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Saturday, November 25, 2006
Courts have no business in school funding
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The oldest and most prominent of the school finance lawsuits rolling around the country that invite judges to be legislators was resolved last week in the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.
The New York suit, filed 13 years ago, has spawned similar suits in 44 other states, including Georgia, premised on the notion that school funding is inadequate and judges should order legislators to give them more. It’s worth noting, as the New York Sun newspaper did in October, that the tiny Long Island resort town of Bridgehampton spent $51,828 per student in the 2004-05 school year, while Queensbury, a small town in the Adirondacks, spent $8,553, with little difference in results.
Georgia has been through this before, as have other states. From 1968 to 1972, school financing formulas were challenged around the country, in Illinois, Texas, California and others. It’s been routine over the years for groups seeking more money from the state to ask judges to do the work of legislators and to give the locals more of somebody else’s money.
The New York suit contended schools in New York City were being underfunded. In Georgia, the contention by officials in 51 rural systems is that their failure to educate children is the state Legislature’s fault because it gives them too little money. That is one possible explanation, of course. The other is that their failures are the fault of poor leadership, of hiring and management decisions made by local boards and superintendents.
In the New York case, a lower court did what judges shouldn’t do. It divined that $4.7 billion more in state money would provide the chance of a sound, basic education to New York City’s nearly 1.1 million schoolchildren. The state now pays $7.1 billion, or about 45 percent of the city’s $15.4 billion school budget, according to The New York Times.
After the lower-court decision, Gov. George E. Pataki proposed a budget that would have given the system an additional $1.93 billion. The high court last week embraced that number. Judge Eugene F. Pigott Jr., who wrote the majority opinion that overturned the lower-court decision, made an important pronouncement. Said he for the majority:
“Devising a state budget is a prerogative of the Legislature and the executive. The judiciary should not usurp this power.”
One of the dissenters, Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye, objected to the $1.93 billion and declared that “a sound basic education will cost approximately $5 billion in additional annual expenditures.” She then added this editorial comment:
“I remain hopeful that, despite the court’s ruling today, the policy-makers will continue to strive to make the schools not merely adequate, but excellent, and to implement a statewide solution.”
That is, indeed, the hope of every American, an aspiration that predates even the creation of public schools. But how best to achieve that is a matter for voters and the legislators and school board members. It’s not a judicial function. Judges have no basis, other than their own arrogance, to decide whether an “adequate” education costs a dollar or a billion dollars more. They’re just picking numbers and using their judicial office to effect their personal whim.
The Business Council of New York State Inc. surveyed spending by local systems in that state and projected that spending for this school year would rise to $16,469 per pupil, an increase of nearly a third in five years, and more than 2.5 times the rate of inflation. Atlanta spends more than $11,200, tops in Georgia. The state’s largest district, Gwinnett County, for example, spends about $7,200.
These suits have been filed in 45 states. It is, first of all, an example of the courts being used as a super-legislature by activists who find it more expedient to make their case before a judge, often a judge either sympathetic to their aim or arrogant enough to seize the authority of a governor and the Legislature to set priorities for spending limited tax resources. But it is an example, too, of the same underfunding argument being made in states whose taxpayers spend vastly different sums on public schools.
States across this country have addressed the money issue. And outcomes don’t improve. The model is broken in ways that a few more dollars, or a thousand more, in per-pupil spending don’t fix.
The solution, whatever it is, falls to the General Assembly and to local school boards. The court has no business here.
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