Ciattarelli’s plan for New Jersey schools: Vouchers for the rich. Layoffs for everyone else.

You may not have heard this, but Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor in New Jersey, wants to radically reshape the public school system in a state that consistently ranks as one of the nation’s best.

His two core proposals, like them or not, are dramatic.

First, he wants to take a wrecking ball to the state’s funding formula, which is tilted heavily in favor of low-income districts. Ciattarelli would instead give schools a fixed amount of aid for each child, rich or poor, with minor tweaks for those for whom English is a second language.

The math, in the end, is straightforward: His plan would shift billions of dollars from poor cities to wealthier suburbs. We’ll get to the potential impact of that.

The second pillar of his plan is another game changer. He says his voucher plan is modeled on Florida’s, where families of private school students get an $8,000 voucher for each child they enroll. Religious schools would be eligible, as would homeschools. They could teach whatever they want, with no state curriculum and no state tests. And even billionaires would be eligible to cash in.

“School choice means school choice for everyone,” Ciattarelli spokesperson Chris Russell recently told NJ Spotlight News. “Money follows the student.”

Let’s first take a deeper dive into his funding plan. Shifting state aid from cities to suburbs has long been a central ambition of Republicans in Trenton, who see the undeniable waste in urban districts, and the crushing burden of property taxes in the suburbs, and say that shifting big bucks is the answer to both problems. Ciattarelli’s plan is in that tradition.

Shifting state aid from cities to suburbs has long been a central ambition of Republicans in Trenton.

“The current formula is nefarious,” he said in Jersey City in August. “It’s arbitrary. It’s unfair … It’s high time we challenge ourselves in this state to come up with a flatter, more equitable distribution.”

But the plan could cripple schools in cities, even those that are achieving impressive results. The Education Law Center, a nonprofit that has successfully sued the state several times over school funding, grinded the numbers and found that Ciattarelli’s plan would reduce aid to Newark by about 30%, forcing the layoff of 900 teachers, 200 support staff, and 100 aides.

“There’s just no way that you’re not having an absolutely astonishing impact on class size and programs and supports,” Danielle Farrie, the ELC’s research director, told Spotlight.

Ciattarelli is a big fan of high-achieving charter schools, but his plan risks knee-capping them, as well, since their state aid is based on a share of the district’s aid, by law. That would be tragic, especially in a city like Newark, where charter schools educate more than one in three students, and often miraculously beat state averages on test scores, despite much higher rates of poverty.

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As for the voucher plan, let’s start with the costs. New Jersey has about 200,000 kids enrolled in private schools, all of them eligible for Ciattarelli’s voucher. That would cost $1.6 billion, and the number would rise with each family that decides to make the switch to private school, or to teach their kids at home. Ciattarelli won’t say how he’d cover that cost.

And just what would these state-funded private schools be teaching? Under this plan, the state would play no role in that. And students would not have to take state tests to measure their progress, as district and charter schools must today. If a private school taught that evolution was anti-Christian bunk, so be it; they would still be eligible.

That’s not a theoretical problem. Andrew Schlafly, of Far Hills, told Spotlight he is eager to use the vouchers to resume his homeschooling operation, and has promoted the long-discredited theory that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together. Like in The Flintstones. Should New Jersey taxpayers fund that?

If this all leaves you spooked, let me offer some reassurance. The state Supreme Court would almost surely strike down a funding plan like Ciattarelli’s, which defies decades of its rulings. And if the Democratic Legislature approves a voucher plan like this one, I vow to light what’s left of my hair on fire.

Still, the plans are revealing. Ciattarelli is no moderate, at least on education. He’s a flamethrower. And if he gets his way, he could do real damage.

Tom Moran is a columnist for Advance Media and a former editorial page editor at the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.