Evan Scott is a lifelong New Jersey resident, a veteran, and a retired military service member. He holds a bachelor’s degree in education and was elected to his hometown’s Board of Education in 1988. Now living in Evesham Township, NJ, he continues to advocate for fair and transparent school funding.
New Jersey spends about $40 billion each year on public education for roughly 1.3 million children. That’s one of the highest per-pupil spending levels in the country. We have a constitutional guarantee of a “thorough and efficient” education, a sophisticated school funding formula, a powerful state department of education, and layer upon layer of regulations and oversight.
And yet: our statewide test scores are still below pre-pandemic levels. Achievement gaps by race, income, disability, and language remain enormous. In some grades and subjects, they’re widening.
If you built a machine to spend this much money and still fail to close gaps year after year, it would look exactly like New Jersey’s education system.
The System Optimizes for the Wrong Thing
On paper, New Jersey’s education system is supposed to deliver a thorough and efficient education for every child, with equity across race and income, leading to college and career readiness.
In practice, the system optimizes for compliance with regulations, political stability, and avoiding lawsuits and strikes.
The proof is everywhere. We produce beautiful policy documents, voluminous regulations, complex aid tables, and endless reports. But ask a simple question — “what exactly are we doing differently in classrooms to get more third graders reading on grade level?” — and the answers get vague fast.
We have built a machine to show we are doing something. We have not built a machine engineered to maximize student learning.
$40 Billion Is Not $40 Billion of Teaching
That enormous figure pays for instruction, sure. But also: support services, administration, operations and maintenance, transportation and food, debt, pensions, and legacy costs. Nationally, barely half of K-12 spending reaches the classroom as direct instruction. New Jersey is no exception.
The problem isn’t that buses or nurses are wasteful. The problem is this: we are spending tens of billions of dollars through a system that does not prioritize the highest-impact instructional uses of the next dollar.
New money goes first to contractual raises, benefit increases, new programs layered on old ones without evaluation, and rising facility costs. Almost none of this is evaluated through the brutal question a serious system would ask: “If we invest this next $100 million, what evidence says it will move reading and math outcomes for our most vulnerable students?”
We don’t ask that. We just roll the machine forward.
The State Knows Better—But Only in Science
The Department of Education has already shown us what a more serious approach looks like. On its own website, NJDOE concedes that less than 20 percent of classroom materials are aligned to standards in science, and has responded by building a Model Science Curriculum around vetted, high-quality resources.
In other words: the Department knows that standards alone are not enough. Teachers need specific, evidence-based materials, and many districts aren’t getting them on their own.
But why only science? Our most urgent gaps are in early reading and middle-grades math. If the Department can curate model units for science, it can create a K-3 literacy framework aligned with the science of reading and a model math sequence built around proven materials.
Instead, New Jersey treats curriculum as a hyper-local, 600-district procurement hobby — and then acts surprised when quality is all over the map and only half our students read or do math on grade level.
600 Districts, Zero Instructional Coherence
New Jersey has hundreds of school districts, each with its own superintendent, business administrator, HR department, and curriculum staff. Many are tiny. Above them sits NJDOE and county superintendents, responsible for standards, accountability, and oversight.
What does the state actually control? It sets standards, not curriculum. Districts must “align” to the New Jersey Student Learning Standards, but the state does not mandate or approve specific programs.
The result: strong standards and a huge compliance apparatus at the top. A fragmented, district-by-district free-for-all in curriculum and instruction at the bottom.
Contrast that with Mississippi and Louisiana, which have seen real gains in early reading. Their state agencies didn’t stop at standards. They rated and recommended specific curricula aligned to the science of reading. They tied professional development to those exact materials. They used state power to make instructional coherence non-negotiable in early grades.
New Jersey has allowed 600 different answers to “what does reading instruction look like in K-3?” and then acts surprised when results are uneven and gaps persist.
Our administrative machine is big enough to boss districts around on paperwork and testing windows. It is somehow too shy to insist on evidence-based literacy instruction for six-year-olds.
SFRA: A Formula Without a Steering Wheel
New Jersey’s School Funding Reform Act is, in theory, a rational way to calculate how much each district needs, with extra weights for poverty, language, and special education.
But SFRA answers “how much?” It says almost nothing about “for what?”
You can be billions closer to full funding and still have districts spending above adequacy with mediocre outcomes, districts below adequacy left on their own to figure out interventions, and no systematic connection between spending patterns and student outcomes.
SFRA is a clever formula for filling tanks. It is not a steering wheel.
A System That Protects Itself Better Than It Protects Children
Step back and the obscenity becomes stark:
We tolerate enormous fixed administrative overhead spread across hundreds of districts that could consolidate or share services. We accept a patchwork of curricula in early literacy even as other states prove you can do better. We pour in new money with minimal discipline about which interventions actually work. We allow graduation standards to be quietly lowered so statistics look smoother.
All of this is defended in the name of “local control,” “flexibility,” and “respecting stakeholders.”
Meanwhile, a third grader in Trenton is still far less likely to read on grade level than a third grader in a wealthy suburb — despite living in one of the highest-spending education systems on Earth.
New Jersey’s system is extremely good at sustaining itself. It is not nearly good enough at changing itself when children are not learning.
What a First-Principles Reset Would Look Like
If we were designing a $40 billion system for learning, rather than inheriting a $40 billion system of habits:
Clear, public goals. By 2030: 80% of third graders reading proficiently, with racial and income gaps below 10 percentage points. By 8th grade: 70% proficient in math, same gap constraint. By graduation: diplomas tied to real college and career readiness benchmarks.
Evidence-based spending rules. The next billion in state aid goes first to high-dosage tutoring for students below proficiency, smaller K-3 class sizes in high-poverty schools, literacy and math coaches tied to vetted curricula, and high-quality pre-K expansion. Not to automatic expansion of everything we already do.
State leadership on curriculum. NJDOE should review and rate K-8 ELA and math curricula and publish a short list of high-quality options. Professional development should be built around those choices. Districts can still choose — but from good choices.
Rationalized administration. Require consolidation and shared services where appropriate. Reinvest savings into classroom-facing roles: teachers, aides, interventionists, counselors.
Real accountability for results. Public dashboards showing, for each district: spending per pupil broken out by category, proficiency rates and gaps by subgroup, and whether things are improving. Tie flexibility and funding to demonstrated ability to turn dollars into learning.
The Courage We Actually Need
New Jersey doesn’t need one more glossy plan or press release celebrating “investments in education.” It needs the political courage to admit that our current system is not designed to do the thing we say we value most.
It will take courage to challenge the sacredness of local administrative fiefdoms. To tell high-spending districts that dollars above adequacy must be justified by outcomes. To insist that early literacy is not a matter of preference but of evidence. To rebuild NJDOE from compliance cop to instructional engine.
We are not a poor state. We are not a low-spending state. Our children’s struggles are not about scarcity. They are about design — the design of a system that has learned to protect adults, institutions, and routines more effectively than it has learned to teach children to read, write, and think.
