Word: jersey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Approaching it on the New Jersey Turnpike just after dusk, a driver stares across sulfurous marshes, the burn-off fires of oil refineries flickering like purgatory. Then all at once, in the distance, he sees the city, a kind of Oz, its lighted crystal buildings like piled diamonds. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that looking at Manhattan from afar was always to behold it "in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world...
...entire "Greater New York area," embracing also suburbs and exurbs in New Jersey and Connecticut, numbers some 20 million...
...lawsuit that finally precipitated the closing of the schools was filed in Jersey City in 1970 on behalf of Kenneth Robinson, 7. Like many other states, New Jersey has financed its schools largely by local property taxes. Young Robinson's lawyer argued that this system resulted in wide variations of expenditures and thus violated the constitution's "thorough and efficient" clause. In 1973 the state supreme court agreed with Robinson and charged the legislature to find other ways of financing the schools...
...were fully funded. Trouble was, when the state budget came out, the act was not funded at all. The court finally imposed a July 1 deadline, and the legislature tinkered for months with ways of raising the money, including trying to pass what had long been anathema to New Jersey conservatives-a state income tax. Even so, the assembly and the senate were not able to hit upon a tax formula that could pass both houses...
...deadline drew near, the state's School Boards Association went to federal court to block the closing, charging that it violated students' constitutional rights. All eleven of the federal judges in New Jersey met to hear the arguments but decided, 9 to 2, not to enter the case. The schools, therefore, were closed, leaving State Education Commissioner Fred Burke with a thousand problems on his hands-including canceled classes for the handicapped and for migrants' children. Among Burke's concerns were the attitudes of high school students. Said he: "The way decisions are being made will...