Interesting article on how the districts have been selected.

http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/11/0208/2355/

I am still waiting to find out how many of the current students in the Lakewood Yeshivas who will get vouchers -er, scholarships- were poor minority students who were fleeing the failing schools. As well as how many poor minority students the Lakewood yeshivas will now accept on "Opportunity Scholarship."

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Dan, that's exactly how it felt in the room! I was just happy to get a few bits of information in between all of the bashing that occurred.

here is some coverage of the forum -

Horns Lock at Jersey City Voucher Forum

http://www.politickernj.com/44516/hor ... jersey-city-voucher-forum

Yeah, but organized religions do each of those things way better.

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"Organised organizations are violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

"Organised countries are violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

"Organised governments are violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

"Organised humans are violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

This is such a wide group of negatives as to encompass any organization of any humans of almost any size, and is therefore, as usual per Hitchens, typical specious bullshit.

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Kitten is right also. If you scroll up the post to the links that DanL posted, you will find some great information as well. Thanks Dan once again for sharing those.

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I agree with you 100%. I just don't like being a hypocrite. I always state how much I hate when politicians do it and I do not want to do it myself. Mayor Booker from Newark was there and summed it up best. He said something like, we can all still love each other and disagree on things but we have to do it in a respectful manner. I don't know if he said it from the bottom of his heart or just to calm down the people hating on him for supporting the bill but I do agree that we need to respect one another more and stop the bashing and name calling.

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From my understanding it is for "low-income" children, which I realized after reading the article Dan posted again.

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Ok well I will give you the interpretation I got from the information that I have heard and information I have researched. Most of this information is directly from other sources (e.g., the speakers at the forum) and I will post links below with their information. The "certain students" would be children from low-income families who are currently attending public schools that are categorized by the state as "chronically failing." Now, I have not heard an exact percentage as to the number of schools in JC that are labeled as such but that would be something that we can get from either the State or the JC Board of Education. "Low-income" is categorized as a family earning no more than 2.5 times below the current poverty level. Therefore, it is based on family size and income. The gentleman from E3 (I forget his name) kept on giving the example that a family of 4 cannot make more than $55,000 annually to qualify for the program. He then stated that from research he found that not many families in JC would have a problem meeting the guidelines. This is a five year pilot program being proposed. The first year, 4,000 students will be able to get vouchers and then 40,000 students in the second year. That is the best explanation that I can give you about the category of "certain students."

The way that the vouchers will work is that corporations will donate money in the form of "scholarships" for the students to attend private or parochial schools. The state will then give these corporations a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. Then, to offset the costs, the state will reduce the public school budget by the amount of money received for the vouchers. The gentleman from E3 stated that every student who is given a scholarship will be allowed to pick a school of their choice. What I found interesting was that he stated the school that the child goes to must give a 2 year commitment to the child. I wanted to ask for further information about this during the Q&A session. Sadly, people took the Q&A session to comment on their concerns or support for the bill and I was never able to ask an actual question. I will be e-mailing the gentleman soon to ask more information about this. My concern is that the school will just dump the child after the two years if their test scores are not good, since there is no regulation stating that the school cannot do that.

Another issue that came up was a concern about a lottery style system. The gentleman from E3 stated that if there were more applications than spots available the school would do a lottery to pick students. One lady commented that the school WILL NOT pick anyone with skin like her (she is African-American). As a Latino, I was saddened by these types of comments because it continues the "US vs. Them" arguments that continue to separate the minorities and majorities in this country.

Other information that I have found states that there will be priority given to children who are already in private or parochial school. Meaning that the children who are supposed to be helped my the bill will not because the parents who are already in those schools will just get help to pay for the school they are already in. I cannot confirm this to be true but I am just spreading information on the topic.

Hopefully, this is able to provide some insight for everyone. Check out these links for more information:

Copy of the Bill

Q&A Section of E3 Site

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I got out of work late but I really wanted to attend.

Based on the news reports it did seem that there was a lot of anger at the program by several of the meeting participants.

However, to the extent we are talking about reckless and vitriolic rhetoric, I do not think the proponents of this bill and other "reformy" measures can claim any moral high ground. Chris Christie has, for the past year, engaged in disgraceful bashing of teachers and teachers unions, and smeared anyone who doesn't support his agenda.

