The Lion's Den: Cerf Debates Opportunity Scholarship Act with Concerned Parents

“Let’s be fair. I was invited into the Lion’s Den tonight,” quipped New Jersey's Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf at Tuesday night’s "Opportunity Scholarship Act" meeting in Montclair. And it certainly seemed that way at times.

The public forum, hosted by Fourth Ward Councilor Dr. Renee Baskerville at the Charles H. Bullock School, was a chance for Cerf to present the positive points of the proposed Opportunity Scholarship Act and counter objections to some of the negative rumors about the bill, notably its reliance on vouchers. Problem was, some of the audience members weren’t buying it.

“We are adamantly opposed to this bill,” stated the President of a New Jersey NAACP chapter. “How are you justifying taking additional money from schools that already need the money? And how is it that you’re not in favor of fixing the whole system so that all children can have a high quality public school education?”

In fact, Cerf had already addressed these issues, and more, in his speech.  His criticism of the current public school system was unflinching and called for significant reforms to benefit all students.

“I am completely in favor of fixing the whole system. That’s why I have committed my life to this cause,” Cerf replied. “So let’s not get caught up in that.”

During his speech, Cerf evoked a bi-partisan education study from 1983 called A Nation at Risk. He said the study concluded, "'If a foreign power wished to declare war against the United States, it could think of no greater weapon than to create the urban school system that exists in the United States today’.”

Cerf’s ouspoken criticisms were not directed at Montclair but at the underperforming school districts in New Jersey. He described Montclair’s school system as “at the top of the National Assessment of academic progress.” He said 13 school districts qualified for inclusion in the program “by virtue of the extremely large percentage of children that are failing the basic definitions of proficiency. So that is who is eligible to receive one of these Opportunity Scholarships. Obviously not Montclair.”

This didn’t stop many residents from protesting the bill, which Cerf stated had already passed on the Assembly side and the Senate side but was still "a subject of continuing legislative discussion."  

Among the dissenters at the meeting was Senator Nia H. Gill who, along with Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver, shared the podium with Cerf throughout the evening. 

“I do not support vouchers that would siphon funds from our public schools,” Gill declared. “This isn’t robbing Peter to pay Paul. This is robbing Peter so Paul never gets paid.” She questioned a clause in the bill that awarded scholarships to low income children already attending private schools and warned repeatedly, “the devil is in the details.”

Cerf explained that the Opportunity Scholarship Act enabled impoverished children from failing districts to get a quality education at a private or parochial school and stressed that funding comes from corporate tax writeoffs, not taxpayer money. 

In response to criticism that school districts would lose per-pupil state funding, Cerf replied, “Let’s remember the math here, folks. The district loses the cost of the scholarship but also loses the expense of educating those children. And as a bonus (the school district) gets the difference between the scholarship and the amount of state aid it was already getting . . . There is an effort to be supportive of the sending districts and not giving them unmanageable transaction costs.”

He went on to say, “This bill is financially neutral. It’s very important to understand that. Because with 40,000 kids not being served within the system, you need to build fewer schools, you need to do fewer renovations, significant expenses are avoided (by virtue of this scholarship) which would have come out of state aid.”

Discussion of the bill inevitably turned to budget cuts, a subject all too familiar to budget-weary Montclair residents.   

"The budget will be released February 22," Cerf said. "And I know that I will make lots of headlines if I say more than that. But let me just say that the governor is absolutely aware of the level of sacrifice that he asked school districts, including Montclair, to make last year. He is deeply and personally aware of that. And nobody, nobody, wants to do anything but give the funds that will enable the schools to be successful.”

Despite the public outcry to the proposed Opportunity Scholarship Act, Cerf’s commitment to it remained unwavering.   

“We need to candidly accept that for many children, zip code is destiny,” he stated, calling children in districts like Montclair "pre-loaded for success."

"Everybody in this room: your kids are going to be just fine," he declared.  "But that is not true for many, many, many, many children in this country . . . While we express our concerns about technical aspects of this bill or that bill, while we squabble among ourselves about what’s best for the system, kids are dying out there. When I get done with this job, I don’t want to look back and say, ‘I wasn’t bold enough.’ Because there’s been too much chatter and too much disagreement and too much fighting, and while that’s happening, kids are getting destroyed. I just want to bring the conversation back to that.”