State High Court Ruling Cites Need For Quantifying Education Quality

By ARIELLE LEVIN BECKER | Hartfod Courant
March 23, 2010

A divided state Supreme Court on Monday opened the door to significant changes in the way the state funds public education, ruling that the Connecticut Constitution guarantees students not just a public education, but one that can prepare them for employment, higher education and civic responsibilities like voting and jury duty.

The 4-3 ruling did not prescribe changes or even say changes were necessary. In siding with the plaintiffs in an education funding lawsuit, the justices sent the case back to Superior Court for trial. Any changes it could bring are likely years away.

But the ruling established a significant new framework, for the first time explicitly declaring that students have the right to a certain level of education, and defining what it is.

"This is a huge win for Connecticut's schoolchildren," said Dianne Kaplan deVries, project director of the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding, a group of municipal and education organizations that brought the lawsuit along with the parents of schoolchildren in Hartford, New Haven, East Hartford, New London, Plainfield, New Britain, Bridgeport, Danbury and Windham.

The lawsuit, filed in 2005, argued that the state fails to maintain a suitable and substantially equal education system. Instead, in many school districts, the state provides inadequate resources and conditions that set students up for failure, the lawsuit said. It cited a range of statistics — including gaps in test scores, graduation rates, teachers with advanced degrees, the number of books in school libraries — and argued that the way the state funds education fosters educational inequality and inadequacy.

The right to an equal education was established in the 1977 case of Horton v. Meskill. In this case, the plaintiffs claimed another right, to an "adequate" education.

A Superior Court judge struck down most of the plaintiffs' claims in 2007, saying that the state constitution does not require a certain standard of quality for public education and that the court could not address it.

Monday's ruling reversed that ruling.

"We conclude that [the state constitution] entitles Connecticut public school students to an education suitable to give them the opportunity to be responsible citizens able to participate fully in democratic institutions, such as jury service and voting," Justice Flemming L. Norcott wrote in an opinion joined by two other justices. A fourth justice sided with the plaintiffs in a separate opinion.

"A constitutionally adequate education also will leave Connecticut's students prepared to progress to institutions of higher education, or to attain productive employment and otherwise contribute to the state's economy," Norcott wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Peter T. Zarella called the ruling a "clear violation of the separation of powers" and warned that it would move control of education matters from boards of education to the courts.

"Moreover, it will require the legislature to appropriate at least $2 billion per year in additional funding to ensure that Connecticut schoolchildren will be provided with the resources allegedly required for an adequate education," Zarella wrote.

Lindsey Luebchow, a Yale law student who co-directs the legal advocacy clinic that is handling the case for the plaintiffs without charge, said that the ruling puts Connecticut in the center of a national effort to use state constitutions to close the achievement gap.

The plaintiffs hope to work with the state to make changes, Luebchow said. If not, they will be prepared to take the case to trial and show that Connecticut does not meet the adequacy requirement, she said.

Changing the education funding system, which relies on local property taxes to supplement state funding, will take "an awful lot of political courage," said state Sen. Thomas P. Gaffey, a Meriden Democrat who is co-chairman of the education committee.

Gaffey said the income tax would be a fairer funding method than relying on property taxes. But he said that changing the system would require wide-ranging changes involving economic development, housing policy and reconsidering the merits of having more than 160 "fiefdoms" throughout the state.

What Is Guaranteed?
A key question in the case centered on what is meant by the Connecticut Constitution's guarantee to "free public elementary and secondary schools."

The plaintiffs argued that the wording implied a right to an adequate education. What would be the purpose of a right to education, a representative for the plaintiffs argued before the Supreme Court in 2008, if it did not provide students with the opportunity for employment or higher education?

"However you define it, the fundamental right to education has to have content," argued David Noah, then a Yale law student, one of more than a dozen handling the case under the supervision of Professor Robert Solomon.

The defense offered a different view, arguing that if the authors of the constitutional passage intended it to imply a level of education, they would have said so.

In the state constitution, the passage that immediately follows the public education clause says, "The state shall maintain a system of higher education, including The University of Connecticut, which shall be dedicated to excellence in higher education." The use of such "qualitative language" in that section suggests that the drafters meant to omit such a standard from the section on primary and secondary schools, the defense argued.

