Who will win the war over the future of public education in New Jersey?

The James Madison Primary School in Edison is a bright and welcoming place.

Student artwork plasters the walls, and the hallways have street names such as Daisy-Mayzie Lane and Fox-Sox Block.

But principal Gina Foxx is dejected, as is her longtime colleague, resource teacher Susan Riolo.

“You’re looking at two very deflated, exhausted people,” Foxx says. “We’re usually more energetic. But it’s been rough in the last two months.” Foxx and Riolo, with 26 and 18 years’ experience respectively, are mourning the loss of programs and fellow teachers.

Like schools elsewhere in the state, Foxx’s K-12 school with about 545 students has been hit hard by Gov. Chris Christie’s $820 million cut to state aid for the 2010-11 school year. The Edison Public School District will lose almost $10 million in funding. This comes after the governor had cut $118,000 from Edison and about $400 million overall from schools in 2009-10.

At James Madison, the cut will mean the loss of at least nine teachers and six support staffers and the trimming of the full-day kindergarten program to half-days.

Foxx and Riolo say the kindergarten cuts will have particular impact on young students learning English as a second language and those who haven't attended preschool. "Now we're going
backward," Foxx says. "This is huge, and it will take us years to adjust."

While some public education advocates say the governor’s approach to school finance and reform makes it appear he doesn’t care about the fate of the state’s public schools, there are plenty of others who say the governor’s course is a refreshing challenge to the status quo, and one that finds common ground with President Obama’s own education reform agenda — especially in the Race to the Top grant competition.

They applaud Christie’s school choice initiatives such as vouchers for low-income students to attend private schools and the expansion of charter schools. They also support his push for significant changes in tenure and seniority rules as well as merit pay, which would tie teacher evaluations to student outcomes.

There is little dispute that Christie has an enormous fiscal mess on his hands with a ballooning budget shortfall of around $11 billion. Given that education spending represents the biggest piece of the overall budget, it was no surprise the governor cut state aid for K-12 schools.

However, many educators and parents believe he could have pared more from other parts of the budget in order to “share” the sacrifices, as he often has admonished New Jerseyans to do.

They also criticize his decision not to extend a tax on the state’s wealthiest residents, which could have brought in about $600 million.

Most of the heat has been generated between Christie and the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. Christie often has chastised the union’s leadership for its intractability, charging that it cares more about teachers’ salaries and benefits than about students.

The NJEA, in turn, has called Christie a bully and insists his reforms will weaken public education. At the core, however, this is a philosophical debate — a clash of ideologies, with millions of federal dollars as stake, not to mention the future of public education in New Jersey.

Should the state continue its robust financial and political support for public education and keep private enterprise from overtaking this crucial public service? Or should it work to remove districts from the constrictive grasp of unions and enable families, regardless of income or ZIP code, to choose where they want to send their children to school?

Which ideology will prevail is far from clear. Only one thing is certain: Emotions are running high.

“See how much crying we’ve been doing?” says Foxx, holding up an empty box of tissues.

S addle River is a pre-K-5 district with one school, Wandell Elementary School, and it’s among the wealthiest districts in the state. But even here, parents worry about the governor’s cuts. Though the Wandell Education Foundation has raised more than $1 million for the school since 1990, parents are concerned about the future of the district.

“We’re fortunate we have the foundation and the home and school association,” says Nancy Bush, president of the foundation, who has two sons attending Wandell. “We can support the school now. But who knows what will happen next year?” The fight over the future of public schools in New Jersey comes at a time when the state’s fourth- and eighth-graders performed better in math and reading than nearly all of their peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Despite the state’s success in the exam, a widely respected testing program of the U.S. Department of Education, Christie and his reform-minded education commissioner, Bret Schundler, have focused their attention on those schools they say are failing children.

In fact, Schundler’s spokesman, Alan Guenther, famously called the NAEP results irrelevant, saying in an e-mail message to Star-Ledger columnist Bob Braun, “We should not take solace in the fact that we score well in a wretched system that fails to adequately teach such a high percentage of children.”

Christie and Schundler declined interview requests for this story.

In May, the governor called the Newark public-school system disgraceful and an embarrassment to the state during a speech in Washington at the policy summit of the American Federation for Children, a national school-choice advocacy organization that supports vouchers.

“Parents and children who are being failed by a public-school system, whose costs are exorbitant and whose results are insulting, deserve a choice.”

