Every April, New Jerseyans head to the polls to vote on their local school budget. New research from my colleague Mark "Jay" Williams at the Common Sense Institute of New Jersey shows that those voters are given incomplete information before walking into the voting booth, and that per-pupil school costs are an average of $3,500 more than what is proclaimed to voters in the "User-Friendly Budget" advertised before Election Day.
When school boards present per-pupil costs to voters, they are following the letter of the law. However, New Jersey's varying per-pupil cost formulas
sometimes exclude factors that are not common to all districts, such as
transportation. Others have excluded state contributions made on
behalf of the district to the state pension program. Governor Christie
tried to rectify this earlier in the year with the release of the
Taxpayers' Guide to Education Spending, and it does a far better job
than prior measures, but even the Taxpayers' Guide does not account for
the total cost in all districts.
The problem is not limited to big cities either, as four of the ten largest differences were in regional school systems, led by a Princeton-area district that was underreporting by more than $10,300 per student.
Despite this underreporting, districts are confident in their ability to reduce costs in the same way you are confident in your ability to restrain yourself from overeating at Thanksgiving. Only 12 percent of districts experienced actual per-pupil cost reductions last year, but 82 percent of school districts project they will be able to reduce costs in 2011-2012. New Jersey taxpayers are likely being overpromised on future cost reductions. All this is the result of layers of legislation and regulations that were designed by rulemakers to be overly fair to school administrators attempting to compare their costs to the costs of other districts. The result is less honesty with the taxpayer, whose interests in transparency slid to the back of the line.
The data needed for an accurate per-pupil cost is contained within an independent audit that each district is required to have performed every year. Making those audits readily available to the public in a sortable form, and using that data to generate per-pupil costs would give taxpayers greater insights as to what their district is spending compared to similar ones. The work to produce this more accurate figure is already being done by every district in the state anyway.
Fixing the problem is simply a matter of reorienting New Jersey's policy to hold transparency to the taxpayer as the highest maxim.
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