During the Supreme Court hearing, Assistant Attorney General Gregory D'Auria, representing the state, argued that the legislature, not the courts, should decide school matters, and that although equality in education is a right, quality is not.

"So as long as it's equally bad, it's OK?" Justice Joette Katz asked.

"If it's equally bad, the democratic process should and will correct that," D'Auria said.

"If it's equally bad," Norcott said, "then there's not much to the fundamental right."

Justices Split
Norcott's ruling drew on previous cases, particularly a series of education cases that included Horton v. Meskill.

The judges' opinions in Horton, Norcott wrote, "support the plaintiffs' position that the fundamental right to an education is not an empty linguistic shell, but has at least some minimal substantive content."

Norcott noted in the ruling that there are limits to the state's responsibilities in education. The state is not required to take measures to maximize the potential of specific students, he wrote, or to counteract every negative factor for which it is not responsible.

But the state must provide students with "an objectively measured 'meaningful opportunity' to receive the benefits of this constitutional right," he wrote.

Joined by Katz and Justice Barry R. Schaller, Norcott wrote that the justices endorsed a view, offered by the New York Court of Appeals, that constitutionally adequate education requires: minimally adequate facilities and classrooms; minimally adequate instruments of learning, such as desks, chairs, pencils and "reasonably current textbooks;" minimally adequate teaching of reasonably up-to-date curriculum in subjects such as reading, writing, math, science and social studies; and enough teachers, adequately trained to teach those subjects.

There are limits to what that might achieve, Norcott wrote, noting that students might struggle because of factors beyond the control of the state, and that the education clause of the constitution will not cure them all.

"A constitutionally adequate education is not necessarily a perfect one," he wrote.

Justice Richard N. Palmer also sided with the plaintiffs but wrote a separate opinion and said the executive and legislative branches are entitled to "considerable deference" in determining what constitutes an adequate education.

In a dissent, Justice Christine S. Vertefeuille wrote that the framers of the education clause seemed to be aware of the option of including a qualitative standard for education, and chose not to do so.

"This deliberate choice weighs very heavily with me, and I therefore would conclude that the text of [the state constitution] reasonably cannot be read as mandating that the instruction in our public schools be 'suitable' or effective for some specific end," she wrote.

Vertefeuille warned that the course taken in Norcott's opinion "can only create unrealistic expectations and divert scarce public resources from supporting schools to defending endless litigation."

'Landmark' Decision
Plaintiffs and their supporters celebrated the ruling during a press conference Monday afternoon, calling it a "landmark" decision. Stephen T. Cassano, the coalition's executive director and a former Manchester mayor, called the ruling one of the greatest economic development decisions the court will ever make.

The group included municipal and school officials, teachers' unions, parents, a handful of state lawmakers and the Yale law students.

Bristol Superintendent Philip Streifer said the ruling represented the beginning of a way to overcome failed education funding policies.

"Schools haven't failed — policy has failed," he said in an interview. "This is the first time in my Connecticut education career that I see a reasonable chance of light at the end of the tunnel for education funding — and I've been doing this for 38 years."

State Department of Education spokesman Tom Murphy called the ruling "a major decision" and said it has implications for both finances and the way schools are structured.

The department has proposed a package of high school reforms aimed at increasing standards and graduation rates, as well as adding support services for students and individualized plans for students built around their goals and strengths and weaknesses. Murphy said those proposals, which are now before the legislature, are consistent with the court's definition of adequacy.

"We are looking at how to reduce the gaps, how to improve graduation rates and how to help more students to achieve success," he said.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell said in a written statement that she will maintain current education funding levels — nearly $1.9 billion a year — while the case returns to court.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said his office will review the decision.

"Lacking a majority for a clear result, this ruling will require the legislature and the executive branch to closely consider the meaning of 'minimally adequate education.' The lower court judge who hears the case enabled by this decision faces a similar challenge," Blumenthal said in a written statement. "I am committed to working with the legislature and the govern
or to ensure that the state complies with the court's decision. I will continue to defend this case at the lower court in consultation with other state officials."