I've looked at Derrell Bradford's website and read his articles. He seems to be unable to go a few paragraphs without throwing in "NJEA dominated" or "NJEA run." And looking at his supporters, it's pretty clear that this is an ideologically driven agenda that has little basis in the actual facts on the ground. Voucher programs have not been particularly successful, yet their proponents keep repeating the same mantras in the absence of data.

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JayRes,

Since you attended yesterday, can you offer a better definition of what "certain students" means to the children of Jersey City? Who exactly is eligible to take advantage of these vouchers?

Thanks for your insights.

JM

Did anyone here attend the forum last night held by Senator Cunnigham in Greenville? I did and I have to say it was very informational. The sad part was that there was still inflammatory rhetoric used against the proposed voucher program and the representative from E3 discussing it. I for one am opposed to the bill but would have appreciated our leaders who represent our voice and used the rhetoric to just stick to the facts and let the people decide. The more that we bash, the more reckless we seem to the masses, leading to these thoughts that minorities have no respect or do not deserve the same rights as everyone else. Anyone else who attended have any thoughts?

FYI.. From what the Senator and other leaders stated, it looks like the bill will most likely pass when it is voted on this Thursday.

Here is a piece by Rabbi Josh Pruzansky in support of the legislation. Pruzansky has long been an advocate of direct funding non-public schools and has worked with Christie on his "reform" efforts.

http://www.thelakewoodscoop.com/news/ ... e-need-are-solutions.html

He makes no bones about it. The purpose of this legislation for him is to save the financially failing yeshivas and Jewish day schools. As with Catholic schools I have respect for these institutions (although, even though I'm Jewish, I can't say I knew these kids as well as I knew my Catholic school counterparts). But again, I cannot support legislation which is designed with a purpose of funding religious based education at the expense of education aid to public school districts.

In this case, I wonder how many students would take advantage of the scholarship and go to one of these academies that was not seeking a clearly religious education.

I think this should be opposed if for no other reason than simply because we don't want our government to be allowed to create such a convoluted money laundering scheme designed to circumvent the court determined meaning of the Constitution. Were there an open debate on whether we should continue to interpret the Establishment Clause as we have, perhaps the voucher might be determined to be acceptable. But this nasty little scheme should be slapped down for proprieties sake. Were this nonsense proposed to funnel morally cleansed cash to some jungle insurgents in Latin America we would have no doubt what to say. We should have no doubt now.

I oppose the program, but I do have to say that I have a great deal of admiration for Catholic schools. I was a public school kid most of my life with the exception of 3 years in private (non religious) school that I really did not like. But I knew Catholic schoolers and got along well with them. I fondly remember the friendly rivalries in sports, debate, etc.

I've also always respected the Jesuit focus on serious academic study.

I do think that the cities are at something of a loss with the decline of the urban Catholic school. St. Peter's Prep has nothing to worry about but some of the lesser known ones have lost much if not all funding from their affiliated churches and are struggling because they need to keep tuition affordable for their student population.

But still, I can't support a stealth voucher program because 1) I don't think we should be defunding the public schools, and 2) I can't support public monies going to religious education. Yes, I know that a supreme court with, shall we say, certain ideological proclivities has taken a less restrictive view of the establishment clause. But I do believe in the Jeffersonian view of a strong wall between church and state even though I have a great deal of respect for organized religions.

"Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."
? Christopher Hitchens

Catholic schools are private enterprises and they should be able to fund themselves. There is no reason to funnel taxpayer money to these private institutions. The voucher movement is a money grab, pure and simple. The education quality of Catholic schools is debatable, as they get to select who is admitted to their schools and they can more easily remove students who cannot maintain standards.

I'd be more willing to accept this idea if public schools could select students to be removed from their own system and force them on the local parochials. I'll bet St. Peter's Prep wouldn't do so hot if they had a few dozen Snyder and Lincoln rejects roaming their halls. Or do you really think that Catholic schools have discovered some magical teaching formula that would turn these kids into Nobel winners?

Yeah, I know public school systems here can be a joke and the teacher's union is a disgrace and the funding system is an abomination, but this can only make things worse.

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The John Birch society could not have put it better.

The US has always been terrified of Catholic Schools turning out little papists. Attempts to destroy Catholic education run back to the 1800s. Nothing new!

