New Jersey’s mismanaged (and sometimes corrupt) urban school districts will be getting even more money, thanks to the New Jersey State Supreme Court. In a 3-to-2 ruling today in Abbott v. Burke, it ordered New Jersey’s legislature and governor to increase spending on these money-wasting school districts by $500 million, gutting Governor Chris Christie’s attempts to reduce the rate of increase in state spending. Its order to increase spending on the so-called “Abbott” districts ignored both constitutional separation of powers principles and the fact that the state constitution only requires a “thorough and efficient” system of public schools.
There is nothing “efficient” about throwing more money at mismanaged school districts that already have more money to spend per student than the average school district in the state – or country. New Jersey already spends $17,800 per student, among the highest in America, and spending in Newark, a supposedly “disadvantaged” Abbott district, is far higher, at $23,000. Audits found that these districts waste 29 percent of their money. If the New Jersey Supreme Court really cared about the state constitutional guarantee of “efficient” schools, it would crack down on wasteful spending in the schools, instead of ordering even more such spending.
The Court’s 3-to-2 vote was the result of the New Jersey Senate blocking Gov. Christie from appointing a new justice to the Supreme Court to fill a vacancy, resulting in a temporary vacancy on the Court . The liberal Chief Justice of the state supreme court then temporarily assigned a liberal judge, Judge Stern, to fill the resulting vacancy. (One of the Chief Justice’s colleagues, Justice Rivera-Soto, says that temporary assignment was a violation of the state constitution).
Government officials are far less indulgent toward for-profit schools than they are towards waste in government-run schools. A GAO Report that was used by the Education Department to crack down on for-profit colleges was not “accurate,” concedes an internal GAO memo, and it repeatedly included claims that “15 out of 15 schools” investigated by the GAO engaged in various deceptive practices, when in fact far fewer of the 15 schools had been found to have done so. “According to the GAO memo, ‘because a summary of X of 15 schools was requested, we then went back and stretched whatever we could find to come up with a number for the testimony.’”
Other inaccuracies in the GAO report resulted because “congressional staffers” hostile to for-profit schools “demanded the inclusion of numerous details as it was being finalized.”“The [GAO] team’s unwillingness to say no to the additional insertion of details at the end of a job created some of our most obvious inaccuracies.”
As the Daily Caller notes, “The report was crucial because it helped the push for strict new regulations at the Department of Education on the for-profit colleges. The most controversial part of the regulations, called gainful employment, is pending at the White House Office of Management and Budget.”
As Norton Norris notes, the GAO’s “error-riddled report” was “a completely inaccurate portrayal of the for-profit college industry”: “only 14 of the GAO’s original 65 findings could be supported based upon the available recordings. The other alleged 41 findings were not valid and served no meaningful purpose to be included in the GAO report.”
The Education Department recently issued another foolish rule that effectively required some private colleges to raise their tuition, by banning them from limiting their tuitions to the amount of financial aid that students receive.
Hans Bader is an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
