Breaking Washington's Hold on Education
According to the New Jersey Star Ledger, Republican governor Chris Christie is cutting $475 million in aid to school districts, $62 million in aid to colleges and $12 million to hospital charity care. Among a number of other programs, he is slashing state subsidies for the popular New Jersey Transit system. Higher transit fares are the least of Christie’s problems, however, as grumbling state employees, union workers, angry special interests, and a hostile media line up to oppose the governor's move.
Realistically, Christie has little choice in the matter. With a budget deficit topping $1 billion dollars, and a projected 2011 deficit of nearly $11 billion dollars, Christie has called a state of emergency. Rather than begging for money at the federal trough, Christie is forcing his own government's hand. The proposed cuts will force state government to make the necessary tough choices that state agencies and school districts were able to offset during the housing bubble and years of artificially high property taxes.
“I take no joy in having to make these decisions. I know these judgments will affect fellow New Jerseyans and will hurt," Christie said. "This is not a happy moment. However, what choices do we have left?" This is the key question, and nobody – including Christie’s political opponents – has a better answer than Christie himself.
According to Democrats, Christie is robbing Peter to pay Paul. State aid to schools will have to be replaced with local funds, leading either to higher property taxes to pad school district coffers, or to serious cuts in bloated local education budgets. “This is an easy thing to pick someone else’s pocket — you’re taking the money from local taxpayers to fill your budget,” said Stephen Sweeney, the Democratic state senate president.
Barbara Keshishian, president of New Jersey Education Association, warns that Christie’s cuts to education could have “serious unintended consequences for the future of our public schools.” Newspapers are calling the cuts “draconian”.
This fiscal belt-tightening, however, lays bare a number of problems with the current public education system - not just in New Jersey, but across the country. Public school has traditionally been funded almost entirely at the local level, and school districts still receive the majority of their funding from local property taxes. Over the years, however, school districts have increasingly leaned on state aid to shore up their budgets.
This, in turn, has led states to rely more and more heavily on federal funding and the strings attached to that funding. Federal education spending sky-rocketed under the No Child Left Behind program, and peaked in 2009 with the federal bailout of the states. Now Democrats in Congress and the president are trying to entrench the federal government even further into the American education system, despite any indication that such involvement actually helps failing schools.
At the same time, parents across America have begun to opt-out of the public school system. Turned off by increased federal involvement, union entrenchment, and unresponsive school administrators, parents have flocked to charter schools, magnets, and private institutions. In 2010 and 2011, with no bailouts to fill empty state treasuries, and with shrinking student populations, school districts will finally be forced to make the cuts they should have made years ago.
Moreover, schools and local governments will need to start considering ways to make their schools more competitive. This will require rethinking teacher merit pay, the power and overreach of teacher and administrator unions, and the outdated use of tenure to protect teachers from even the most basic accountability.
Christie is on the right track in New Jersey, meeting the crisis head on and tackling it before it overwhelms his state and brings government to a halt. Now local governments across New Jersey and across America need to consider the implications. With states like California and Arizona teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse, perhaps it’s time for those states to consider taking a similar approach to state spending, while shifting more of the responsibility of government back to local communities.
On the education front, school choice and competition is vital for America’s schools if they are to remain autonomous and effective. Relying forever on state or federal aid, and allowing the federal government to further enmesh itself in local education is the wrong approach to fixing our nation’s schools. Not only is it a dangerous fiscal proposition, but one which threatens our children with mediocrity in the name of egalitarianism.
In New Jersey, the question remains whether Christie’s cuts will go far enough, and whether local governments and politicians on both sides of the aisle will be able to work together to make the transition as painless for New Jerseyans as possible. Christie may have popular support for his proposals now, but that could drop off just as quickly as the fiscal crisis deepens. If that happens, and states can't balance their own budgets, the federal government promises to become even more involved in educating our children. Chris Christie understands this. The question is, will the rest of America have the courage to do the same?