Guadagno supports 'school choice' movement

Kim Guadagno, the state's current lieutenant governor and now a Republican candidate for governor herself, made it known Thursday morning that she’s fully onboard with the controversial “school choice” movement that has led to the expansion of charter schools in New Jersey and is backed by President Donald Trump.

"The children of the state of New Jersey, in at least the failing districts, are owed a constitutional right to charter schools" and vouchers, she said at an event in Ewing called the School Choice and Education Funding Summit. “The incontrovertible numbers prove that we should do it, and we should do it now.”

Guadagno’s views on this issue mesh with those of her boss, Gov. Chris Christie. During his tenure, the number of charter schools in the state has nearly doubled — from 50 to 89 — and the governor has pledged to ramp up financial and legislative support for charter schools during his last year in office.

But in an interview after her scheduled remarks, Guadagno distanced herself from a plan Christie has been touting for months that would radically alter the state’s existing formula for funding public schools by giving districts a flat sum of $6,599 per student, no matter where the student lives or the area's income level.

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Most lawmakers agree that the current school funding formula should be fixed, but Christie’s so-called fairness formula is vehemently opposed by Democrats and the state’s largest public teachers union. Both say it would cripple poorer districts.

“Do I think this governor or any governor would ever walk away from a child in an underserved district? No,” Guadagno said Thursday. “What I like about the governor’s program is it got the conversation started.”

Both Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, and Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, D-Secaucus, have launched hearings to collect testimony that would help shape legislation to fix the existing system. Both have said they want to use as a basis for reforms the School Funding Reform Act of 2008, which is in effect and uses a weighted formula to steer money to school districts based on their number of high-need students.

Christie, on the other hand, filed a lawsuit in September challenging the legal underpinnings of the current system. He asked the New Jersey Supreme Court to reopen the landmark Abbott v. Burke case that in multiple rulings has steered the bulk of school funding in the past three decades to 31 of the state’s poorest districts.

Christie has said the rulings drove up suburban property taxes but that the districts that received the extra aid are still mostly failing. He also has asked the court to allow state education officials to waive teacher contract rules that he claims have been the real impediment to progress in the districts.

Coincidentally, Christie visited students at one of the so-called Abbott districts on Thursday to hear “about all the great things that you’re accomplishing and achieving here.” 

About a half-dozen public school advocates outside 9th Grade Academy in Trenton protested his appearance because his fairness formula would strip the district of what they said is essential funding.

“This governor has been an opponent of public education. This governor has been an opponent of democratic – lower-case d – education,” said Jerell Blakely, a member of the Healthy Schools Now Coalition. “He can’t pat us on the back and pick our pockets.” 

Three gubernatorial candidates — Democrats Phil Murphy and John Wisniewski and Republican Jack Ciattarelli — have signaled that they would not continue Christie’s lawsuit if elected in November and given the choice, but Guadagno remained noncommittal on Thursday.

“You will have to wait for my plan,” she said, referring to a tax relief plan she said her campaign would release in the coming months.

At the national level, Trump has made it clear that he's an ardent supporter of the school choice movement, meaning he supports funding and programs to help students go to the school of their choice, whether it's a regular public, private, magnet or charter school. He has appointed Betsy DeVos, one of the country’s most vocal and active supporters of school choice, to lead the Education Department. 

He has even referred to school choice as "the new civil rights issue of our time," which outraged critics who say the movement has worsened segregation and taken needed dollars away from regular public schools.

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged he would reroute $20 billion in federal education dollars to offer block grants to states so they can provide money for students to pay for public, private or religious schools. His plan, he said, would help 11 million students living in poverty go to schools of their choosing and escape "failing government schools," although he has not said where the money would come from.

“Given the $20 billion that President Trump has said he will contribute to a — he uses the word 'voucher'; in New Jersey we use the word 'opportunity scholarship,' we’re going to have to take a look at that,” Guadagno said Thursday. “You can’t walk away from that in an education system people claim is underfunded.”

In support of her arguments about charter schools on Thursday, Guadagno cited a 2012 study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University that concluded that students in New Jersey’s charter schools gain an average of two additional months of learning per year in reading over their traditional public school counterparts. In math, they gain an average of three additional months of learning per year, the study says.

Those results, however, are skewed by the success of the charter school program in Newark, the report says. Students at charter schools in New Jersey’s other major cities learn on average the same or less than their traditional public school counterparts.

Students of color and poor students also tend to perform better in charter schools, according to the study, although students at charter schools in rural areas learn less than those at traditional public schools.

“It is hard for me to comprehend as a parent how anyone can argue that charter schools, done the right way, are [not] the way to go,” Guadagno said.

State House Bureau reporter Dustin Racioppi contributed to this article. Email: pugliese@northjersey.com