Gov. Christie: Destiny Should Not Be Determined By Zip Code

June 22, 2011: Governor Christie holds his 20th town hall of 2011 in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.

Christie: "...What’s going on in a lot of other places in our state where the children and their families are being cheated. Now when you spend more than $30,000 per pupil per year in Asbury Park and less than 50% of the kids in high school can do math at an eighth-grade level, something’s wrong. When you’re in the city of Newark and you’re spending $24,000 per pupil per year, and of the kids who enter the ninth grade this past year only 23% of them will graduate in four years with a high school degree and of those 23% who graduate over 90% if they go on to some type of higher education need an additional year of remedial work at the college before they can qualify to sit in a college classroom. Something’s wrong. Something’s very wrong. It’s costing us an enormous amount of money in the short term but worse yet what it’s costing us is the economic vitality of this state. Those children have to become the trained workforce of this state for tomorrow and we are failing them and we’ve been failing them for a long time based upon what I feel is a failed legal theory that the more you spend, the better the quality of the education will be. If that were the case, places like Newark, and Asbury Park, and Jersey City, and Camden, and Trenton, would be the finest school districts in New Jersey but in fact they’re the worst. Part of the discussion we have to engage in when we get beyond tomorrow with folks like you who are in good school districts is to say how do we change this system so that destiny is not determined by zip code"