget votes -- as long as the budget stays within the 2 percent cap
By John Mooney, July 13 in Education
Following the Assembly’s overwhelming vote yesterday, Gov. Chris Christie is expected today to sign into law a new 2 percent cap on school, local and county property taxes.
Under the cap, some items would be exempted like health care and pension costs. Budgets that otherwise exceed the cap would need approval of the voters.
But for the likely vast majority of budgets that fall within the cap -- for example, a 1.5 percent increase -- there is growing sentiment among lawmakers that there should be no votes at all.
“Honestly, I think if you stay underneath the cap, you should be rewarded by not having a vote,” said Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester), after his chamber approved the cap last week.
Unwritten Law
None of this is written into bills as yet, let alone law, but Christie has voiced general support for such a move over the last several months, and Sweeney leads several prominent Democrats who have done so in the last week.
“There’s a flaw in the process that we need to figure out,” said Assemblyman Joseph Cryan (D-Union), the Assembly majority leader. “But I’m a big believer that you should be rewarded if you are below cap, a big believer.”
New Jersey’s school budget votes have been around since the turn of the last century, a holdover from an agrarian culture in which people were given a say on what was then the largest public expense by far.
Taking place now every April in nearly 600 school districts, the annual rite of spring has been controversial, to say the least. Only a small fraction of people actually vote any more -- the average turnout is about 15 percent -- and some question the significance when many budgets still see little change, regardless of the votes.
Rethinking the Calendar
Sweeney said any change in the election law would likely be in this summer’s deliberations of Christie’s so-called toolkit of financial and collective bargaining reforms. Among those bills is one that would move school board elections to November, a bill that would likely include a change in budget votes as well, they said.
Still, several details are far from resolved, and that has led to some confusion to how -- and if -- the scheme would work. For instance, would local levies that go up more than 2 percent due to health care and pension costs also be exempted from a vote?
Assemblyman Louis Greenwald (D-Camden), chairman of the Assembly’s influential budget committee, yesterday said he has long supported eliminating the vote for those under cap -- as long as there is ultimately real discussion to not just capping property taxes but reducing them.
“We’ve argued for years for an incentive to keep people under the cap,” Greenwald said. “Why waste the dollars on the votes. I think the public would stomach stabilization of the property taxes if it was 1.8 or 1.9 percent.
“But I think they would only do that,” he continued, “if they are hearing people like myself say this is really nipping at the edges, we need to have a real discussion of property tax reduction.”
Revising Election Procedures
Local district leaders, already beaten up by state funding cuts and left uncertain by ever-changing rules of what would be included or excluded from the caps, are not yet counting on any change in election procedures, a process in which they invest many hours every year.
“We’ve been fooled before,” said Robert Copeland, superintendent of Pisctaway schools.
The votes have also gained heightened attention -- and political capital -- in the last several years, especially this year when nearly 60 percent of budgets were rejected. It was a record rejection rate that Christie seized as a mandate for his property tax reforms.
How many districts would request override votes is, of course, speculation. This year, only 110 of nearly 600 districts proposed levy increases of 2 percent or less, but that does not factor in those that went higher due to health care or pension costs. Still, just six presented “second questions” to exceed the current 4 percent cap, and all were rejected.
The New Jersey School Boards Association has combed the various iterations of pending bills for more information about how future budget votes might work, after several different reports pointed to Christie’s support for ending the annual rite for every district.
“We made several calls over there,” said Frank Belluscio, spokesman for the school boards group. “We never really got a clear answer.”
“But we’ve supported this for a long time,” he said. “With a strong cap in place and [the state’s] county superintendent reviewing budgets, it really diminishes the importance of having these votes.”
Privatize Preschool Education, Administration Argues
Task force says private sector should play bigger role in public preschool programs
By John Mooney, July 12 in Education |Post a Comment
New Jersey has been among the nation’s leaders in providing state-funded public preschool to families and children, especially low-income children.
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Using a mix of public and private settings, programs in urban districts like Newark, Camden and Trenton serve more than 40,000 kids with some of the highest standards for staffing and class size in the nation.
The preschools come by mandate of the state Supreme Court in its Abbott v. Burke rulings, and it is generally agreed upon that they have been the court’s most effective tool in raising achievement in later grades.
But these preschool programs are also the nation’s most expensive, at more than $12,000 per student per year, not including capital costs. That has made them the target of those who question the expense versus the benefit.
More Room for the Public Sector
The latest salvo came last week from a task force report released by Gov. Chris Christie, recommending potential services for the state to privatize. It was a long list that ranged from automobile emissions services to state park management. The task force also suggested that New Jersey loosen its requirements on preschools and allow the private sector to handle more of everything--from construction to instruction.
Private providers are already a central piece of the current system, partnering with local districts and actually serving a majority of the children.
But the task force report said more can be done, and the program as it stands now is “effectively crowding out the private sector and driving up costs to the taxpayer without any documented benefit to the children they serve.”
Fighting Words
Not surprisingly, those words drew protests from many of the experts and advocacy groups who have put New Jersey on the map for its preschool advances. Some claim it’s an example of Christie’s efforts to dismantle public schools.
But the task force said the high cost of the program certainly raises questions if there are more efficient approaches. For example, it suggested increasing the maximum class size from the current 15 students. It also specifically cited the ever-rising public cost of building new public centers.
“The sense of the task force was it is being provided well by private providers; there’s no reason to build all this public infrastructure while the private providers can do it very well,” said task force member Todd Caliguire, a former Bergen County freeholder and now president of ANW/Crestwood Inc.
In the last decade, the state has spent $230 million on 13 new or renovated public preschool centers, from Millville to Union City, according to the New Jersey Schools Development Authority. Another 10 projects -- including three in Jersey City and two in Passaic City -- are either under construction or planned, totaling another $280 million, according to the SDA.
A Critical Response
The report drew immediate criticism. Ellen Frede was assistant state education commissioner and chief architect of the current system over the last decade, and said she could barely read the email exchanges among her colleagues when the report first came out.
“I was so depressed, I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said this weekend.
Frede, now co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers, said no state fully privatizes its preschool programs for a reason. She said to do so would put the state back in the early days of the program when audits uncovered all kinds of problems in private centers.
“It would put us back in the mode when we had all those horrible findings and the misuse of funds,” she said. “Who would do the auditing? Department of Human Services isn’t going to do that.”
Frede maintained the situation only improved as local districts and the state itself took stronger roles. Still, she also contested the report’s claim that private providers are even being crowded out, since more preschoolers are in private settings now than they were in the beginning. Private centers make up about 65 percent of the overall enrollment, only slightly down from when the program started, she and others said.
Doing the Right Thing
“It may not be fun to work with districts, but it’s the right way to go,” Frede said. “Otherwise, they’d be kicking out all the hard-to-teach kids, and districts wouldn’t be there to catch them.”
Another critic was David Sciarra, director of the Education Law Center, the Newark organization that led the Abbott v. Burke litigation. The ELC is back in court now over Christie’s broader school funding cuts. Interestingly, Christie has not reduced preschool funds.
“To recommend that New Jersey ‘deregulate’ the preschool program by reverting back to child care standards would devastate a program that is nationally acclaimed as effective in closing early learning gaps,” Sciarra said in an email.
