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Results

Education Law Center has worked tirelessly on behalf of public school children and has successfully championed the cause of education reform in New Jersey and across the nation. For decades, ELC’s advocacy has influenced education policy and practice and has focused on the needs of low-income students and students with disabilities and other special needs.

Major accomplishments include:

  • Substantial reform in school funding, particularly for at-risk students and high-needs schools in New Jersey, making the state a national leader in fair school funding and providing the resources needed to improve student performance.
  • Establishment of high quality preschool for over 40,000 three- and four-year-old children in urban communities, widely recognized as the nation's most effective early education program.

Recognition                          

  • ELC Executive Director David Sciarra received the Outstanding Community Service Award from the Irvington Branch of the NAACP at the 2011 Freedom Fund banquet.
  • Volunteer Lawyers for Justice, a New Jersey legal services provider, chose ELC and Attorney Ruth Lowenkron for the 2011 “Champions of Change” award. The award is given to leaders in the cause of equal justice for ten years or more.
  • The New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages and New Jersey Bilingual Educators presented ELC with the 2010 Advocacy Award. The award recognizes ELC’s efforts to promote and support equitable educational practices on behalf of all students.
  
  • Implementation of a statewide school construction program to ensure that all New Jersey students attend school in facilities that are safe, educationally adequate, and not overcrowded. As of 2010, this program had built over 100 new  and renovated urban schools, and provided grants to support hundreds of other school projects in suburban,  middle-income and rural districts across the state.
  • Significant improvements in the academic achievement of New Jersey’s at-risk students and a narrowing of the achievement gap between suburban and urban students. 
  • Establishment of legal due process safeguards in discipline proceedings to ensure that children are not expelled or removed from school with no alternative educational options.
  • Development of a strong set of regulations that protect students seeking admission to public school who are homeless or undocumented or who live with caregivers other than their parents.
  • Requirement that school districts provide parents with evaluation reports prior to special education eligibility determination meetings, and that all students with disabilities receive assessments to determine appropriate post-secondary outcomes.
  • Creation of New Jersey’s only statewide education advocacy network, Our Children/Our Schools, bringing together education, civil rights and child advocacy organizations.
  • Development of a large relational database of educational indicators, containing trend data on over 200 indicators for all schools and districts in New Jersey dating back to the 1994-95 school year.
  • Establishment of the Secondary Reform Project, which advocates for progressive middle and high school reform. Recent efforts by the Secondary Reform Project ensured that thousands of high school seniors at risk of not graduating because of changes to the alternative graduation exam received their diplomas in June 2010.
  • Creation of Education Justice, a project that provides services to a network of litigators and other education advocates across the country to secure the opportunity to learn and equity in funding and learning resources.