Gov. Corzine’s new funding formula for New Jersey would require full-day preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds students in at least 100 low- and middle-income districts that currently do not provide it.
In this article from the Newark Star-Ledger, Tom Moran cites the success of New Jersey’s public and private preschools, “probably the most remarkable success story of the last decade in this beleaguered state.” All of New Jersey’s preschools – both public and private – receive public dollars.
But extending vouchers into K-12 education would mean allowing students to attend private preschools, and in the words of Moran:
That, of course, is not going to happen in New Jersey. Because here, even talk of vouchers causes the teachers unions and the education establishment to break out in hives… A voucher system would allow parents to pick whatever school they want, public or private. And these guys don’t want anybody to mess with their cozy monopoly, which works so well for all the adults involved.
I couldn’t agree more with Moran that students and parents deserve choice, and that reform must be directed at the destructive monopolies that districts guard. But when it comes to methodology, our opinions differ. I’m for charter schools as the more sustainable method of education reform. Here’s why:
In many middle-income districts (but certainly not all, as I mention here), both private and public middle schools perform on par with one another, and relatively well. However, the lower the median income of an area, the fewer high-achieving private schools there are.
To provide a public school student in Newark with a voucher to attend an equally low-performing private school doesn’t do much to drive competition for public schools in the district, nor does it provide the meaningful choice that vouchers were mobilized for.
While vouchers are intended to airlift kids out of miserable schools, charter schools reform from the ground, up. They draw the most innovative leaders and teachers, and, because of their high levels of accountability, they are the more sustainable reform mechanism. That might sound contradictory, since there is a greater chance that a charter school might be shut down, leaving those students with only one out: the failing schools that they came from.
In the long term, however, this means that successful charter schools (and there are more and more of them) will drive public school competition through innovation, resulting in better teaching throughout the district.
Last, if New Jersey expands vouchers into middle and high schools, the result will be increased spending with no guaranteed increase in quality. While public school teachers are politically organized, parents and taxpayers are not. Government-funded vouchers would build the union lobbyist’s argument for ever-higher expenditures, whether or not the quality of education improves.
Corzine’s funding formula is good news for charter schools, because it will provide funding that has been sorely lacking. With money allocated wisely for preschools in charter districts, student achievement will be limitless. It’s one thing to start over with a 5th grader who arrives reading on par with a kindergarten. When you no longer have to, the sky’s the limit.