Jack Ciattarelli is running for governor of New Jersey. You would think that, in a highly-educated blue state, a Republican would take the time to educate himself about two of the biggest issues facing the voters: education and taxes.
But as his campaign has unfolded, it's clear Ciattarelli doesn't know jack:
What are your plans for lowering property taxes? Will it include revising the school funding formula?
Our property taxes are the highest in the nation, not necessarily because of municipal and county budgets, upon which [a governor has] no real power. Where I could have real influence is the school tax, and that’s because of state aid. So, we need a new school funding formula. The current one is nefarious. It’s arbitrary and violates the equal benefit clause of our state constitution that says no community is supposed to suffer at the expense of another. So, with a more equitable distribution of state aid, we can lower property taxes. The cost per pupil in a place like Newark is $37,000, while the state average is $16,000. No one can justify to me that a particular student needs $21,000 more per year to educate them. That makes a compelling case why the current formula is unfair. Does that mean I will leave a community or student behind if that school district isn’t performing well? No. I believe in a voucher system, like we’ve seen in Arizona, Ohio, and Florida. I also believe in school choice, and charter schools to achieve that objective.
We'll get to the false promises of school "choice" soon enough. What I'd like to focus on instead is that "$37,000" per pupil spending figure from Newark. Where does it come from? Is it accurate?
I'm tempted to let Ciattarelli off the hook here, because there is an ostensibly reliable source for the claim. The National Center for Education Statistics lists the per pupil spending for Newark as $36,862 in 2021-22. But there's a well known problem with this data: it often includes charter school payments in its expenditures but excludes charter schools students in its enrollment counts. This can—and in Newark's case, does—inflate the per pupil spending figures for districts with lots of charter schools.
(If you really want to get into this, see my note below.)
So Ciattarelli is using a figure from an otherwise reliable source, but one that isn't valid for comparisons. I'd let him slide... except there are plenty of other ways to verify the claim, and it's obvious he didn't care to (which I think says a lot about how he would run things as a governor).
Let's use the best national data source available: the Annual Survey of School System Finances (F-33) from the Census Bureau. (These are average sweighted by enrollment.)
| District | Total Current Spending, FY2023 | Pct. Poverty, 5-17 yer-olds (2023) | Pct. English Language Learners (2023) |
| Newark City | $28,631 | 30.0% | 21.6% |
| All other NJ districts | $25,408 | 11.2% | 8.3% |
Yes, Newark spends more than the average New Jersey school district—but not $21,000 more. But there's something else...
I've included the childhood poverty rate and English Language Learner rate for Newark and the rest of New Jersey.* Newark's poverty rate is nearly three times as much as the rest of the state. Its ELL rate is also nearly three times the rate found in other NJ districts.
We know for a fact that schools enrolling more children in poverty and English Language Learners need more resources to provide those children with equal educational opportunity. Newark and other cities need more funding for their schools because they serve the most disadvantaged children.
Now, there's very good reason to believe the state is not providing the extra funding these schools need. I'll say more on this in a bit, but for now, let's acknowledge that Jack Ciattarelli has his facts wrong: Newark does not way outspend other districts in the state, especially given the challenges facing its student population.
If Jack is going to run the state in the slipshod way he runs his campaign, New Jersey ought to take a hard pass. We already had a Republican governor who played fast and loose with the truth when it came to public education, and it didn't work out so well.
A note about federal school finance data and charter schools: States have all sorts of ways of funding charter schools. In New Jersey, the funding for each student enrolled in a charter is "passed through" the student's resident school district to the charter school; in other words, the local tax revenue and state aid for the district goes through the district to the charter.
In the NCES data, these payments are counted as expenditures for the district. But the charter school students aren't counted in the total number of students enrolled. This means the spending on a charter school student's education gets added when calculating the per pupil spending figure for a district, but the student themselves is not included.
The upshot is that per pupil spending is inflated. That's the problem with Ciattarelli's figures.
Again, I could almost forgive this: it's an obscure point and it would be easy for someone to make this mistake... IF they didn't bother to check their work against other sources. Ciattarelli clearly didn't. I want better from my next governor, don't you?
* Source: The School Finance Indicators Database.
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