Opposition to vouchers is raw anti Catholicism blended with teacher?s unions self interest and poverty pimps self propogation together with those who are stake holders in the high performing districts, e.g. Ridgewood, Rumson, who do not want their magic school threatened. Together the anti voucher forces seek to prevent the most stabilizing private institutions from benefiting the most at risk populations or, outside of the City, of providing an alternative to the cultural hegemony of the public school/ secularist system. .

Thomas E. Buckley | SEPTEMBER 27, 2004
I n recent years a better understanding of American history has gradually moved the U.S. Supreme Court away from a strict separationist perspective on church and state and toward a greater accommodation of religion. In Agostini v. Felton (1997) and Mitchell v. Helms (2000), the majority of justices expanded possibilities for government aid to church-related schools. Then in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the court approved the Cleveland voucher program, which allows poor students to use public money to pay for private and parochial school tuition. Voucher cases in other states, most notably Florida, have been less successful, because state courts have determined that such programs violated state constitutional prohibitions that are stricter than the First Amendment?s establishment clause. But the 19th-century history of such state provisions, commonly known as Blaine amendments, is instructive. As its recent rulings demonstrate, the Supreme Court has been reading that history.

In 1870, James Gillespie Blaine was 40 years old and a rising star in the Republican Party. After he served in the Maine Legislature, that state elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he soon occupied the speaker?s chair. His political trajectory and that of his party had risen together. Down Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House sat his friend, Ulysses S. Grant, whom he hoped to succeed in office. In addition to the presidency, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and were now completing a Southern reconstruction policy designed to gather the newly emancipated and enfranchised African-Americans into the political fold of Abraham Lincoln.
The advancement of public schools represented a key element in that program as well as an important part of the Republican drive for cultural homogeneity in post-Civil War America. The schools would lift up Southern blacks and Americanize newly arrived immigrants, especially Irish and German Catholics. Following the program laid out by Horace Mann in the 1840?s, public education would inculcate a nondenominational Protestant morality through Bible reading, hymn singing and the use of the McGuffey readers. The result would be a law-abiding, hard-working, broadly based middle-class society that embodied the values of capitalism embedded in Republican ideology.
The Catholic Church, most notably in the person of Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, resisted this vision of an essentially Protestant culture. Though a religious minority in that city, Catholics formed the largest single denomination, with 23 parishes. By 1870 Purcell?s Catholic school system enrolled 12,000 students in Cincinnati, in comparison with 19,000 attending public schools. The archbishop wanted his schools to share in the public school fund. The New York Legislature had recently passed a bill introduced by William Marcy Tweed, the Democratic boss of New York?s Tammany Hall, to provide public funds to private schools in the city and county of New York enrolling at least 200 students. Agitation existed for similar measures in places where Catholics were numerous. The New York law was soon repealed, and Purcell failed to get a share in the funds. But, confronted by the pervasively Protestant character of the public schools?the chief irritant to Catholics?a majority of the Cincinnati school board determined that Bible reading and other religious exercises should be discontinued. After a series of court battles, the Ohio Supreme Court ultimately upheld this decision.
Protestants committed to fostering a religiously based morality in the schools were outraged by the court?s action. In their view, Catholic immigrants who disagreed with this public policy should go home. By Protestant definition, Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign ruler in Rome, where the First Vatican Council had just upped the ante by proclaiming papal infallibility. Adherence to authoritarian, antidemocratic Romanism rendered Catholic claims of American loyalty dubious at best. Fallout from Cincinnati?s Bible war merged with the school-funding issue in New York and spread across the nation.

