Application blunder cost New Jersey school funding

A state worker's misreading of a question on a funding application was blamed yesterday for New Jersey's loss of $400 million in federal education money, setting off a political scuffle that ensnared the White House and the statehouse.

In a single paragraph of a 1,299-page application, New Jersey answered a basic question about its budget with information from fiscal year 2011, as opposed to fiscal 2008 and 2009. As a result, the answer was given just 0.2 points out of a possible five.

If the state had scored just three more points on that answer - and a previous application with the correct answer indicated it could have - New Jersey would have become one of 10 states to win a piece of $4.35 billion.

Instead, New Jersey came in 11th, with 10th-place Ohio receiving $400 million. (New York will receive $696.6 million.)

At a news conference yesterday on an unrelated matter, Gov. Chris Christie spent nearly a half-hour taking responsibility for the "clerical error" while forcefully deflecting the criticism and ridiculing the Obama administration.

This is the kind of bureaucratic decision, the governor said, that "drives people crazy about government, and crazy about Washington."

He also blamed the state's largest teachers' union, the New Jersey Education Association, saying that if it had accepted changes, the application would have been stronger and the mistake would have been irrelevant.

NJEA president Barbara Keshishian said the governor weakened New Jersey's score with his "misguided decision to hijack the grant application process for his own political purposes."

The Philadelphia Inquirer