A burning question from the school funding conference

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The conference on school funding at Princeton on Tuesday surprised and enlightened me, but ultimately left me with a disturbing question.

SURPRISE

Several things were not clear to me before arriving and getting the one-page handout outlining the event. First, it was billed -- accurately enough as it turned out -- as a "conversation" on school funding. A roundtable, rather than the conference which I somehow had been led to expect. (The difference being that in a conference one would expect several sharply focused presentations on various aspects of a topic, and a roundtable would be expected to be a "conversation," which accurately describes this particular event.)

Secondly, the sponsors listed -- the Public Education Institute, ETS (Educational Testing Services), the NJ School Boards Association, and the Institute on Education Law and Policy -- indicated that the audience and presenters would be geared toward policy questions involving public schools more than toward fiscal matters.

Together, these revelations made for my surprise, since I had expected a wonkish discussion of fiscal policy and various proposals for solving the problem of funding the "thorough and efficient education" guaranteed to all by the state constitution.

ENLIGHTENMENT

My enlightenment came in learning from another attendee just how historic this gathering was. Rounded up in one place at one time were most of the major players in public school funding over the last forty years.

From ex-Senator Ray Bateman (a sponsor of New Jersey's first statewide public education funding law, the Bateman-Tanzman bill of 1965) to David Sciarra (the bulldog strategist of using the courts to enforce the constitutional mandate), to Cecilia Zalkind (chief strategist of the preschool mandate), this was an unprecedented assemblage of the movers and shakers -- elected officials, justices, lawyers and education advocates -- who have been in the trenches on this issue over the last forty years.

Their easy manner with and obvious respect for one another, even though they had often enough found themselves on opposite sides of various struggles, was refreshing in times like these where public discussion at the national level has taken on a poisonous tenor that we haven't seen since the era of Richard Nixon.

The seesaw history of the last forty years that they sketched was instructive to this non-native Jerseyan and leavened with humorous quips and asides, as well as barbed comments -- many of the sharpest directed at educational bureaucracy at the state level.

One thing I learned from an attendee was that Plainfield's re-inclusion in the list of Abbott districts was at the instigation of Sen. Donald DiFrancesco, who is said to have signed an executive order while acting governor (when Christie Whitman was out of state) which ordered the inclusion. Whether or not it is apocryphal, the story neatly underscores the kind of jockeying that goes on behind the scenes of the often Kabuki-like public discussion.

The event was ably moderated by Dr. Henry Coleman of Rutgers, who focused and sometimes prodded the participants. And Plainfield's own Herb Green introduced the participants. Though I spotted four Plainfield attendees -- out of perhaps 150-175 -- there seemed to be no representation from the District. That was surprising to me, given the importance of state funding to Plainfield as an Abbott district. But then maybe they knew better than I what the "conversation" would really be about.

What struck me as an outsider at this insider event -- most of the attendees seemed to be school board members, superintendents and educational policy professionals -- was the makeup of the roundtable. Of the twelve participants, only one was a person of color and one a woman. So the meeting had its ironic aspect, since one could hardly envision moving a major public policy question forward in today's New Jersey on such a narrow base of actors.

And this leads me to what may be the real issue.

A BURNING QUESTION

Given the participants at the roundtable, it is no accident that most of the day focused on the long and tangled history of trying to fund public education in New Jersey equitably.

Its strength as an historic gathering seems also to have been, to me, its weakness. What I expected was representatives of the new, more diverse generation of players who must eventually displace these honored but aging warriors. What I expected was today's equivalent for what must have been a young, energetic and creatively open-minded Assemblyman Ray Bateman in 1965.

What I was expecting is the equivalent on the educational front of a few Cory Bookers: young, energetic, informed and charismatic. What I saw and heard was the generation of Sharpe James (if not somewhat earlier).

As Sharpe made way for Cory, the time has come for these largely superannuated warriors to make room for the next generation of those who will find creative solutions to keeping New Jersey at the forefront of the national struggle for a "thorough and efficient education."

That is the burning question.

And that will be another roundtable. Soon, I hope.

-- Dan Damon

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