Quote: "My fear is that vouchers and other private school choice programs will siphon both dollars and motivated students from the public schools, especially those in urban areas, leaving them with a double whammy — a harder-core population of educationally disadvantaged and educationally disaffected students and fewer resources."

Paul Tractenberg glances about his "good-sized office" at the Rutgers University School of Law in Newark and surveys the piles of boxes that surround him.

He estimates that 90 percent of their contents pertain to a cause that has occupied many of his working hours since the early 1970s — a legal quest for quality public education in New Jersey that "some people would call an obsession."

For more than three decades his goal has been to ensure that the state live up to its constitutional mandate to provide "a thorough and efficient system of free public schools" for children in poor districts as well as middle class and wealthy ones.

"Paul Tractenberg has been with this case from the very beginning, and his interest and his passion have never wavered," said Gary Stein, a NJ Supreme Court justice who spent 18 years on the bench before retiring in 2002.

Stein spoke as one of four ex-justices who gathered at Tractenberg's invitation at the New Jersey Law Center in New Brunswick on Sept. 20 to contemplate the years of legal battles to democratize public education funding.

Those battles began in 1970, when a group of Newark parents sought law professors' aid in making sure their public schools were funded as adequately as those of their neighbors in the affluent suburbs.

"If somebody had come to me in 1970 or '71, in the early years of this commitment, and described to me the situation now in terms of funding equalization, and asked, ‘Would you be satisfied with the result?' my response would be, ‘What are you smoking? We are never going to accomplish that,'" Tractenberg reflected in a telephone interview 37 years later.

A series of seemingly endless hearings in lower courts and appeals before some 25 past and present justices on the state Supreme Court have produced results that the professor is highly proud of.

"When we started this litigation, the amount being spent on poor students was essentially one half as much as on kids in the wealthy suburbs," he said.

Then, by increments, the legislature enacted a state income tax chiefly as a funding source for the state's public schools and created so-called Abbott Districts, now 31 in number. Named after the lead plaintiff in this enduring case, the designated districts qualify for special funding. It is a frequently challenged mandate from the court to bring about parity with education spending and facilities in wealthier areas of New Jersey.

"Now the kids in the cities are getting as much as or more than any other kids in the state. It is a remarkable turnabout in funding," Tractenberg said. "We've seen some dramatic educational improvements in the lower grades already. But can we extend those achievements, can we build on them, can we extend them upward to middle school and high school? That's the real challenge."

Tractenberg lives in West Orange with his Israeli-born wife, Neimah, who is director of missions at United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.

"I value and admire and respect my wife's commitment to Jewish causes, and I don't feel what I am doing is antithetical to that," he said.

Born at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center and educated at Weequahic High School, Tractenberg joked that "more than one person thought I may have been the role model for Portnoy," the title character of Philip Roth's 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint. But he insisted "there is no truth at all to it."

After finishing Wesleyan College and law school at the University of Michigan, he joined a corporate law firm he considered "the epitome of Wall Street practice." But a few years later he "shocked the partners" by leaving to become a counsel at the Peace Corps during the Johnson administration.

That started his enduring commitment to education and public interest law.

To Tractenberg, "cultural Judaism" prepared him to face that challenge.

"I can't trace it to my knowledge of Halacha and the like, but it is very much rooted in devoting yourself to good works for the help of your society," he said. "I am not oblivious to the needs of people in the Jewish community. But there are a lot of people whose primary commitment is to take care of our own, so I have wound up devoting my energies to those who are really behind the societal eight ball where even the most needy Jews aren't."

Of the four panelists invited by Tractenberg to last week's forum, three happened to be Jewish.

"I was raised in a family that believed in education and believed in the power of education," said Deborah Poritz, who served as chief justice of the state Supreme Court from 1996 to 2006.

In an interview after the three-hour forum, Poritz told NJ Jewish News, "I think that is a value among Jewish people, but not Jewish people alone."

The panelists stood firm in their support for Abbott and court-ordered equity, despite criticisms about the rising cost of reforms and the impact of the rulings on the state's strapped budget.

For the jurists, basic values trumped politics.

"I wouldn't for a moment minimize the enormous privations felt by those who are disadvantaged, and it is something the courts have been aware of during the generation of this litigation," said Alan Handler, an associate justice between 1977 and 1999.

"One's general background — familial, institutional, educational — all contribute to one's attitude and values as they are brought to bear on this," he said.

Stein grew up as "a poor kid in the blue-collar town of Irvington. Irvington has now fallen on harder times, but I was always taught to be sensitive to the needs of people who were disadvantaged."

The fourth panelist, James Coleman, understood such privations in a special way. As an African-American who grew up in heavily segregated Virginia in the 1930s, he confronted a law of the land "that came to be known to us as the ‘separate and unequal doctrine,'" he said.

As a member of the state's high court from 1994 to 2003, the education cases he confronted "reminded me of my own growing up. So, it became part of my core values to want to do whatever I could to see if I could turn that process around."

Tractenberg agreed.

"Public schools are open to everyone. They need to be publicly supported and absent some cataclysmic change in the future, 85 percent of all school-age kids are going to wind up in public schools," he predicted.

"I think therefore our overriding obligation as a society is to support the public schools in the best way possible. It is part of the social compact. In point of fact, in a lot of ways self-interest demands it."