Later in his remarks, the governor acknowledged that the Opportunity Scholarship Act, a voucher bill sponsored by Sens. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) and Thomas Kean Jr. (R-Union), which he strongly supports, would not be the final answer for all of the state’s problems with inner-city schools.

Nevertheless, “it is the first step in the solution to that problem,” he said, “which will lead to school vouchers across the state of New Jersey so the choice is available to every parent everywhere.”

The Lesniak-Kean voucher bill, which calls for a five-year pilot program, was working its way through the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee at press time. It would provide tax credits to corporations that give scholarships to up to 20,000 students from low-income families to attend private or parochial schools.

It is the most controversial of the three reforms central to Christie’s education agenda. The other two are expanding the state’s charter-school sector and promoting an interdistrict choice program that would allow students to move among participating public-school districts. A bill that would make permanent a current pilot inter-district program was passed by both houses in late June.

At press time, the governor had not yet signed it.

Susan Curry, an organizer with the Jersey City chapter of Parents and Communities United for Education, worries about what will happen if the governor implements these reforms.

The fear, she says, is that because charter and voucher schools can be selective in their admission criteria, traditional public schools would be populated with the most challenging students — those with disabilities, behavioral problems or learning disorders.

“With this voucher program, our public schools will be a dumping ground for those children the private and religious schools don’t want,” says Curry, whose son attends a Jersey City public high school. “Then you are labeling them: ‘Oh, those are the students who can’t achieve.’ Can you imagine?”

Critics of the voucher bill also argue it will drain $360 million within five years from public coffers — in the form of tax credits — and redirect the money to private schools. In doing so, they say, public dollars would go to schools unaccountable to voters and the state.

But supporters of school choice counter that vouchers ultimately will save money because they set the per-student cost for elementary school at $6,000 and high school at $9,000. The state laid an average of $15,000 per pupil in 2008-09, according to the latest figures from the state Department of Education.

The back-and-forth over voucher programs and charter schools foreshadows the much larger national debate about whether these initiatives actually improve student outcomes.

Patrick Wolf, an expert in school choice and a professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, says that the results of rigorous studies on voucher programs are neutral to positive.

Wolf is principal investigator of the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas. He also is leading the evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and overseeing a national research team evaluating the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, one of the largest and oldest in the country.

In a recent report on the D.C. program, Wolf found students who used federally funded vouchers to attend private schools were more likely to graduate from high school than those who did not participate. Graduation rates for students using vouchers increased 21 percent. It’s an important outcome, Wolf says, because graduation, more than academic success, is associated with improved lifetime earnings, avoiding prison, fewer out-of wedlock births and marital stability.

However, the academic gains for students using vouchers in D.C. were less clear, with some subgroups improving on reading, and others not improving. Overall, the gains on test scores for students in the program were not statistically significant in either reading or math, according to the report.

There has been no evidence, Wolf says, that such programs reduce academic achievement. “It’s just that the magnitude of benefits are pretty small,” he says. “But we’re all on the positive side of the ledger.”

Diane Ravitch, an historian and research professor of education at New York University, once supported school choice and testing-based accountability. But she reverses course in her latest book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.”

Ravitch, a former high-level education official under President George H.W. Bush, said in a recent interview that the focus on test scores under the federal No Child Left Behind Act has narrowed the curriculum, removing many of the subjects that excite children most about school. She also cites a national study by Margaret Raymond, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, that found just 17 percent of charter schools outperformed traditional public schools, while 46 percent produced similar results and 37 percent performed worse.

“So the odds are, that if you create charter schools, 83 percent will be no different or worse,” she says. “That is not good odds.” Ravitch says deep social problems such as poverty, joblessness and homelessness, which plague districts such as Newark, Jersey City, Paterson and Camden, are the same as in inner cities across the country.

“I don’t think the answer is privatizing education,” she says. “It may be that they need to intensify the educational opportunities for these kids. But government also has to have solutions for the poverty of families. Schools can’t alone solve these problems.”

Howard Fuller, director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University in Milwaukee, underscores the nuances of creating effective voucher and charter school programs.

The school-choice advocate cautions that while charter and voucher schools can educate children more cheaply than traditional public schools, they can’t do it for, as Christie suggests, half the price.

