New Jersey Families Using State Constitution as Justification for School Vouchers

In the newest tactic of the school choice movement, a group of families in New Jersey is piggybacking on a decades-old school-funding lawsuit and using the state's constitution as justification for school vouchers.

In a lawsuit to be filed today against New Jersey and some of its poorer performing school districts, the families argue that students should be allowed to switch schools across district lines — or attend private schools — and take their share of funding with them.

Groups backing the New Jersey case are trying to establish a precedent: Children in failing schools throughout America should be able to attend the school of their choice. While states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio have established voucher programs through their legislatures, this would be the first time a similar program was created by the courts.

Like many states including New York, New Jersey's constitution guarantees a certain level of education for its students. Two groups backing the suit — the Arizona-based Alliance for School Choice in Arizona, and Excellent Education for Everyone, based in Newark — claim that while New Jersey spends more on average per pupil than any other state, thousands of children are being denied their constitutional rights.

Advocates in New Jersey have been fighting for more than two decades to increase spending on schools in poor, urban districts. In the late 1990s, the state dramatically increased spending in those districts.

A similar funding lawsuit in New York City was started in 1993 by a coalition of parent and advocacy groups known as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. The case culminated last year when a state Supreme Court judge, Leland DeGrasse, ordered New York State to spend at least $5.6 billion more a year on operating costs for New York City schools.

"New York now is where New Jersey was about 30 years ago in terms of deciding that their problem is lack of money," the president of Alliance for School Choice, Clint Bolick, told The New York Sun. "And now what we're finding in New Jersey schools is that a number of the districts are spending very close to $20,000 per student … and education outcomes are in many instances breathtakingly poor."

The case, known as Crawford v. Davy, is being filed on behalf of 60,000 students in 95 failing schools in 25 districts. New Jersey spent an average of $12,981 a student in 2004, compared to the national average of $8,287. New York State spends an average of $12,930, according to U.S. Census data.

The lead lawyer in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity suit, Michael Rebell, dismissed the New Jersey case.

"It's true that you don't have complete positive implementation to the remedy there so you can't say that 100% of the children have benefited, and that's a problem," Mr. Rebell said. "But this idea of saying that individuals who feel they are not getting sufficient benefit out of this remedy can opt out and go into private school would quite frankly create havoc."

In New York, a retired corrections officer and mother of five, Dianne Payne, tried a similar approach earlier this year when she tried to piggyback on the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit claiming that her children were entitled to vouchers until the state fully funded the city's schools. Her case was thrown out in April.