While the New Jersey Legislature takes its summer recess, advocates of a pilot program that would give corporations tax breaks for funding private-school scholarships continue pressing their cause.

Proponents say that the bill before the House (A. 257) will give disadvantaged youngsters access to better schools and relieve the tuition burden on families who send children to private schools, including day schools and yeshivot.

Opponents say the act will divert tax dollars from the public schools and violate church and state separation tenets.

Both sides are drawing lessons from the experience of other states with similar programs – and reaching opposite conclusions.

The bills allow for scholarship funds to be allocated to secular and parochial schools in six communities. Four of them are inner cities with troubled public schools – Newark, Camden, Orange, and Paterson.

Two others, Elizabeth and Lakewood, have sizeable Orthodox Jewish populations that would also benefit from such financial aid.

Howie Beigelman, a New York attorney who represents the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations in America, said passage of the bill would be "historic. We would certainly be supportive of anything that happens in New Jersey."

To Beigelman, such tax breaks have already proven successful in other states.

"Minnesota has had similar deductions and Illinois has credit for education expenses. The Pittsburgh Jewish community has done really well. They raised over $1 million this past year from corporations for a scholarship fund. In the Scottsdale, Ariz., Jewish community, more than 60 percent of the children in day schools are receiving scholarships."

But Paul Tractenberg, director of the Education Law Center at Rutgers University's Newark campus, said such aid inflicts grievous wounds on the nation's public schools.

"We are talking about a substantial number of dollars that would leave the treasury.

If you have scarce public dollars, is using them to support private choice the best use of those scarce public resources? Or do you have a prior obligation to make sure the public schools, which educate the bulk of kids, are educating them well?" he asked.

"Under any conceivable scenario in the future, the majority of kids are going to be attending public schools," said Tractenberg, "so I guess our question is not, 'Is it good for the Jews?' but 'Is it good for the public schools?'"

In Florida, where such corporate tax credits have been on the books since 2002, Kathy Yuz, associate director of the day school department at the Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education in Miami, said the program has benefited some 4,300 students who attend 20 Jewish day schools in Miami and throughout Dade County. Tuitions there range from $5,340 to $16,755.

"Anytime schools can get money to help the poor children – and our schools are loaded with them, especially with a rise in tuition and a rise in the number of people losing jobs and losing homes – anything they can get to keep a student in the school is good," said Yuz. "The economy here is really bad. It works well for the corporations, and the schools get this extra income, so they can afford to put in students who couldn't otherwise go."

Since 1999, the state of Arizona has provided tax credits for individual families. Earlier this year, it passed a corporate tax credit law. Both measures have survived court challenges.

Linda Zell, administrator of the Jewish Community Day School Scholarship Fund in Phoenix, said the two programs have produced different results.

She called the individual credits "wonderful. We would not have had the six Jewish day schools in the greater Phoenix area that we do have. We raised just under $2 million last year from individuals."

But, Zell said, the corporate program was more problematic.

"We've tried getting corporate money, and it's very hard. Because this is the first year they receive tax credits, the corporations are not into that mode yet," she said.

Brian Mono, manager of allocations for the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, has been coordinating its Foundation for Jewish Day Schools for the past four years.

He said the corporate tax write-offs are "a terrific additional way for us to support the day schools in our area, particularly for the low- and middle-income families who struggle to attend them. We have distributed almost $2.5 million in the last five years to 1,300 students at our six local day schools," he said. "But it had gotten more competitive to get scholarship money from the corporations."

Larry Frankel, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the program in his state was fraught with problems in overseeing the effectiveness of the scholarships and how they are implemented.

"Those who are benefiting have lobbied the legislature to make it impossible to collect information that would be useful in determining whether it's working, such as how many students are benefiting," he said. "On top of that, there is a church-state issue – but we don't even know how much aid is going to private versus parochial schools."

In Trenton, legislative watchdog Jon Shure, president of New Jersey Policy Perspective, is skeptical that the corporate tax credits will ever become law.

"The legislature is in recess for the summer and since it's an election year, they may not do much until after it's over.

Shure opposes the concept of corporate tax breaks for funding private education.

"I think it's a bad idea," he said. "We should be supporting public schools with public dollars and raising what money is necessary for them to operate. If businesses want to help, they should, but I don't think they should get tax breaks for doing so.