Perhaps the most extreme anti-Catholic reaction was the proposal in 1870 of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution proposed by Judge Elisha Hurlbut of New York, an expert in constitutional law. It would empower Congress to ban ?any foreign hierarchical power...founded on principles or dogmas antagonistic to republican institutions.? Some read in Hurlbut?s proposal the opening salvo of an anti-Catholic, nationalistic campaign akin to Otto von Bismarck?s Kulturkampf, which was gathering steam in Germany. Moreover, the campaign to identify the United States as a Christian Protestant nation, which had begun during the Civil War, now revived with the efforts of Supreme Court Justice William Strong and the National Reform Association to amend the U.S. Constitution?s preamble to read: ?Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and...the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government,? we the People, etc.
Although such proposals proved too extreme to rally widespread support in Congress, they showed the way to politicians anxious to distract voters from the financial mismanagement and gross scandals of the Grant administration. A Protestant minority, including such notable clergymen as Henry Ward Beecher, was willing to eliminate overtly Protestant religious exercises from the schools. But Beecher and his friends drew the line at public funding for Catholic schools. Where worried Protestants read signs of moral crisis and Catholic threat in the school fights, others saw political opportunity. School funding rather than school prayer became the defining issue. Constitutional amendment became the method. And political gain provided an important motivation.
A vigorous dose of anti-Catholicism always enlivened an otherwise dull speech. As the future President Rutherford B. Hayes informed Blaine in June 1875, the ?school question? had rendered the state Republican convention ?enthusiastic.? The party had ?been losing strength in Ohio for several years by emigration of Republican farmers,? he explained. ?In their place have come Catholic foreigners.... We shall crowd them on the school and other state issues.? Running on a blatantly anti-Catholic platform, Hayes narrowly captured the Ohio governorship that fall, despite the economic depression and the scandals enveloping the national Republican Party.
Grant seized the moment. In a speech in December 1875, the president proposed that Congress approve a constitutional amendment formally separating church and state, provide for the taxation of church property and forbid the states from allocating public funds to any schools that taught ?sectarian tenets.? Sectarian meant Catholic. A week later Blaine offered his amendment on the floor of the House. It included the most popular of the Grant proposals. After extending the language of the First Amendment to the states, it provided that ?no money raised by taxation in any state for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund thereof, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.?
As the University of Chicago law professor Philip Hamburger has demonstrated in his superb study, Separation of Church and State (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), Blaine?s proposal directly challenged Catholic efforts for school funding while leaving nondenominational Protestantism securely entrenched in public education. It was designed to secure the nomination for Blaine. Hayes?s victory in Ohio had made him an instant ?reform? Republican candidate. Blaine?s friends were concerned. Apart from the school issue, Hayes had failed to excite the voters. One Republican politician urged that Blaine needed only to make ?a good speech on the School question? to ?cinch the nomination.? But Blaine?s Catholic cousin, Ellen Ewing Sherman was not so sure. She and her husband, the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, wanted him in the White House, but Ellen Sherman warned that his proposals for ?the State Constitutions and school laws? would hurt him ?among our Irish friends and Catholics.?
Blaine lost anyway. Though he entered the Republican convention in June as the front-runner, allegations that he had accepted bribes from the Union Pacific Railroad fatally damaged his chances for the nomination; and the delegates eventually chose the squeaky clean Hayes, everyone?s second choice. They also recognized Hayes?s single successful issue in his Ohio campaign by incorporating Blaine?s amendment into their national platform. That August it almost passed Congress, winning 180 to 7 in the House of Representatives but failing to gain the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate.
Iowa and Illinois, however, had already placed variants of the Blaine Amendment in their state constitutions, and Congress quickly mandated that all states admitted to the Union after 1876 must follow suit. Washington State, for example, incorporated the following proviso in its 1889 constitution: ?All schools maintained or supported wholly or in part by the public funds shall be forever free from sectarian control or influence.?
Earlier this year in Locke v. Davey, a 7-to-2 Supreme Court majority decided that the state of Washington could deny a scholarship to a student seeking a ?devotional theology degree.? But the justices avoided directly ruling on the Blaine Amendment statement in Washington?s constitution. Instead they pointed out approvingly that the guidelines for the scholarship program permitted students to attend ?pervasively religious? institutions and take courses in ?devotional theology.?
Thirty-seven states have clauses modeled after the Blaine Amendment, and cases challenging such provisions are coming up in Michigan, South Dakota and elsewhere. A 19th-century concern has become a burning issue in 21st-century church-state jurisprudence. The question the U.S. Supreme Court will face is whether such provisions placed in state constitutions a century or more ago violate the religious liberty provided by the First Amendment.
As for Blaine, he finally received the long-desired Republican presidential nomination in 1884. His defeat in that year?s election has been attributed largely to a Republican charge, which he never made or endorsed, that the Democratic Party was one of ?Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.? That attack galvanized the Democrats. Blaine later said he could never have condemned ?that ancient faith in which my mother lived and died.? The son of a Catholic mother and Presbyterian father, he was raised as a Presbyterian. Among his cousins was a Jesuit priest, Thomas Sherman, son of the general. Given his relatives, Blaine may have hoped and expected, as some scholars assert, that the amendment he sponsored would not pass. Perhaps his anti-Catholicism had been ?just politics? after all. Shortly after he lost the 1876 Republican nomination, Maine put Blaine in the Senate. The next month, when that body defeated his amendment by a two-vote margin, Senator Blaine was absent.
Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., is professor of American religious history at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, Calif.

