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With 18 months left in office, Republican Gov. Chris Christie has announced his intention to combat New Jersey’s high tax rates by reworking the funding formula attached to school districts.

In his Tuesday afternoon address at Somerset County’s Hillsborough High School, Christie said the state faces two separate, but completely intertwined crises – property taxes and the failure of urban education.

“Property taxes are the highest in America and the majority of those taxes are for local school taxes,” Christie said in a transcript provided of his speech on what he calls The Fairness Formula.

In the copy provided by his office, Christie cited Asbury Park’s School district’s state funding as part of the problem.

“When you look at some of the individual districts, it is appalling,” he said. “Asbury Park spends 60% less of their property tax dollars on schools than the state average, while their city spends 64% more than the state average on their municipal government.”

The municipality currently receives close to $2 million in transitional aid, requiring oversight by the state and its public schools are among what Christie called failed Abbott schools.

Abbott districts were born from the 1981 Abbott v Burke lawsuit that maintained the 1975 Public School Education Act was unconstitutional [in part] because poorer urban public school districts could not adequately meet the educational needs without increased funding.

According to figures released by Christie’s office, state taxpayers will spend $97 billion on 31 Abbott school districts since 1985, compared to $88.3 billion spent on the remaining 546 school districts, resulting in 52 percent of state education monies going to 5 percent of the school districts.

“Do not let anyone tell you that failure is inevitable for children in those 31 districts or that money is the answer, he said. “The Academy Charter High School in Asbury Park had an 89% graduation rate compared to 66% in Asbury Park. Academy spends $17,000 per pupil while the traditional public schools spend $33,000 per pupil.”

Christie proposes changing the school funding formula to an equitable per pupil distribution that he calls ‘The Fairness Formula.’

“If we were to take the amount of aid we send directly to the school districts today [in excess of $9.1 billion] and send it equally to every K-12 student in New Jersey, each student would receive $6,599 from the State of New Jersey and its taxpayers,” Christie said.

In a written response to Christie’s proposed Fairness Formula New Jersey Education Association President Wendell Steinhauer said the most vulnerable children would be harmed the most.

“Governor Christie’s school funding proposal is a transparent attempt to deflect attention from the abject failure of his education policies,” Steinhauer said. “Having never once funded the state’s existing formula, he has no basis for assessing its effectiveness. New Jersey has a progressive school funding formula that acknowledges the need to invest the most resources in students who have the greatest needs. Gov. Christie has made a mockery of that formula and the values it represents since he took office.”

This past year the Asbury Park School district’s Superintendent Lamont Repollet launched programs aimed at increasing students’ reading, writing, and math scores. It Dream Academy and College Promise programs, in collaboration with Brookdale Community College, offers advanced college credit courses and the district was just named a Model School by the International Center for Leadership in Education.

“Our motto of building a brighter future is about hope and opportunity,” Repollet has said. “Everything we do is built on the three pillars of rebuilding, retooling and restoring.”

The award will be given during the 24th Annual Model Schools Conference, held June 26th-29th in Orlando, Florida, where Superintendent Lamont Repollet will be a featured speaker.

“Asbury Park has historically had some of the lowest literacy rates in New Jersy, rates that were dropping every year; struggling students in grades 3-12 were achieving only 0.5 years of growth in reading per school year,” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Meghan Kelly Daly said in a written statement. “Now, however, the results are different;  44% of students in grades 3-12 exceeded one year’s reading growth in a single semester, as a result of the implementation of reading intervention programs, 23% exceeded two years’ growth in a single semester, and the percent of students failing three of more courses has fallen from 30% to 3%.”

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