Courant staff writer Don Stacom contributed to this story.

"This is a huge win for Connecticut's schoolchildren." — Dianne Kaplan deVries, Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding

High court won’t take up No Child Left Behind case

Associated Press / June 8, 2010

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court yesterday turned away a challenge by school districts and teacher unions to the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The court said without comment that it will not step into a lawsuit that questioned whether public schools have to comply with requirements of the law if the federal government doesn’t pay for them.

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit and a federal appeals court split 8 to 8, leaving the judge’s ruling in place.

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act requires tests on subjects including math and reading in grades 3 through 8, and once in high school. Schools that miss testing benchmarks face increasingly stiff sanctions, including the potential loss of federal money.

President Obama is proposing major changes to the law. Obama has markedly increased federal money for public schools.

Schools and race: Still separate after all these years

Schools and race: Still separate after all these years
Apr 26th 2007 | LOUISVILLE AND RALEIGH
From The Economist

Five decades after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation, black and white children continue to learn in different worlds. And it could get worse

LARRY BISIG grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where he went to Catholic school and where he now runs a local marketing firm. He has seen his local school district's history from several angles. In 1975, when a court-ordered desegregation drive began, his public-school friends started waking up at five o'clock to be bussed to new schools across town. His Catholic school made reassuring intercom announcements, saying that the public-school buses had arrived safely—despite the violent protests and threats. And he remembers the sudden influx of new students into his own school, as white Protestant families chose a Catholic education for their children rather than sending them to public school with blacks.

By the 1990s, however, the Jefferson County school district, which includes Louisville, was far more racially integrated (see chart). Its public schools had also become much more attractive to the white families who had stayed in the district, and Catholic schools had such a hard time keeping students that Mr Bisig's marketing firm began working with some of them to handle the stiffer competition. These days, Jefferson County is eager to keep the racially integrated school system it has created. But that integration—which began with a federal court order driven by Supreme Court precedents—is now under threat from the Supreme Court itself.

The court's two newest justices—Samuel Alito and the chief justice, John Roberts—are serving their first full term together in 2006-07. And although the new court has sometimes aligned in unexpected ways, George Bush's two appointees have given a more conservative tilt to some important decisions. Most notable was a five-to-four ruling last week upholding a congressional ban on partial-birth abortions. Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate, had previously provided a pivotal vote against abortion restrictions. Last week's ruling thus seemed to confirm that her replacement by Justice Alito will lead to a conservative shift in at least some types of cases. Race-conscious education policy, which Justice O'Connor broadly favoured, is among the areas most likely to change.

In the coming weeks the court will announce its decision on a pair of cases that it heard in December, involving the Jefferson County school district and another in Seattle. Both districts act aggressively to maintain racial balance in their schools, but may not be able to continue.

In Seattle, where places in the most popular high schools are scarce, officials use race to decide who gets left out, so that a school's racial mix will not deviate too much from the district average. Jefferson County uses a broadly similar system to ensure that black students, who are 35% of the total, make up 15% to 50% of the student mix in every school. A white student's mother has claimed that he was deprived of a good school place there to preserve this racial mix, violating his rights. Lower courts have upheld both districts' methods, but the newly conservative Supreme Court is examining the issue.

Even without this judicial complication, America's school boards are being sorely tested by economics and geography. Blacks and whites still tend to earn different incomes and live in different areas. And those stark facts undermine many districts' efforts to foster racially integrated schools and equal education. As a result, 53 years after Brown v Board of Education—in which the Supreme Court declared school segregation to be unconstitutional—the gulf between blacks' and whites' educational attainment remains glaringly wide.

The winning lawyer in the Brown case was Thurgood Marshall, a descendent of slaves who would later become a Supreme Court justice himself. When the court issued its unanimous opinion that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”, Marshall was so pleased with the decision that he said “we hit the jackpot”. For the past five decades, America's judges, politicians and school boards have wrestled with the challenges of putting the court's principle into practice. Despite all the integration that these reforms have achieved, however, Marshall's jackpot has so far brought only a fraction of the equality that it once seemed to promise.

