New Jersey

New Jersey's education system has become one of most progressive in the United States through a protracted constitutional dispute over the state's role and responsibility to educate its citizens. Article 8 of New Jersey's constitution guarantees that “The Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five and eighteen years.” The meaning of the ‘thorough and efficient’ clause and its implications for state school funding has been debated in New Jersey's supreme court for the past 40 years. In a series of decisions favoring the plaintiffs in those cases, New Jersey's court-mandated reforms of the state's education funding policies have placed ...