Is your district not getting enough school funding? Join the chorus: blame it on the Abbott districts! That’s what legislators, State education officials and media outlets do.

Almost daily we hear the refrain: the NJ Supreme Court’s Abbott rulings are the reason why students in poor and middle-income districts don’t receive the funding they need.

State Education Commissioner Lucille Davy often makes this claim, most recently telling the Supreme Court "[Abbott]-mandated aid categories required the majority of State aid increases to education to be used to support the Abbott districts."

That’s code for "because they get it, you don’t." And the "they" in this case are the mostly poor, Black and Latino students attending public schools in our intensely segregated Abbott districts.

But here’s the real story – it turns out the shoe is on the other foot. It isn’t the Abbott districts that are causing funding gaps for students in other districts after all. It’s those very same State legislators and officials who are so quick to point a finger at Abbott.

A study conducted by Dr. Ernest C. Reock, Jr., Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University and our state’s most esteemed expert on school finance, makes this abundantly clear. Dr. Reock pinpoints the real culprit: the failure of successive Governors and Legislatures to fund the Comprehensive Education Improvement and Financing Act of 1996 (CEIFA).

Dr. Reock calls it the "CEIFA funding freeze."

According to Dr. Reock, the Legislature stopped funding CEIFA in 2002-03, for a total of six years. This, in turn, caused what Dr. Reock describes as a "massive under-funding of many school districts, especially poor non-Abbott districts, throughout the state."

Dr. Reock’s conclusion: "I have studied the State’s failure to fully fund CEIFA and it is this failure on the state’s part, not the Abbott v. Burke remedies for children in Abbott districts, that has created shortfalls of funding in the non-Abbott districts."

Dr. Reock estimates that by the sixth year of the CEIFA funding freeze, the shortfall in State school aid had reached a staggering $1.3 billion. Poor districts not classified as Abbotts felt the brunt of that under-funding, losing approximately $2,214 per pupil. Middle-income districts were also big losers.

Of interest, Dr. Reock found that the CEIFA funding freeze also drove up the cost of the Abbott requirements. If the Abbott districts had received their required allotment of state aid under CEIFA, Dr. Reock estimates that Abbott remedy aid would have been reduced by almost $400 million, or over one-third.

But the CEIFA funding freeze isn’t just recent history. It’s a lesson for the here and now.

What happens if, in the next few years, legislators and the Governor decide, because of "limited resources," they don’t have the money in the State budget to fund the new funding formula – the School Funding Reform Act of 2008? Public school districts and students around the state will find themselves in the same sinking boat they’ve been in for nearly a decade.

Let’s face it. The only reason Abbott districts received any State aid increase during the CEIFA funding freeze was because of the Abbott rulings. If the SFRA is under-funded, and the Court protections are lifted, Abbott districts will find themselves set adrift along with everyone else. And then legislators will start the blame game all over again to deflect attention from their own failures. Bank on it.

Consider this myth busted. Students in all school districts deserve the state funding they need. But let’s stop blaming Abbott whenever the State abandons those students. It isn’t that Abbott students get too much; it’s that all districts do not receive their fair share of state aid.

In the end, it’s up to us to make sure the Governor and Legislature live up to their obligation to adequately fund all our children’s schools, no matter where they happen to be, court order or not.

Read Dr. Reock’s presentation to the NJ Supreme Court.

We’ll continue busting Abbott myths. Read Myth #1: Abbott Districts Spend the Most Per Pupil.

Prepared: May 21, 2008

Copyright © 2008 Education Law Center. All Rights Reserved.