“Money may not be everything, but money matters,” says Fuller, a professor of education and former superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools. He maintains that quality must be the driving force behind vouchers and charter schools and that reformers shouldn’t think parental choice, and the competition it encourages, will force bad schools to close. “There is an assumption that parent choice alone will drive quality. I can tell you that ain’t true,” he says. “I can’t envision a lasting reform that doesn’t include parent choice. But I do not think that parent choice by itself will define quality.”

Fuller says successful schools tend to be mission-driven and focus on student achievement. Choice advocates, such as Derrell Bradford, executive director of E3, a Newark-based nonprofit that supports parental choice, say they are not against public schools, nor do they want to see the public school system weaken or even shut down.

“Pursuing choice is not to the exclusion of traditional public school reform. They have to happen in concert,” Bradford says. Though parental choice is E3’s signature policy, Bradford says the organization supports all efforts to reform education, whether it be collective bargaining or school design. “Lots of other people will tell you why you shouldn’t do something,” he says. “We’re saying do it all.”

But, just as others who recognize that turning around chronically underperforming schools takes a great deal of time and work, he sees parental choice as a crucial element. “Choice gives you an immediacy that public-school reform doesn’t,” he says. “School reform is about getting a great teacher in front of a student who is ready to learn. Choice makes that immediacy real.”

Segun Eubanks, director of teacher quality for the National Education Association, the NJEA’S umbrella organization, says teacher quality is key to successful reform, especially in low-performing environments.

The 2001 reauthorization of No Child Left Behind reflected this, he says. So, too, does the more recent push to tie student outcomes on standardized tests to teacher effectiveness. This focus on student and teacher performance is reflected in the state’s second-round Race to the Top application, which seeks $400 million in federal aid. The state’s first grant request was unsuccessful.

This time, the application seeks changes to tenure rules and how seniority is used in personnel decisions. Teachers would be retained based on their effectiveness and receive merit pay for success in the classroom. Teacher evaluations would be tied to student outcomes, and would be used in making tenure decisions.

NJEA spokesman Steve Wollmer says reforms he’d like to see include a statewide effort to identify the most successful schools and then replicate their best practices at underperforming districts.

The association supports research-backed reforms, he says, such as professional development for educators, smaller classes, after-school programs and parental involvement. In fact, there may be more common ground than it appears between the governor and the union, even on thorny reforms such as teacher tenure.

Wollmer explains tenure as the process by which teachers can be fired. It actually requires termination of ineffective teachers, he says. But it also ensures due process. And while the NJEA is open to making tenure more efficient and cost-effective, it will not give in on the standard of fairness, he says.

Christie’s budget cuts will invariably lead to larger classes, thousands of layoffs and the loss of programs and extracurricular activities this year. And that, says Wollmer, is exactly what the governor wants.

It’s his blueprint for change.

“You can’t get people to abandon public schools unless they think they should,” he says. “So you need to grind down the quality of schools, cut programs, increase class sizes and make private schools attractive, so people take vouchers.

“It’s a master plan,” Wollmer says. “His supporters are those who support privatizing public institutions. His supporters think that’s good policy. And he wants to take us off the map politically.”

Consensus may appear elusive, but one theme emerges in the debate: Everyone says it’s about finding the best way to help kids get a quality education. Union representatives often repeat their refrain that “what’s good for teachers is good for students.” Mona Noyes, coordinator of the character education initiative for the Cherry Hill Public Schools, says public schools are important specifically because they are open to all students, promoting diversity and mutual respect.

They are “the democratizing institution of this society,” says Noyes, whose children attended district schools. But Bradford, of E3, says such arguments fail to address the realities in urban New Jersey.

“There is nothing democratizing about a terrible school that lets everyone in,” he says. “People are selling the golden glow of public education, not the reality in our cities.” School-choice advocates see vouchers as an equalizing force, giving poor students the same opportunities as wealthy students. Bradford says his organization is “pro-kid first. Put kids at the top and let providers fall where they may.”

If there are any answers here, Wolf, of the University of Arkansas, says reformers should look for tactics that produce better results for children even “if the progress those interventions create falls short of our hopes and dreams.”

Of all the lessons he’s learned in 12 years of evaluating choice programs, the most significant is that improving educational outcomes is not an easy endeavor.

“It is a hard slog. It’s challenging just to get reform-oriented policies passed and implemented,” he says. “It is extremely difficult to move the test scores of large numbers of disadvantaged kids. We’ve repeatedly been disappointed that we haven’t found a solution to that wicked problem.”