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Chapter 1: The Adequacy Lawsuit: A Critical Appraisal
- Brookings Institution Press
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1 Public education has long been a core government function in the United States—“perhaps the most important function,” according to Chief Justice Earl Warren’s landmark 1954 opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. Writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, Warren noted that “compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society.”1 The depth of the nation’s educational commitment is evident also in its state constitutions, forty-nine of which mention the government’s responsibility in this area.2 Yet it is increasingly clear that the American school system is ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Although per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled since 1970, high school graduation rates and the test scores of seventeen-year-olds have hardly budged from levels attained years ago.3 The performance of American students in mathematics and science continues to lag far behind that of their peers abroad.4 A half-century after Brown put an end to legally sanctioned segregation in the schools, gaps in basic skills along lines of ethnicity and income remain scandalously wide.5 Policymakers seeking to enhance the school system’s flagging productivity have proposed everything from new accountability systems to more parental choice, from data-driven instruction to a return to traditional teaching methods, The Adequacy Lawsuit: A Critical Appraisal 1 martin r. west paul e. peterson 01-7031-6-CH01 12/11/06 2:40 PM Page 1 and from handing schools over to mayoral direction to altering how teachers are paid. While all these reforms have gained widespread attention, their implementation has been haphazard and idiosyncratic. Pressures to generate sustained improvement , especially in troubled urban districts, have only grown. Meanwhile, almost unnoticed, an alternative reform strategy—the adequacy lawsuit—has made rapid headway within the nation’s judicial system (see figure 1-1). Advocates for increased school spending have gone to court in at least thirty-nine states to date. Armed with photographs of rundown school buildings, data revealing large numbers of uncertified teachers, and evidence of abysmal and unequal student performance, teams of lawyers allege that schools lack sufficient funding to provide children with the quality of education guaranteed by the state’s constitution. As a remedy, they ask the courts to mandate large increases in state aid for public schools. Often the proposed dollar amounts are staggering. A March 2006 ruling in New York, for example, ordered the state’s elected officials to increase operating aid for schools in New York City alone by between $4.7 billion and $5.63 billion a year (roughly $5,000 per student), in addition to $9.2 billion over five years for capital improvements. If acted on by the governor and legislature, the increment for operations would by itself lift spending by more than one-third over current levels.6 Nor is it only in the Democratic “blue” states where courts have been impressed by plaintiff claims. Adequacy lawsuits have been decided in favor of plaintiffs in states as Republican-red as Kansas, Montana, and North Carolina . Meanwhile, the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, enacted in 2002, has given adequacy advocates new fuel for their claims by requiring states to collect detailed information on student performance. With victories in hand and fresh evidence to bolster the advocates’ case, it is no wonder that at the end of 2005 adequacy claims were pending in at least fourteen states (see the appendix). Is adequacy litigation a promising avenue for education reform? If success in the courtroom were the appropriate metric, the matter would be settled. Adequacy plaintiffs have won victories in twenty-five states, including ten of the fourteen cases decided between 2003 and 2005. Responding to complaints and court rulings in school finance cases has become a consuming concern of governors and legislators, who must balance educational spending against revenue constraints and other fiscal obligations. If court orders to improve educational outcomes could reliably do so, the story to be reported in the pages that follow would be as happy as the stories of the families that Tolstoy excluded from his canon as too dull to be worth the telling. 2 martin r. west and paul e. peterson 01-7031-6-CH01 12/11/06 2:40 PM Page 2 [3.235.120.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:28 GMT) The path from courtroom to classroom is...