A mixed bag of results has arrived from New Jersey's charter schools, with a few showing strong gains but many falling behind local district schools. Only 17 percent of eighth graders in Garden State charters, for example, passed state math tests, compared to 74 percent of students across the state. In many cases, school operators blame outside management companies that did a great job finding facilities but little to put demanding and test-aligned curricula in place. New Jersey is a poster child for how a bad charter law can strangle innovation in its crib: The 52 charters in that state labor under serious constraints, with little freedom from state licensure and collective bargaining requirements, no funding for facilities, and only 90 percent of per-student funding that district schools receive. On last year's Fordham evaluation, Charter School Authorizing: Are States Making the Grade? (http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=67), the state's charter policy environment received an anemic C-. So, while performance is not what it ought to be, one could also say that in New Jersey, charter schools have not yet been fully tried.
"Charter schools come up short," by Ken Thorbourne, New Jersey Journal, March 6, 2004,