Corzine’s “New Formula For Success”: Forgo Property Tax Relief

Corzine has established the adequate spending per student necessary to provide a thorough and efficient education in New Jersey - $9,649 for elementary school, $10,035 for middle school and $11,289 for high school. But to Corzine not all students are created equal.

The Governor has decided that students living in districts with certain demographics are entitled to spending that’s far above what he considers adequate for the middleclass. He has proposed a plan to make state taxpayers fund his vision at the expense of property relief.

Under the Governor’s new formula, students living in lower income districts are automatically considered to be “at-risk”, and so require 47 to 57 percent more spending per student.

Students living in areas with a high percentage of immigrants are automatically considered to be of limited English language proficiency (LEP) and therefore require a 50 percent boost in per student spending

Corzine has also determined that public school students living in lower income districts with a high percentage of immigrants should spend 60 to 70 percent more than the amount deemed adequate for educating a child from an average family.

The obvious question to these spending proposals is why? Why must we spend more to educate a student on the basis of demographics? How many teachers can stand in front of a classroom and teach at one time? And why must taxpayers forgo property tax relief to fund this obvious pork barrel program?

The 30 year Abbott school experiment has proven that more spending didn’t equal thorough and it certainly didn’t efficient. It did equal huge increases in government spending and sky-high state income and local school property taxes. Why should lawmakers permit and taxpayer put up with the expiation of a failed program?

Back in 1990, the left and its legal advocates wanted “a uniform per-pupil spending level” in New Jersey with “95 percent of all educational spending [to] fall within the equalized per-pupil rate and local districts could spend only 5 percent more per child”. Now the cry is to spend 50 to 70 percent more.

Taxpayers will never be able to meet the ever increasing demands of the Education Law Center and the “more money for education” crowd. They’ve had their way with us for decades, it’s long past time that we taxpayers put our foot down.