NEWARK

— It’s a newly popular idea: New Jersey’s public schools fail. An idea promoted by politicians on the national prowl, privatizers who’ll sell anything for a profit, and clueless celebrities who live thousands of miles away and believe Tony Soprano really lives here.

And it’s preposterous.

New Jersey has some of the best public schools in the nation. Ask admissions directors of the most selective colleges — the Ivies and Stanford and MIT and liberal arts colleges like Amherst and Haverford. Check out results from national tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress — New Jersey ranks in the top five.

Some of the best schools — because it has some of the richest communities in the nation.

The state also has some of the worst public schools — because it also has some of the poorest and most racially segregated communities in America.

Wealth and achievement are inextricably linked. Give the College Board, the agency that produces the SAT Reasoning Test, your family income numbers and your race and educational level of your parents and it will predict your scores and almost always be right.

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"There is far more to this than programs and buildings, obvious things you can buy with money," says Joseph DePierro, dean of the Seton Hall College of Education. "There are all the issues related to living in poverty."

That doesn’t mean poor children can’t learn. They can and do. What it means is educating poor kids is expensive. Anyone who believes poverty doesn’t affect learning hasn’t read Dickens.

The best analysis of education now isn’t strictly about schools, it’s evidence compiled by Princeton’s Larry Bartels about the dangerously widening income gap between rich and poor, the worst since the Depression. It distorts our institutions — and our attitudes. But that — to steal a phrase — is an inconvenient truth. Something many, especially in the midst of a grinding, relentless recession, don’t want to hear. Something tax-cutting politicians don’t want to face.

Like fighting a war, battling failure in the schools is costly — but we don’t mind going after the Taliban, no matter the cost.

So, because we don’t like spending money on schools, we’ll change the subject. Bash teachers, envy their secure jobs and pensions because, in the nonunion private sector, secure jobs with good pensions disappeared without a fight. Teachers went to jail to win those rights.

We’ll pretend — as we saw on Oprah Winfrey — that millionaires giving some of their stock away will make up for the lack of public commitment. Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge of stock doesn’t even make up for the state aid cuts imposed this year — and will never match the $400 million lost to a "clerical error." Self-congratulatory cheerleading is cheap.

"This is a very dangerous moment for public education," says Paul Tractenberg, the Rutgers law professor who knows the link between money and schooling. "Instead of facing up to our responsibilities to support the schools, we are tearing them apart. We are destroying the very values that created the public school system.’’

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Public schooling is a value as well as an institution. Fostering a democratic, egalitarian America. Reject that value and you change the country in unknowable, maybe dangerous, ways.

We have lost patience. And confidence. We fear the future — and faith in public schools is faith in the future. We ricochet from policy to policy, never waiting to see what works. Impose a set of standards, a set of tests, a set of curriculum guides, then change it all in a few years.

"Every decade or so, a new crisis and we change things around,’’ says DePierro.

More than 20 years ago, our leaders decided the state should take over failing school districts. With no Plan B if it didn’t work — and no formal system established to evaluate whether it did and, if it didn’t, why it didn’t. Different governors and different commissioners expected different things of the schools — and then they were gone.

"We have made progress," says Richard DeLisi, dean of the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. "But it all takes time and patience and consistency. We don’t seem to want to give reform the sustained commitment it requires."

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