After nine years and $35 billion, maybe New Jerseyans have finally had enough with the Abbott system.  While I noted this in a prior post, here’s a quick primer for the uninitiated.  In 1981, lawyers in New Jersey filed Abbott v. Burke, charging that the state had failed to provide an adequate education for poorer school districts.  After the lawsuit wound its way through the system, in 1997 the state Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs, requiring the state to increase funding to those districts (three more were added later by legislators). 

It’s unfortunate the justices didn’t take a minute to observe Kansas City, where a similar experiment was ending just they issued their ruling in Abbott.  It seems a similar result has been discovered, just on a much bigger scale:

Now a growing number of New Jersey elected officials, educators and parents are calling for sweeping changes to this school financing system, saying that it has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars in the Abbott districts. For every success story like Garfield, where fourth-grade test scores have risen to the state average, there are chronic problems, like those in Newark, Camden and Asbury Park.

Today, the Abbott districts serve 286,500 children in kindergarten through 12th grade — about 21 percent of the state’s students — but get $4.2 billion a year in state aid, slightly more than half of all the state money given to New Jersey’s 616 school districts. The Abbotts are among the highest-spending school districts in the state, averaging $14,038 per student compared with $10,509 statewide. The vast majority of districts that fall between richest and poorest say they are increasingly bearing the burden of the Abbotts’ getting so much of the money.

Kansas City spent $2 billion over 12 years.  The Abbott districts spent more than double that each year. In return, Abbott districts are still well behind their non-Abbott counterparts.  (And, of course, New Jersey is the state that gave you Camden.)  But I also see some commonality with the Kansas City experiment–namely, the top-down, external approach to fixing the problem:

For their part, the Abbott districts have criticized what they see as a bureaucratic system that undermines local authority and forces them to adopt programs that they do not need. For instance, Patrick Gagliardi, the Hoboken superintendent, said that he is required to provide full-day preschool to every 3- and 4-year-old child in his district, regardless of income, a mandate that now benefits many affluent families. “The court intended to help poor people, not the wealthy,” he said. “Now it’s costing the state more money, and it’s inefficient and flawed.”

Lack of local authority.  Hostility from other school districts within the state, who find themselves strapped for cash due to the beneficiaries’ sky-high spending required by a court decision–a decision that went above and beyond pretty much anything done anywhere else.  Yeah, sounds a lot like Kansas City. 

I could wrap up this post with yet another call for parental choice in the Garden State (which would, of course, be closely tied to our lawsuit in Camden).  But it’s also worth pointing out that increased accountability–which we in the school choice movement have long advocated and worked for in school choice programs–is just now starting to become a concern for the Abbott districts.  If anything approaching the kind of money in the Abbott districts had been spent on school choice programs that had generated the mediocre results seen in even the best of the Abbott districts, I can only imagine the shrieking that would ensue, the demands to shut the program down. 

Being realistic, Abbott is going nowhere for a while; it’s too big, too entrenched, and the Abbott districts have promised to sue if anybody touches the program, meaning the state will have to endure another round of court battles to bring this to a conclusion.  But once the dust finally settles, maybe the state will turn to folks like E3 for a different way of doing things.