Claiming vouchers are unconstitutional is a bit of a canard. Government funded and backed financial aid has been used on the college level in parochial / private colleges and universities since the GI bill.

Having the experience of both going to private and public school as a teen, I can attest that getting out of the public school system can really change someone's life. My SAT scores went up so much after one year that I was warned that I might be investigated for cheating.

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Thank you for sharing this very insightful piece Dan!

@JP Hurst thanks for the information.. It's interesting/ironic how our government functions and how they try to separate church and state but still find ways to fund parochial schools. I am also a parent who is more concerned with finding ways to improve our current public school system instead of just running away from the problem and trying to find a "magic elixir" or cover up the true problems affecting the children and schools.

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Yes the BOE has to foot the bill for transporting all of the children out of district. That is a hefty burden on the budget for the school district and the taxpayers contributing to the budget.

This bill is basically a way for struggling private schools, mostly parochial schools, to get students with government subsidized tuition to enter the schools.

Vouchers have always been constitutionally problematic because of direct aid going to religious schools. This bill is an end-around the establishment clause. Instead of the government directly funding religious schools through vouchers, the state offers the opportunity for corporations to donate for "scholarships" and get a dollar for dollar tax credit from the state (I'm not sure if they also will be able to take a deduction on the federal level as well, but that would be a nifty piece of alchemy by the state to also hurt federal revenues). To make this "revenue neutral," for each dollar of corporate tax credits, a dollar is deducted from state school aid.

The schools receiving these vouchers (excuse me, scholarships) must take all students in the relevant geographic area. Successful private schools, of course, don't need to take all comers because they have more applicants than spots.

So what schools can benefit from this? For the most part it will be parochial schools, which are struggling with declining enrollment and need a pool of applicants with their vouchers - scholarships - in hand to keep them afloat.

As someone who is hoping to send my kid to public school and to be involved so that the public school serves her and the other students, I think we need this reduction of state aid for a stealth voucher program like we need a hole in the head.

Tax credits offset a reduction in state aid to districts which keeps the program revenue neutral. Over the length of the pilot, the 13 districts in it will receive almost $340 million dollars for students they no longer have to educate. Participation by all out of district and private schools is voluntary, as are contributions from the companies and participation by parents. No one has to take a scholarship if they don't want one.

There are over 7,000 students in Jersey City enrolled in chronically failing schools identified by the bill.


Derrell

more from JCI's partner, NJ Spotlight -

Opinion: Deception, Fiscal Irresponsibility, School Vouchers
The school voucher program can't deliver on its promises, but it can help subsidize private schools across the state -

http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/11/0123/1957/

Two Decades in the Making, School Voucher Bill Clears Big Hurdle Senate committee vote not just about voucher merits, but also recipients -

http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/11/0120/2256/

@Kitten, as a parent I too understand your concerns and recognize the need for every parent to be comfortable with their child's schooling. however, I believe there are sound and safe public district school options in many (not all) neighborhoods.

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Also, is the sending district going to have to pay for transportation ? And what if a suburban district won't take a minority child because their schools are full ? A discrimination lawsuit ?

This bill is a major pandering effort to the urban minority communities as well as the charter school supporters/industry.

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I'm not sure if I agree with you. A voucher at least puts the power in the hand of the parents and affords them more options other than just "winning" the lottery. As someone who's kid just "lost" in 3 different lotteries, I don't think charter schools should be the only option. Considering I am now looking at a hefty tuition bill or mercy from the BOE to keep my kid out of a failing school, I like the idea of a voucher for private or out of district schools. Remember, not everyone gets into the good charters, simply because of the luck of the draw... and when you lose, it more than sucks.

What if that targeted out of district public school is full?