Court Upholds New School Funding Law, Ending Parity Aid to Abbott Districts

By Ronald J. Fleury
New Jersey Law Journal
May 28, 2009

New Jersey's new public school funding law is constitutional and may be applied in the state's poorest districts, subject to a review of its efficacy after three years of operation, the state Supreme Court held on Thursday.

The decision, in Abbott v. Burke, M-969-07, effectively brings an end to three decades of Court-supervised litigation over the state's alleged failure to ensure that students in the poorest districts receive a thorough and efficient education as the state constitution requires.
The Court entered an order relieving the state from the prior remedial orders concerning funding to the so-called Abbott districts and denied the plaintiffs' request for an order preserving and continuing the status quo.

Following a special master's recommendation, the justices ruled, 5-0, that the 2008 School Funding Reform Act, which state officials say will provide $8 billion in statewide school funding this year, is a good-faith attempt to meet the Court's earlier mandates for an adequate funding scheme and should be given a chance to work.

"The political branches of government … are entitled to take reasoned steps, even if the outcome cannot be assured, to address the pressing social, economic, and educational challenges confronting our state. They should not be locked in a constitutional straitjacket," Justice Jaynee LaVecchia wrote for the Court. "SFRA deserves the chance to prove in practice that, as designed, it satisfies the requirements of our constitution."

Moreover, the Court declined to order continued supplemental funding for the Abbott districts during the three-year shake-out period, as the special master had urged. "This funding formula was designed to operate as a unitary whole and, in order to achieve its beneficial results, it must be allowed to work as it was intended," LaVecchia said. "Because the supplemental funding may undermine or distort the effectiveness of SFRA, we decline to order its continuation over the next few years until the look-back occurs."

LaVecchia noted that during the first few years of SFRA's implementation, the Abbott districts will have two ancillary sources of funding that will provide a "substantial cushion of resources" — about $630 million in federal funds and emergency aid the state Department of Education has budgeted for use as needed by individual districts.

"The federal funds are not being used as a crutch against some structural failing in the funding scheme itself," LaVecchia said. "Rather, we simply refuse to ignore the stark reality of such a large amount of federal funds for the Abbott districts' use during the same period in which they claim they require the continuation of supplemental funding."

The supplemental funding was an interim remedy ordered in 1997 in Abbott v. Burke , 149 N.J. 145 ( Abbott IV), in which the Court approved the comprehensive core curriculum standards, but not the funding scheme, of the Comprehensive Educational Improvement and Financing Act. The Court ordered that the Abbott districts be funded on a par with the wealthiest districts in the state.

The SFRA, however, was an effort by Gov. Jon Corzine's administration to create a funding formula, based on curriculum-content standards, which addresses the needs of disadvantaged students across the state. The law distributes aid based on enrollment and provides additional funds for districts with high concentrations of poor, special-needs and foreign-speaking students.
After the law's enactment, the state sought a declaration from the Court that it satisfied the constitution's thorough-and-efficient clause and therefore obviated prior remedial orders concerning funding in the Abbott districts.

The Court remanded the case to a special master, Bergen County Assignment Judge Peter Doyne, to determine whether the new formula met the thorough-and-efficient test, even when applied in the context of the peculiar difficulties faced by districts with concentrated levels of at-risk pupils.

After exhaustive analysis, Doyne, in a 134-page decision issued on March 24, recommended that the statute be found constitutional but only subject to continuation of supplemental funding to the Abbott districts until a three-year look-back review, saying he could not predict SFRA's immediate and practical effect on the educational services provided in Abbott districts.
LaVecchia largely agreed with Doyne's fact finding and deferred to the executive and legislative branches' determinations. "A costing-out study such as that engaged in by the State is rife with policy choices that are legitimately in the Legislature's domain. In the record below, each value judgment attacked was demonstrated to have been made in good faith, and on the basis of available factual data informed by advice from experts, including national experts, whose testimony revealed that they had the interests of the pupils in mind," she wrote.

"We see no reason, or basis, for us to second-guess the extraordinarily complex education funding determinations that went into the formulation of the many moving parts to this funding formula," she added.

LaVecchia said deference was called for because, unlike in prior episodes of the decades-long litigation, the Court was not confronted with legislative inaction or failure to provide adequate school funding. "It was previous indifference to a constitutional deprivation that started us down the Robinson / Abbott path," she wrote.

"Although we do not have the ability to see ahead and to know with certainty that SFRA will work as well as it is designed to work, we trust that the State will not allow our school districts to regress to the former problems that necessitated judicial intervention in the first place," she concluded.

Chief Justice Stuart Rabner and Justice Virginia Long did not participate.