Cerf Assembles Expert Team to Review School Funding

Gov. Chris Christie has long said he doesn’t much like how – and how much -- New Jersey funds its public schools, especially its urban districts, and more recently he has said changes would be coming with his next state budget plan in early 2012.

Not surprisingly, Democrats have cried foul, with leaders calling for the administration to show its hand. Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) wrote to acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf demanding details of what changes he has in mind.

Now, some information is starting to come out.

Cerf said yesterday that he has enlisted a team of nearly a dozen academics, researchers, and others to look at the effectiveness of the current School Funding Reform Act (SFRA) formula and help him come up with changes.

The court-ordered review of SFRA is already a year late. Cerf said it would come this winter.

And it looks as if the review will be quite extensive, with proposed changes either to the formula itself -- requiring legislative approval -- or to the regulations that dictate how the money is to be spent, Cerf said.

He described the process as very much a work in progress, with few if any models to follow from other states. But he also said budget simulations are being made to test out different ideas.

“What we propose will be unique and distinct,” he said.

The central reform principles would center on what Cerf called the flaws of the current SFRA, which defines a precise mathematical calculation for how much each district should receive, based on specific demographics and needs of children.

“Where we have collectively gone astray is we have talked about how much money each district receives and not about how they spend it,” Cerf said.

He said he would like the money steered much more toward specific programs and reforms. When asked whether he would propose tying at least some funding directly to student achievement, he said that is possible.

“It’s one of the ideas we are considering,” he said.

He stressed the final recommendations will be his, but he has enlisted help from a mix of school funding experts from across the country, most from academia. They are:

• Sean Corcoran – New York University
• Eric Hanushek -- Stanford University
• Brian Jacob – University of Michigan
• Susanna Loeb – Stanford University
• Mona Mourshed – McKinsey & Co.
• Steve Rivkin – Amherst College
• Marguerite Roza -- University of Washington
• Cecilia Rouse – Princeton University
• Jason Willis -- Stockton (CA) Unified School District

Hanushek, Rouse, Loeb, Willis and Corcoran will be paid consultants, providing research for the ultimate report, said department spokesman Justin Barra.

“These are very talented folks, and represent a broad spectrum of thinking,” Cerf said of the group with whom he has met once collectively. “These are hard and knotty problems, and we want to listen to their views.”

Some of the names are notable. Hanushek, a school finance expert with the Hoover Institute at Stanford, is an outspoken critic of school spending patterns, which he says rarely show any correlation to student achievement.

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