Other than the Orwellingly named aid-hoarding mechanism known as "Hold Harmless Aid," the most unfair aspect of New Jersey's School Funding Reform Act is the State Aid Growth Limits, aka "Enrollment Caps."
Due to these limits on how much money a district can gain, the most aid a district can gain is a 10% or 20% of what it got the year previous, no matter how severely underaided it is.
(Technical Note: due to the cuts of 2010 and how low-aid districts then lost large percentages of their state aid, there are districts who would gain more than 20% from what they get now, however, that is technically due to the mechanism of Adjustment Aid, which overrides the State Aid Growth Limits for districts getting less state aid now than they did when SFRA was passed. Since this is a benign effect of Adjustment Aid, and Adjustment Aid is usually odious aid-hoarding, I prefer not to get into the weeds about it.)
Due to the existence of the Aid Caps and the fact that the Caps are percentage based, the more aid a district already receives, the more aid a district gains in dollars-per-student, which is the real measure of budgetary-tax impact.
(I got Capped Aid and Uncapped Aid amounts via an OPRA request to the DOE. I've made the data publicly available here)
For instance, the following underaided districts all would be gaining the same amount in percentage terms if SFRA were operating:
But in the all-important dollars-per-student, the amounts the districts are getting are completely different and skewed.
What is unfair about this is that Chesterfield, Bound Brook, Manchester Regional Freehold Boro are New Jersey's most underaided districts against Uncapped Aid (Uncapped Aid = real SFRA full funding). In percentage terms, Chesterfield does worse than any other district. For 2017-18, Chesterfield will only get 9.5% of its Uncapped Aid, with Bound Brook (-$10,592), Manchester Regional (-$7,562 pp) and, Freehold Boro (-$8,484 pp) among the worst in dollars per student.
Newark, Paterson, Trenton, and Elizabeth are indeed badly underaided, but not by nearly as much. Newark's aid deficit is only $3,059 pp, Paterson's is $3,252, Trenton's is $3,003, and Elizabeth's is $3,198.
As a consequence of the percentage-based mechanism of the Aid Caps, new aid under SFRA goes disproportionately to large, moderately underaided districts.
Fortunately, reforming the State Aid Growth Limits (aka Enrollment Caps) is part of Steve Sweeney's state aid proposal. Unfortunately, no one in the media and few among other politicians understands what the State Aid Growth Limits even are.
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