Segregation no longer has the force of law, but it is still a fact of life in most cities. Many districts are actually going backwards, as Charles Clotfelter of Duke University documented in a 2004 book, “After Brown: the Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation”.

The reasons for this failure have long been more apparent than the solutions. High-income and middle-class white parents have moved in droves to suburban school districts that are outside the reach of city ones, thereby using the housing market to buy a better education for their children. Other affluent families have quit the public system entirely, and use private schools instead. And even though many white children still attend public schools in cities, big gaps in wealth—and in parents' ability to work the system—force school administrators to adapt constantly if they want to keep their schools racially integrated.

Louisville at least manages to include the suburban bits of Jefferson County in its school district. In many American cities, especially in the north-east and Midwest, middle-class parents can choose from a variety of separate districts in nearby suburbs, leaving struggling cities behind.

Nothing can be done about this because the Supreme Court ruled in 1974, in Milliken v Bradley, that desegregation cannot be required across school district lines, even if it is compulsory within them. That decision left the door wide open for white flight, and marked a constitutional limit for America's drive to integrate its schools. The city involved in the Milliken decision, Detroit, has been left with one of America's starkest racial divides between city and suburbs, and the quality of the city's public schools has collapsed.

Colour-blind alternatives
The question facing many school boards now is whether to keep focusing intently on the racial mix of each school, or to pour their energy instead into offsetting the disadvantages faced by any child, regardless of colour, whose parents are poor, uneducated or just hopeless. The Supreme Court may soon make this decision for them, in its rulings on Seattle and Jefferson County. But even if the court issues a vague or flexible opinion, a growing number of school boards have been considering an alternative approach to improving equality.

The Wake County school district in North Carolina, for example, began mixing students from different economic backgrounds together in 2000, instead of continuing to integrate them by race. Some 40 districts across America now do something similar, often using the receipt of free or reduced-price lunches as a simple proxy for low-income status.

Wake County, which includes the city of Raleigh, does not reassign students individually. Instead, it divides its district into hundreds of “nodes”, each one classified by the number of children who qualify for lunch subsidies. It rebalances schools by moving entire nodes at once, which both avoids singling out poor children and lets neighbourhood friends stick together. The goal is to ensure that no school in the district has more than 40% of its students on free lunches, or more than 25% performing below their grade level.

The Supreme Court in session

The county's schools perform well. And despite overcrowding and a population that is 27% black and 45% non-white overall, affluent white families are still pouring into the district and enrolling their children in its public schools. True, the rapid growth is taxing the district's capacity and stirring lots of complaints, but many other urban school districts would love to have too many rich white kids.

The Wake County model will tempt many other school boards if the Supreme Court forces districts to scale back or dismantle race-based integration schemes. But its new approach is not the only reason for its success. It previously had a good history of integrating schools racially with support from parents, and had made extensive use of magnet schools—which offer variety and innovation—to draw white students back into Raleigh. Teachers in North Carolina are not unionised. And the county was always well off economically.

Whatever school districts do, says Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, any serious effort to bridge the gap between poor (disproportionately black) children and everyone else will have to involve spending more money—probably lots more—on those poor students, since they clearly need more help. As in any other labour market, says Mr Neal, “if you want more work done, you have to pay for it.”

It's really about the middle class
This point often gets lost in debates about school vouchers, choice and the role of competition. At the core of that debate lie competing theories about what disadvantaged students need most. Voucher advocates argue that they need their own money to spend, so that schools will compete over them.

Many voucher opponents, by contrast, believe that what poor (or black) children need most is access to rich (or white) children every day in the classroom, along with all the advantages that affluent and involved parents bring to their children's schools. They favour spending more money on schools and teachers' salaries, but fear that competition from outside the system would undermine integration.

Both arguments, however, have a debatable premise in common. They assume that the main educational goal of America's voters and policymakers is to improve the lot of children from low-income families, who tend to be the slowest learners. Many pressure-groups pay lip-service to this notion only to win support for schemes which they prefer for other reasons. In America's current political environment, pandering to middle-class gripes appears far more popular than really helping the poor. So the odds that any education reform with voters' support will genuinely be aimed at poor children seems depressingly low these days—whatever the Supreme Court rules, and however many years have elapsed since Brown.

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

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