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195 For as long as newspapers have been cranking out front pages, there has been a certain pressure on those who write the “first draft of history” to publish accounts of verifiable happenings. Nearly every headline that has ever been written implies that some sort of action has occurred: a hurricane ripped through the Gulf Coast, a fire blazed its way through an apartment building, an election was held in which voters selected one person over another to lead a community. Very rarely are consumers of news media treated to accounts of equally verifiable non-happenings. Not only does the proverbial tree that did not fall in the forest not make much of a sound, but it also has about the same chances of getting covered in the press as the rainstorm that never came, the airplane that did not crash, or the cure for cancer that has not yet been discovered. For most segments of society, these ironclad rules of newsworthiness work just fine. But in other subject areas, like education, the things that don’t happen often are as important as the things that do. The conventional rules of journalism, for example, make it difficult for news outlets to produce stories about why kids are not performing on grade level, why school leaders are not providing schools with the levels of support necessary for reform to take place, and why the public is seemingly content to settle for education systems that clearly are not getting the job done for millions of kids who need an education. This chapter looks at one of the most noteworthy events in New York City education that never happened: the distribution of billions of additional dollars in tax money to the city’s 1.1 million–student school system. Despite a The Non-Implementation of New York’s Adequacy Judgment 8 joe williams 08-7031-6-CH08 12/11/06 2:44 PM Page 195 court ruling requiring this massive infusion of cash to provide for an “adequate” education for the city’s schoolchildren, a complicated set of factors has combined in the Empire State to create what has up to now been a stalemate of sorts. This stalemate, depending on your perspective, is viewed either as a welcome delay by fiscal conservatives, who have long argued that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York was an illogical and dangerously bad form of judicial intrusion, or as a frustrating exercise that has continued to delay the moment when justice will ultimately be served to the unfortunate students who have been denied a “sound basic education” by the city’s school system. To be sure, New York’s case and the complicated factors affecting it have swirled in uncharted territory and have been difficult to comprehend, even for seasoned political and educational observers. “I didn’t think that we would be at this point, so long after the judge’s order, wondering what is going to happen ,” said Diana Fortuna, of the Citizens Budget Commission, at a June 2005 forum on the case that was sponsored by the Manhattan-based education advocacy group PENCIL. Remarked Michael Rebell, the attorney who filed the original lawsuit seeking additional funding for city schools, in comments to reporters in September 2005: “We want this matter resolved . . . If we have to wait for a new governor in 2007 it will mean the schoolchildren will have had to have waited another year.” Simply put, the politics that lead to legal decisions regarding school adequacy can become so complicated that they contribute to a political climate that makes settling these cases difficult, if not impossible. Rifts can open up within the adequacy coalition, as the focus shifts from proving “inadequacy” to determining precisely how much money will correct the problem, who should get their hands on that money, and what it should be used to fund. In addition, the adequacy coalition in cases like New York’s has itself been forced to contend with an increasingly fragmented political system that has trouble paying its existing bills, much less supporting massive and sudden increases in school spending. As a result, the promised windfall of new school cash becomes a doubtful reality, along with the reforms the adequacy lawsuit was intended to unleash. One’s views of this particular case, for reasons that are fully explained elsewhere in this chapter, often are influenced by the geographic vantage point one assumes at the start. In New York City, for example, there...

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