The Implications of the Real Cost of Living in New Jersey

In New Jersey, minimum wage is $7.15 an hour. Working full time, that amounts to just over $14,000 a year. According to The Real Cost of Living 2008, in order for a single adult with no children to live self-sufficiently in New Jersey, they need to make roughly double that salary.

So, what, exactly, does that mean for education?

Ultimately, it's about the resources available to the family - it means that as long as people are living off of minimum wage, they will not be provided with the same educational opportunities as those who are better off than they. A single parent with two children who makes $14,000 a year simply cannot afford to make certain resources readily available to his or her children. When it comes down to whether to put food on the table or buy school supplies, which do you think a parent will choose? More than that, a community living below the federal poverty line cannot come up with the taxes necessary for proper resources or sufficient funding for public education. As teachers, we need to sift through the data given us, and make meaning of it in order to apply it to our teaching.

As someone who wants to teach in New Jersey, I recognize that this is a very serious problem because when a community must rely on federal funding for public education, suddenly politics become a part of our school. In order to keep that money coming we must make sure to keep the politicians happy. This means the curriculum has to reflect what the government wants us to teach, not what the students need to learn. Surely, we can all understand how dangerous this can be - for example, in an age when one in every four teenage girls in the US has a sexually transmitted infection, we cannot afford to teach our students abstinence-only sex education; still, in many cases, the schools are forced to choose between teaching only what they are told to, or not at all.

Also, this is where the implementation of standardized testing comes in. How can the government ensure that we're doing what they want us to do? By testing the students, of course. As we all know, however, that comes with an even greater price because now the focus of schools has shifted from the acquisition of knowledge and independent thought to the regurgitation of a bare minimum of information and a loss of creativity.


As a future English teacher, I cannot help but to resent this system of standardized testing. Learning to read well and write intelligently is vital to every student's development, regardless of their future plans. Unfortunately, the aim of English education has been reduced to passing a test, or reading, interpreting text, and writing the way the people who develop and score the tests think it should be done. This really frustrates me because there is never only one correct way to read a passage or write a sentence. What these standardized tests have done is to ensure that the students' individual expression and creative development is stifled, and in the end it all comes back to the same thing : money, resources, budgets, and funding.