May 21, 1996

Analysis: Whitman Treads Carefully Into Battle Over School Financing

By JENNIFER PRESTON

RENTON, N.J. -- The spending gap between New Jersey's poorest and wealthiest school districts has bedeviled every governor from Brendan T. Byrne, who enacted the state's income tax in 1976, to Jim Florio, whose $1.1 billion tax increase to help close the gap in 1990 led to his defeat.

Unlike Florio, who tackled the thorny issue soon after taking office by imposing new taxes and shifting state aid from wealthier districts to poorer ones, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman has moved more cautiously.

With a September court deadline now looming, the Whitman administration presented its proposal Friday. It promised to increase state spending by $235 million to allow the 595 local school districts to meet newly adopted statewide curriculum standards for New Jersey's one million schoolchildren.

The plan, Whitman asserted, would require no new state-mandated taxes or property tax increases. She did not say how the state would find $235 million in the 1997-98 budget.

"It is a pretty good plan politically," said Stephen A. Salmore, a Republican political consultant and political science professor at Rutgers University. "It raises spending in the amounts that can be handled by the state and it does not savage the middle class and upper middle class, which many people thought would have to bear the burden."

The more difficult question is whether the proposal will meet the requirements of the New Jersey Supreme Court. The Whitman administration hopes that the court will accept its plan.

But the Education Law Center, which brought the initial lawsuit that led to the court battle, said that the administration's $136 million commitment to the poorer districts would not equalize spending between the rich and the poor districts. And the center is already in court trying to get the state to increase school spending for September.

Assemblyman John A. Rocco, a Republican from Camden County who is chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, said he believed that the Supreme Court would be reluctant to push the state toward a sizable tax increase to address the disparity with more dollars.

"The $235 million is a real effort to resolve the issue," Rocco said. "I think that it would be totally wrong for the courts to ask the public to put out significantly more than $235 million. The taxpayers are at a breaking point."

What is different about Whitman's proposal from past efforts and what makes it politically palatable in tax-weary New Jersey is that she is the first to try to shift the debate away from how much money should be spent to what students should be learning.

By setting standards to define the state's constitutional duty to provide a "thorough and efficient" education, the Whitman administration is betting that the court will consider the standards, and not dollars alone, to determine whether all of the state's children are receiving an equal education.

"I know a lot of people assumed that this was just a fancy way to avoid spending money, to find a way to spend less money on education," Whitman said in a meeting in her office with reporters Saturday, the day after her top aides presented the plan. "As you can see, the opposite is in fact true. This is an honest look at what it will take to deliver education in the state of New Jersey."

To comply with the new standards, the Whitman administration estimates that it will cost $8,285 per student, $143 less than the current statewide average. Although many of the more affluent suburban school districts spend well above the statewide average, local districts would have to go to local taxpayers to win approval to pay for spending above the proposed ceiling.

With that move, Whitman has not only drawn up a plan aimed at satisfying the court's requirements, she has also put forth an agenda that would make it difficult for those communities that go along with higher school spending to blame her for higher property taxes.

"I am worried about the instability it will bring to districts because of that budget vote," said Lynne Strickland, spokesman for the Garden State Coalition of Schools, an organization that represents 110 of the more affluent school districts. "It is a sink-or-swim proposition."

The next step is to win approval by the Republican-controlled Legislature. It was noted by some political analysts that not only was Whitman absent from Friday's presentation of the school financing plan, so were the state's legislative leaders, who are critical to turning the proposal into law.

"She could do a better job, laying the groundwork, working with the Legislature," said Salmore, the Republican strategist. "The Legislature was simply not involved in this, and there is a natural coalition in favor of this program."

But lawmakers are predicting that it will win passage after lots of noisy debate. Much of the discussion will be framed by how each legislator's school districts fared. With almost 75 percent of the state's school districts spared deep state spending cuts, the Whitman administration has made passage fairly easy by giving lawmakers few reasons to go against the proposal.

"Their effort to hold harmless lots of districts suggests that it may diminish the fight in the Legislature somewhat, but it will make it more obvious that the constitutional argument is not a strong one," said Paul L. Tractenberg, a Rutgers University law professor who has led the campaign for spending parity among the wealthiest and poorest districts. "If they had said, 'Spending above the average was excessive and wasteful', that would have been stronger than saying, 'Spending above this level is optional.' "

Democrats say that the program leaves too many questions unanswered, such as who will assume costly teacher pension costs. And John A. Lynch, a Democrat who is the Senate's minority leader, said the plan "raises false expectations by claiming that the new school funding program would not force increases in local property taxes."

If Whitman actually ends the 25-year court battle without imposing a major broad-based tax increase, she would further weaken the Democrats' attempts to unseat her next year.

But if the court rejects the proposal, Salmore does not think that it will hurt her too badly with voters.

"I think that she is playing a very strong hand," he said. "She did something that has some logic and sense to it when explained to the public. The only way that you are going to attack it is by saying the state should be spending more money or the state should be forcing middle-class suburban districts to spend less. And I don't think that voters will buy either one of them."