For 2024-25 Phil Murphy, with assistance from the New Jersey legislature, a growing economy and slightly shrinking enrollment, has done what no other governor has: the full funding of New Jersey's state aid law. For 2024-25, Phil Murphy's budget proposes a $901 million net increase in K-12 formula aid.  The addition of the $901 million plus $106 million in redistribution (more below) is +$1.01 billion for 423 districts and sufficient to bring every district up to a 100% minimum. The Big Picture Overall, NJ's $11.4 billion in formula aid for 1,314,974 students is $8,811 per pupil ..read more

In the last few years as districts in NJ and the United States have had increasing difficulty finding qualified teachers, one argument that many people in education have made for the teacher shortage is that staffing is a casualty of the "Culture War," ie conservative criticisms of teacher unions, individual teachers, and curriculum. Source, New Jersey's Teacher Pipeline: The Decline in Teacher Candidates Continues" by Mark Weber for the New Jersey Policy Perspective People within public education say that conservative criticism of teacher unions and public schools are an "att ..read more

The New Jersey Policy Perspective has written many reports over the years in favor of programs to benefit New Jersey's poorest residents. These include calls to increase cash assistance for poor families, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, end the welfare child cap, improve Medicaid, and assist immigrants.   On NJ's budget, the New Jersey Policy Perspective calls for raising taxes on high-earners, cutting New Jersey's corporate tax incentive program, and attacking the belief that NJ's outmigration is harmful or that it has anything to do with NJ's high taxes. Yet, over the yea ..read more

In April 2023, the NJ legislature almost unanimously passed and Phil Murphy quickly signed a bill that would give $102 million to districts who had just lost Adjustment Aid in the 2023-24 school year. The $102,991,919 is equivalent to 66% of the money these districts were originally slated to lose, and was given without any sensitivity to a district being above or below Adequacy, strong in tax base or weak in tax base. The re-appropriation of $102 million to these 160 school districts brings NJ's state aid surplus/deficit to a surplus of $266 million for the overaided districts, while conti ..read more

 The 2023-24 state aid numbers are available.  Although there are some losers in state aid this year who are in budget stress or crisis due to the rigidity of the tax cap, this is the best year for state aid fairness we've had since the start of the SFRA era in 2008-09, perhaps since the inception of major state aid in 1976. For 2023-24 Phil Murphy proposes to increase overall K-12 formula aid by $832 million and redistribute $157 million from overaided districts.  This means +$991 million for underaided districts and enormously greater state aid equality than even 2022-23, when ..read more

Considering how major a change it is, I'm surprised I don't see more journalistic coverage of New Jersey's shrinking population of young people and looming decline in school enrollment. From a peak of 123,125 births in 1990, New Jersey's births have fallen by 17.7% by 2021.  Year General Fertility Rate per 1,000 # of Women Aged 15-44 in the Pop. Births 1990 67.2 1,831,359 123,125 1991 66.4 1,831,264 121,545 1992 66.3 1,817,468 120,570 1993 65 1,813,222 117,940 1994 65.1 1,810,478 117,812 1995 63.5 1,811,528 115,098 1996 63 1,814,247 114,335 1997 62.3 1,819,084 113,332 ..read more

  Imagine if a town wanted to have something done and instead of hiring people to do the work, it required randomly selected residents to do the work for the town.  Imagine if the time requirement was at least 90 hours a year, for six years, and there was also no possibility of exemption.   Imagine if the town also required those randomly selected citizens to pay expenses for the mandatory work.  The biggest cost would be a loss of time, but imagine if the amount for supplies and equipment was hundreds per year, and that expense had nothing to do with anyone’s abilit ..read more

New Jersey's 2023 Equalized Valuations are out again.  Changes in Equalized Valuation allow us to track changes in real estate growth and is a rough proxy for economic and population growth. Since Equalized Valuation is half of the calculation of Local Fair Share, knowing districts' Equalized Valuations allows us to make predictions about state aid for 2023-24. The following is a rough draft of some changes in Equalized Valuation.  My time budget does not allow for a more detailed post. The big statewide news for Equalized Valuation is that NJ as a whole was up by +11.53%, the lar ..read more

  Now that Adjustment Aid is being phased out, the biggest problem in the School Funding Reform Act is its use of Aggregate Income to calculate Local Fair Share.  To see how bad Local Fair Share disparities can get, check these out: Local Fair Share disparities for 2021-22  Anticipated Local Fair Share disparities for 2022-23  If you are unfamiliar with the problems of Local Fair Share, New Jersey's formula for local share is nearly unique in the United States in that it is a 50:50 hybrid of a district's Equalized Valuation and its Aggregate Income.   The use of ..read more

Public sector unions want their members to believe that their union membership and the dues they pay are worth it because a well-funded union is a powerful union, and a powerful union is one that can determine who is elected in the first place, influence those elected officials, and win higher salaries and benefits for workers.    To a large extent that's true, where strong unions = higher salaries, which the above chart demonstrates, but since public employees are taxpayers too, there are costs to public employees for their own higher salaries.  Since anyone climbing ..read more