School Money Trials: The Legal Pursuit of Educational Adequacy

Abstract

SCHOOL MONEY TRIALS: THE LEGAL PURSUIT OF EDUCATIONAL ADEQUACY. MARTIN R. WEST AND PAUL E. PETERSON, EDS. BROOKINGS INSTITUTION, 2007. 373 PAGES. Reviewed by Julie Underwood* volume consists of edited papers and discussant remarks from a 2005 conference titled The Adequacy Lawsuit. papers - presented as a set of scholarly articles - clearly do not represent a range of views on the subject of public school finance. Instead of offering a marketplace of ideas, the volume adheres to the core message that public schools are failing and that we as a country continue to throw money at the problem to no avail. authors present the school finance litigation strategy of the adequacy lawsuit as yet another agenda that, by their accounts, is also failing. text begins with this message: Public education has long been a core government function in the United States - perhaps the most important function, according to . . . Brown v. Board of Education. *** Yet it is increasingly clear that the American school system is ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. 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, and from handing schools over to mayoral direction to altering how teachers are paid. *** Meanwhile, almost unnoticed, an alternative reform strategy - the adequacy lawsuit - has made rapid headway within the nation's judicial system, (p.l) authors submit that adequacy litigation has been a created as a discrete reform strategy, and question its viability. They put forth this conclusion early in the text and echo it throughout: path from courtroom to classroom is long and uncertain, however. ***Even when additional money reaches the schoolhouse door, there is no guarantee it will benefit students.... Indeed, it may be that these judgments are an instance of judicial overreaching that will do little to rectify the undeniable inadequacies and inequities in American education. *** Adequacy litigation, we ultimately conclude, is unlikely to make educational opportunities more adequate or more equitable, and, by inviting ongoing judicial supervision of school spending, it threatens the separation of powers within state (p. 3-4) Pervasive leaps of logic and faulty assumptions lead to the illogical conclusion that adequacy litigation is a doomed reform strategy unlikely to make educational opportunities more adequate. In the following paragraphs, I want to explore some of the central flaws to their key assumptions. Underlying assumption #1: Adequacy litigation was devised as a strategy to reform public education goal of adequacy litigation, it seems, is to provide adequate educational opportunities for all public school students. Simply put, the question in adequacy cases is: Does the school have sufficient resources to support equal opportunity for all children to achieve to state-mandated outcome standards? This strategy, in my mind, is not similar to changing instructional methods or structural systems, but aims to marshal resources. objective is to apply state education clauses as a mandate to better ensure that high-need programs possess the means to provide all students with adequate opportunity to achieve to at least the minimum standards. As a political strategy, the objective is to compel state legislatures to live up to their constitutional obligation to provide for an educational system in which all students have a bona fide opportunity to achieve to state-mandated levels. Merely creating the standards and the structures alone does not fulfill this commitment; the state also must breathe life into its system with sufficient funding. Political and economic sustenance for schooling rests on a mixture of federal, state, and local governments. …