New Jersey wants Lakewood, one of the state’s biggest and fastest-growing towns, to relinquish control of its eight flailing public schools. All decisions — who gets hired, what to serve in the cafeterias, which textbooks to purchase — would be up to state officials rather than local elected leaders.
Longstanding “educational and operational failures,” the state argued in January, demand an intervention. Lakewood’s nine-member school board has a response to that: Stay away. And it may have good reason to object.
Studies show a mixed record of student progress in Jersey City, Newark and Paterson, cities where the state was in charge for a quarter-century or more. In Camden — under state management for more than a decade — major fiscal troubles persist, 47% of students are chronically absent and standardized test scores are far below average.
“What the state said it was going to do in these other cities’ schools never materialized,” Domingo Morel, an associate professor of political science and public service at New York University, told NJ Spotlight News. “And so, is there any expectation that things will be different here?”
Different demographics
The Lakewood school board has a March 5 deadline to make a legal argument to stay independent. Should acting Education Commissioner Lily Laux nonetheless decide intervention is needed, the matter will go to the state Board of Education for more consideration.
In the past 37 years, New Jersey has swooped in on four districts — all struggling fiscally and academically, all urban, all majority Black or Hispanic. In some ways, Lakewood is similar. Its public school students are 90% non-white, with high poverty and disability rates and a vast need for English-language instruction.
Unlike in those cities, though, Lakewood’s school profile doesn’t reflect broader demographics. The township population is 11% Hispanic and 2% Black. White residents, who make up 85%, are almost entirely Orthodox Jewish, drawn to study at Beth Medrash Gohova, one of the world’s largest yeshivas.
That Orthodox community, whose faith-based culture encourages very large families, has helped make Lakewood the state’s fourth-largest municipality by population. And Lakewood taxpayers — on a scale that exists nowhere else in New Jersey — pick up the cost of busing 50,000 township students who attend private religious schools, and also cover special-education tuition for thousands of Orthodox children with special needs.
In the public schools, only 40% are proficient in English/language arts and 25% in math, test scores show. Violence has surged in the middle school. To cut costs, the district may sell one school and reorganize two others.
‘Shake things up’
New Jersey was the first U.S. state to take over local school operations, after 1987 legislation enabled the step if students are denied a state constitution-guaranteed “thorough and efficient” education.
In each of four districts seized, the state promised a turnaround. Communities, meanwhile, begged the state to leave their schools alone, saying it was their duty to make hometown decisions. Instead, in three cities, the oversight lasted for decades: Jersey City, the first takeover district, resumed local control after 33 years in 2022; Paterson, after 30 years in 2021; and Newark, after 25 years in 2020.
As for Camden, the state remains in charge. Last year, facing a $91 million budget deficit, the district planned to fire 18% of its staff.
“The experience with state takeover doesn’t give me or anybody who’s studied it a warm and cozy feeling,” said Paul Tractenberg, one of the attorneys representing Lakewood students in litigation over what they say is inadequate state funding. “The state will shake things up, but we haven’t seen things turn around in fairly short order, or a return of a well-functioning school district to the local authorities.”
Nationally, states have seized school operations in more than 100 locales, including Detroit, Philadelphia and Chicago. A broad 2023 study by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.,-based nonpartisan research group, found that takeovers “on average do not improve student academic performance in math or reading,” though they appeared to have boosted budgeting and long-term financial health.
In New Jersey, researchers found “no evidence that the state takeover improved standardized test scores in Camden City schools,” according to a 2021 study by NJ Policy Perspective, a Trenton-based nonpartisan research and advocacy group. “These results are particularly concerning because state takeovers disenfranchise district residents.”
When the state left Paterson five years ago, a state school board member noted that less than a third of students were proficient in standardized language arts tests. In Newark, about 30% of students now attend charter schools.
Jersey City did make a noteworthy improvement: Its 2022 graduation rate was 80%, double the 1989 figure. At the same time, the city’s 11 charter schools outperform the public schools, where math and language proficiency lag behind the state average and almost one in 4 students is chronically absent.
“If the purpose of state takeovers is to disrupt the local governance and disenfranchise the local communities, then they have been very effective,” said Morel, the NYU professor and author of “Takeover: Race, Education and American Democracy,” a book based on his national research.
New Jersey state education officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Years of oversight
No Lakewood schools have been designated “in need of improvement” by the New Jersey officials in eight years, according to a school board statement after the state order was filed in January. That reflected “sustained progress and compliance with state accountability benchmarks,” the trustees said.
Still, state monitors since 2014 have overseen budgeting, due largely to annual gaps in the $300 million annual spending plan.
The Lakewood school board acknowledges its ongoing financial troubles, though it argues that the cause is too little fiscal assistance from the state, not local mismanagement. Lakewood gets about $27.5 million annually from the state, for 9% of its budget. The state also has kicked in $280 million in loans.
State aid is tied to the number of local students, and Lakewood public school enrollment is 4,357 — unusually low for a town of 142,000 people. That’s because the vast majority of students — about 50,000 in all — attend classes elsewhere, in private Orthodox schools called yeshivas.
By state law, districts that bus their public school students, as Lakewood does, must do the same for private school enrollees. They also must pay special-education tuition. More than half of the Lakewood district’s budget covers the costs for nonpublic students, creating an “abnormal and unsustainable imbalance,” according to a judge’s ruling in Alcantara v. New Jersey, a long-running lawsuit.
The plaintiffs in that suit allege the state’s school funding formula fails to provide Lakewood students with the constitutionally mandated “thorough and efficient education.” The most recent ruling found that the state’s school aid formula wasn’t to blame for the district’s financial turmoil.
“The state has decided now is the time to go nuclear in its effort to ensure students get a thorough and efficient education in Lakewood, even though we’ve made the state well aware of the issues here for more than 15 years,” said Tractenberg, the attorney for the students in the Alcantara case.
Across New Jersey, funding gaps have roiled school budgets, prompting calls for changes to how the state calculates aid. Tractenberg said local school leaders around the state will look to Lakewood to see whether the state plugs those funding gaps.
“It’s not only Lakewood and not only a handful of others, but the school funding formula is not working as intended for hundreds of school districts,” Tractenberg said. “That’s the core of the state’s dilemma.”
This story was originally published by NJ Spotlight News through the NJ News Commons.
