Judge tells state to hand over secretive school-funding study Saturday, October 07, 2006 • BY DUNSTAN McNICHOL • Star-Ledger Staff State education officials, who have kept under wraps estimates of what it should cost to educate New Jersey's 1.3 million schoolchildren while they work on a state aid formula, were chastised in court yesterday. In a hearing punctuated by sharp criticism of the Department of Education's handling of a consultant's report on school costs, Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg ordered the state to let attorneys from the Education Law Center in Newark review the consultant's conclusions. She questioned Michael Walters, the assistant attorney general representing the state in the hearing, on the Law Center's request to see the report. "How does somebody like the plaintiff participate effectively in the process without having this information?" Feinberg said. "If they don't have the information available to effectively advocate, they are at a tremendous disadvantage." While the Law Center can review the report, Feinberg's order prohibits it from making the information public, and Department of Education officials declined to release it publicly. But David Sciarra, the center's executive director, said the judge's ruling should serve notice that the state must be more open in developing the formula that will determine how homeowners and state taxpayers split the $20 billion tab for education. "This has to be about a vigorous, open debate on what it costs to educate our kids," Sciarra said. "It would be unsound to develop a formula as it has been done in the old way -- in the back room, in secret and based on what politicians are willing to spend." Feinberg noted that one chart withheld by the state shows a district-by-district comparison of what each of the state's 616 school systems currently spends and what the consultant concluded an adequate education should cost. The consultant, John Augenblick of Denver, calculated how much a basic education should cost and then determined how much more each district would need to address the needs of poor students, students who are not native English speakers and students with other special needs. Richard Rosenberg, a former assistant state education commissioner who worked with Augenblick when he did the analysis, has said in recent interviews it indicated the total state and local cost of public schools should be about $1 billion more than the $20 billion currently spent. The state currently provides $7 billion of that amount. Lawmakers say they are close to wrapping up work on the new formula for distributing state aid, but have not attempted to determine how much more their new proposals would cost. "It's very, very premature to say we have a potential draft," said Sen. John Adler (D-Camden), co-chair of the committee devising a new funding formula. Lawmakers and officials of the Corzine administration are still determining how much extra funding should be allocated to offset poverty or social disadvantages and to what extent local incomes or property values would be used to offset state aid, Adler said. Assemblyman Herb Conaway (D-Burlington), co-chair of the school funding committee, said it would be confusing to start generating cost estimates before a final formula has been developed. "Having different sets of numbers out there is likely to cause more problems than it solves," he said. "It's much better in terms of public support that we work from one set of numbers at the end of the process." Dunstan McNichol covers state government issues. He may be reached at dmcnichol@starledger.com or (609) 989-0341. © 2006 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with permission.