Socioeconomic Segregation and the Cost of Inequality: In Search of a New Paradigm for Education Reform in New Jersey
Jason J. Moreira
25 March 2015
Since the early 1970s, finance reformers have argued that the unequal distribution of educational resources is primarily responsible for producing and perpetuating persistent inequalities in achievement and opportunity in New Jersey’s schools. Even though it is indisputable that in some sense “money matters,” the problem vexing education reformers continues to be the mutually reinforcing contingencies of race, class, and place. Textbooks, teachers, supplies, and facilities all cost money, and a community that lacks the funds to furnish its schools with these basic educational tools will not be able to provide education of the same quality as a school that has them. But school finance litigation, which was designed to equalize school finances in the interest of equalizing educational opportunity and achievement, has not had the intended effect of raising the academic performance of poor and minority groups to the levels typically attained by more affluent and white segments of the population.
The fight over school financing was never solely about money. The focus on school financing is predominantly a result of pragmatic strategic emphasis, not strict logical necessity. School funding is, by and large, the best judicially remediable proxy for describing inequality generally speaking. The reasons for the reliance on this proxy—this fiction of school funding as a panacea for equalizing educational equality— have been well documented. Jurisdictional fragmentation, home rule, and the ideology of localism cause and maintain extreme variations in taxable property wealth, perpetuate segregation by race and class, and ensure that socioeconomic integration in the classroom—a far more useful metric for determining the presence of educational inequality3—is as rare as socioeconomic integration in the community itself.
The barriers to equalizing educational opportunity and achievement are not only social and economic, but also legal in origin. Further, New Jersey’s options for crafting a pragmatic reform agenda—one which would address inequality of educational opportunity as the fundamentally social, economic, and geographic problem it is—are extremely confined. The simple redistribution of money (the strategy exemplified by Abbott), even in conjunction with dramatic school governance reforms, experimentation with charter schools, tenure reform, curricular redesign, technological upgrades and additional afterschool programs (to name a few) has proven to be woefully inadequate with respect to raising poor and minority student achievement. Inter-district remedies, after Milliken, are a virtual impossibility. The ability to diversify school racial and socioeconomic demographics through affordable housing policy—through the landmark framework established through the Mt. Laurel and Fair Housing Act, has fallen prey to loopholes and other forms of legislative mismanagement that have stunted its revolutionary potential.
Thus, we appear to be at an impasse. The State is in need of a paradigm shift in education reform that strikes at the root cause of educational inequality, and does not simply attempt to mask it—unsuccessfully—with top-down redistributions of money. This paradigm shift must address the socioeconomic segregation which lies at the root of educational inequality, and must not continue to wage a proxy war on that inequality through the policy vehicle of“school finance.”
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