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The Education Crisis

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Martin Pérez, Esq., LLANJ President

In New Jersey zip codes determine more about the education a child receives than the child’s parents. This is because school district boundaries are drawn to mirror municipal boundaries and, by law, a parent must send their child to the assigned school without regard to whether that school is a success or a failure. In almost all of the New Jersey cities and towns where large percentages of Latinos live, the public schools serving Latino children have lengthy track records of educational failure. And although significant gains have been realized for our children at the fourth grade level as the result of intensified early literacy programs, including universal preschool in the special needs districts, Department of Education data reveals the complete loss of these gains by 8th grade.

Statistics show that close to half of all Latino children in New Jersey attend school in one of the 31 ‘special needs’ or Abbott districts, which are mostly urban and rural. These districts are distinguished by the following characteristics: they are the only districts to provide pre-school for all three and four year olds; they spend more per pupil than New Jersey’s wealthiest districts; they have, with only two notable exceptions, lengthy track records of poor educational outcomes by test performance, drop out rates, SRA abuse and low college attendance; and they are among the most segregated schools, by race and poverty, in the entire United States.

The dichotomy that is New Jersey’s special needs/non-special needs, or Abbott/non-Abbott, framework maintains a ‘separate but equal’ system of public education, and one that measures success for minority children by the amount of money spent on education, rather than the educational outcomes achieved. Within this framework, improvement incentives for the Abbotts/special needs districts are nonexistent because there are no consequences for failing their students who are overwhelmingly Latino and Black. In the latest perverse twist on what is in the best interests of these children, a court decree is being sought to prevent any decrease in funding where significant segments of the population, 5% or more, leave the district. The desperation of parents to get their children out of these schools is typified by Camden which has experienced a greater than 15% decrease in its enrollments since 2000, despite a per pupil spending rate that could pay prep school tuition for each student in Camden public schools. Over the last several years, the racial segregation of these districts has intensified as overall enrollments have declined. This is further proof of what is already well in these communities, those who remain would leave if only they had the resources to move to a better school district or to pay for private school tuition.

Latino and African American children are being left behind by New Jersey’s system of education. Yet, some government officials and the teachers’ union have besieged New Jerseyans with the misleading claim that insists New Jersey has the highest graduation rate and best education system in the United States. There are statistics that support these claims, but they are all misleading in their omissions. New Jersey’s method of calculating the drop out rate is deceiving. Department of Education data labeled “Enrollment by Grade” demonstrates annually that the special needs districts are hemorrhaging high school students as they move from freshman year to senior year. However, on the same page of data, a misleading convoluted formula reports grossly diluted “Dropout Rates”.

True measures of the drop out rate conservatively estimate that one in three Latino 9th graders will fail to graduate from high school. But read on, diluted drop out rates are insufficient to cover up the depth of the state’s failure to provide an education for the majority of Latino children. A “special” is needed in order to cover up the fact that 33% to 50% of students in the Abbott districts are not able to demonstrate proficiency in 8th grade skills which are measured by the High School Proficiency Assessment (‘HSPA’).

SRA, the Special Review Assessment, is yet another deception. Disproportionately huge numbers of Latino and Black children who are awarded their diplomas through this alternative route process. Since the 1980s New Jersey has required demonstrated skill proficiency for award of a high school diploma. Today the test is known as the High School Proficiency Assessment (‘HSPA’). But, in 1991, use of the SRA was enlarged to include general students who failed the state’s high school graduation test. The SRA had been originally developed for limited use by students demonstrated to be “test phobic” by their child study teams. Throughout the late 1990s into the early years of the new century, abuse of SRA grew in the special needs districts. This enabled those districts to cover up the high “partial proficiency” (ed-lingo for ‘failure’) rates on the HSPA by Latino and Black students. Simply put, the SRA became the back door method for inflating graduation rates and for masking the failure of the most expensive districts in the state and nation. According to the 2006-07 Biennial Report on New Jersey’s Public Schools published by the Center for Effective School Practices, “Teachers, who grade their own students’ SRAs, admit there is a tendency to avoid failing anyone, and observers suggest that administrators support the process because they would be put in a politically dangerous position if they failed large percentages of their seniors.” The bottom line is that when SRA is accounted for as the failure it represents New Jersey’s graduation rate drops from number 1 to number 24 among the 50 states.

LLANJ realizes the urgency of this crisis and refuses to accept solutions that will postpone quality educational opportunities for our children. LLANJ knows that failure to urgently confront the challenge presented will determine whether our children dominate the socio-economic underclass of the future or whether they will be able to claim a role in building the wealth of this country and in reducing income inequality. LLANJ’s insists that success must be measured by the educational outcomes of our children: their test scores, their honest graduation rates and their college degree attainment rather than budgets, salaries, buildings, vendor contracts and court mandate compliance. Our advocacy seeks immediate reforms that put the interests of children first. Increasing educational options immediately for parents who the law otherwise requires to send their children to failing schools. Increasing the quality of the delivery system in the schools that our children attend. Toward these ends, over the last three years, LLANJ has actively and vocally supported:

Link to important documents about the issue
Link to Events:
Link to Testimonies:
Link to Press Releases: