By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Pumping more money into failing public schools is not the answer, according to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

The key to helping students stuck in those schools is increasing the number of educational options, Christie said. That could be accomplished in New Jersey through a limited but effective voucher program, he said.

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Christie, speaking this week at the American Federation for Children’s National Policy Summit, said he plans to push New Jersey’s Democrat-controlled legislature to approve a pilot voucher program that would offer private school tuition to low-income students stuck in failing districts.

He said he would also continue to press for the implementation of the rest of his education reform package, which includes merit pay for effective teachers, and an easier way for public schools to fire inadequate teachers, according to Bloomberg.com.

“Parents cannot wait for us to get it together anymore,” Christie told his audience. “In New Jersey, we’ve been trying to figure this out for 30 years. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars and we still haven’t gotten it.”

The governor went on to say that teachers unions and other “entrenched interests” cannot be trusted to improve broken public schools. The unions typically claim that increased funding is the answer, but that argument melts under the weight of several statistics provided by Christie.

New Jersey spends an average of more than $17,000 per pupil, more than any other state, yet 100,000 students attend schools that don’t meet basic standards, according to Christie.  Newark, the state’s largest city, spending $24,000 per pupil, but just 23 percent of current ninth-graders will earn a diploma in four years, he said.

“This year my budget proposes $8.8 billion in direct aid to K-12 education, the highest amount ever proposed by any governor in our state’s history, and yet I know much of that money will be wasted,” Christie said. “How much longer are we going to permit that to happen?”