Education Law

Educational Adequacy and Fiscal Reality

Two recent developments highlight what I think portends lots of coming chaos in school finance.  The first is a suit filed by parents in a middle-class Kansas school distict challenging the state's limits on local property tax millage rates (enacted in response to Kansas's numerous school finance cases).  The parents allege that their First Amendment right to direct the education of their children is infringed by the caps.  They also allege that their Fourteenth Amendment rights to control their own property and the uses to which it is put are infringed.  This is a novel claim, but it illustrates very clearly the conflicts that judicial rulings on systemic equality of educational resources create--simply put, these equalities cannot be achieved without limiting local control, and if these parents are correct, there are federal constitutional interests in local control of educational expenditures.  The parents have Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe on their side, so this is not just a shot in the dark. 

The other development is the re-opening, once again, of the Abbott v. Burke case in New Jersey.  This time, the plaintiffs challenge the $800-plus million in budget cuts that the Christie Administration has directed at the NJ schools to help close an $11 billion dollar budget gap resulting from the recent economic times.  The most recent prior action of the New Jersey Supreme Court (the most activist court in the nation on school finance) was to grudgingly approve the latest set of funding levels (enacted before Governor Christie was elected), on the explicit assumption that these levels would not be reduced.  Now that the funding levels have been reduced, it is likely that the court will once again find its way into the case.  By my count, if the new set of hearings results in a written decision, this will be the 21st New Jersey Supreme Court opinion in the Abbott case.  Pretty remarkable. 

The question now is what will happen as a result.  If the courts in both cases rule for the plaintiffs, will the political branches comply?  In Kansas, this would seem to be easy, as the legislature can just remove the caps from the plaintiff district, but the suit in Kansas did not open up the prior Kansas Supreme Court decision--it is an independent challenge to the legislation based on federal constitutional rights, so the Kansas legislature may be faced with an equality mandate from its own supreme court and simultaneously an order forbidding the application of its equality legislation from the federal courts.  In New Jersey, it's hard to see this being resolved without a constitutional confrontation, unless the court completely capitulates to the Governor's arguments that the state just doesn't have the money.  The really scary thing is that, considering the coming end to the ARRA and its federal subsidies of state education systems, these two cases are likely only the tip of the iceberg. 

Full post as published by Edjurist on January 06, 2011 (boomark / email).