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TRACTENBERG,SADOVNIK: EDUCATION
Without a world-class public education for all our nation's children, we face decline and disaster. Paul L. Tractenberg and Alan R. Sadovnik are the board of governors distinguished service professor of law and professor of education, sociology and public affairs at Rutgers, Newark, respectively, where they are co-directors of the Institute on Education Law and Policy. BARACK OBAMA assumes the presidency facing extraordinary challenges. We understand that some may be more dramatic and appear more pressing than the status of American education. But for a half century we have understood that education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. In today's global world, the federal government, too, has awesome educational responsibilities. Without a world-class public education for all our nation's children, we face decline and disaster, not by terrorist act or stock market collapse, but by steady, incremental, inexorable erosion of our national capacity to produce and to compete. We could write a book on how our education system falls short, and what the president could do about it. Instead, we focus briefly on what President Obama can do immediately to begin addressing three linked national problems with important symbolic as well as tangible aspects: * Inequality of educational opportunity. Despite decades of efforts, mainly through state courts, to equalize educational funding within individual states, most states still have serious inequality, harming mainly poor and disadvantaged children. There is an equally severe problem of educational inequality that has received less attention — resource and educational differences among states. Just as we have first-class and second-class educational citizens within states, we have first-class and second-class states. A full copy of the report is available at: http://ielp.rutgers.edu/docs/Op-ed.pdf
ABBOTT RULING: A RETURN TO THE BAD OLD DAYS(04/09/2009)
WHEN I TELL colleagues from other countries that schools in most low-income neighborhoods in the United States receive significantly less funding than schools in affluent neighborhoods, they are perplexed. Why, they ask, would children with the greatest educational needs receive less than children with the greatest advantages? In most other Western democracies, it is exactly the opposite. Because of Abbott v. Burke, New Jersey has defied this unfortunate and inexplicable national pattern. Students in our 31 special needs urban districts — the Abbott districts — receive funding at the levels of the state’s most affluent districts, and have a variety of programs designed to overcome their poverty and educational disadvantage. That may change, however, if the New Jersey Supreme Court were to adopt Judge Peter E. Doyne’s recent recommendations. Judge Doyne, serving as a special master, has concluded that the state’s new school funding law, the School Funding Reform Act of 2008 (SFRA), should be found constitutional so long as supplemental funding continues to be available to the Abbott districts for at least three more years. Such a decision could reverse Abbott’s extraordinary gains and return New Jersey to the bad old days, when at-risk children failed to receive the resources and programs necessary for them to achieve at the levels required in the 21st century. A full copy of the report is available at: http://ielp.rutgers.edu/docs/Abbottruling.pdf
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