States Deal With “Leandro” Issues

In Kansas, the plaintiff was Montoy. In Connecticut, it was Sheff, and Brigham filed the complaint in Vermont.

The Leandro lawsuit, in which the state Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina has a constitutional obligation to adequately fund education in its poorer counties, has had sibling cases in 44 other states. That is because almost every state in the union has a constitutional provision similar to North Carolina’s, which promises a “sound and basic education” for all its residents.

According to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, an organization that advocates for adequate public education funding, every state except Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah has had litigation over the constitutionality of its K-12 funding.

However, over the last 40 or so years, the lawsuits have taken different forms with varying success.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 was intended to end schools’ segregation of blacks and whites, but real progress toward integration, especially in the South, didn’t develop until the early 1970s. Many schools remained naturally segregated because blacks generally lived in neighborhoods apart from whites.

According to a documentary article by Michael A. Rebell entitled “Educational Adequacy, Democracy, and the Courts,” education reformers in the late 1960s began to test legal theories in various state and federal lawsuits. Rebell is executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a nonprofit group that seeks education reform through increased, equalized spending for “disadvantaged” public schools. CFE has litigated against New York State for years over school funding adequacy, and the organization also closely tracks similar lawsuits in every other state in the country.

“Rooted in the traditional pattern of local control of schooling in America,” Rebell wrote in his article, “most state systems required much of the funding for public schools to be obtained from local property taxes, a method that inherently disadvantaged students who attended schools in areas that had low property wealth.”

Reformers in the early 1970s first sought relief from the inequity through the federal courts. A San Antonio case, which claimed that Texas’ system for financing education was discriminatory, was found by the Supreme Court not to have a legitimate legal basis in the federal constitution. Rebell quoted Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., who wrote in the majority opinion, “[No] charge fairly could be made…that the system fails to provide each child with an opportunity to acquire the basic minimal skills necessary for the enjoyment of the rights of speech and of full participation in the political process.”

But the court majority expressed an understanding of the plaintiffs’ plight, Rebell wrote, noting that Powell said “this Court’s action today is not to be viewed as placing its judicial imprimatur on the status quo.”

“The court clearly hoped that both scholars ‘and the legislatures in the various states’ would come up with ‘ultimate solutions’ to these complex problems,” Rebell wrote, paraphrasing the court.

In the ensuing years, education advocates and their lawyers adopted the “fiscal neutrality principle,” which held that each state “has a constitutional obligation to equalize the value of the taxable wealth in each district, so that equal tax efforts will yield equal resources,” according to Rebell. They succeeded in some states, including California, under that argument, which led some legislatures to institute policies of redistribution of resources from wealthy school districts to poor ones.
But by the mid-1980s state supreme courts “tended to rule in the defendants’ (or states’) favor,” emphasizing more the precedents set in the San Antonio case, Rebell said. “Fiscal neutrality,” or equity, proved difficult to implement, and though the funding gap was reduced, other forces such as hiring decisions and student makeup hindered the effort to reach achievement equity.

In the late 1980s, however, lawyers and plaintiffs in education funding cases turned from a strategy of “equity” to “adequacy” under state constitutions. The standards-based reform movement, which blossomed in the mid-to-late 1980s, led many states to raise their requirements for student promotion and graduation. It provided advocates for poorer schools a foundation upon which they could build cases that proved students in their districts were failing to receive an adequate education.

“‘Adequate education’ was no longer a vague notion that could be assumed almost in passing to describe any state education system,” Rebell wrote. “The concept now had substantive content…”

Since 1989, according to statistics compiled by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, 19 of 29 lawsuits argued on educational adequacy grounds were won by the plaintiffs. North Carolina’s Leandro decision, reached in 2004 by the state Supreme Court, was among the successful cases. In addition, CFE said courts in several states, including South Carolina and Idaho, “reverse(d) or distinguish(ed) earlier cases in which defendants had prevailed.”

Today, even if a state Supreme Court has ruled its education financing system unconstitutional, the legal wrangling over plans and funding still continues.

In New Jersey, Abbott v. Burke was filed in 1981 and has since seen 10 court decisions related to the case. Typical of many of the education funding lawsuits, the various decisions reflect negotiations between the state and the plaintiffs over implementation of programs and new laws, as well as the funding for them.

As Judge Howard Manning has done with the Leandro case in North Carolina, courts continue to hold hearings long after their decisions so that states are held accountable. Last May the Arkansas Supreme Court heard arguments over whether the legislature had complied with its November 2002 order.

Cases also drag out because both plaintiffs and defendants file challenges under the decisions because they complain that their legal opponents are failing to comply with standards set by the courts. Many adequacy suits seem to have no end.

In Wyoming the Supreme Court said that education costs, class size, and teacher salaries should be reviewed every five years, and inflation costs reviewed every two years.

In Arkansas, the state Supreme Court ordered the state to conduct a “costing out” study to determine how much money was needed to provide enough resources for a “general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools” as its constitution requires. The findings released in September 2003 determined that in order to provide adequate resources for its students, Arkansas would need to raise education spending by $848 million, a 33 percent increase over its current spending.

Arkansas was one of only five states in which the studies were ordered by its courts. Similar studies with varying formulas and bases have been conducted in 32 states, 21 of them initiated by the states themselves and the rest commissioned by outside groups.

The findings are usually staggering, often calling for hundreds of millions of dollars in spending increases. A state-ordered study in North Dakota recommended a spending increase of up to $866 million, a 31 percent increase. That would represent an additional $2,000 spent per pupil in the state.

A study conducted by an outside group in Missouri determined that the state needed to raise its education spending by $913 million, or by 15.7 percent. The authors went so far as to call for a statewide property tax to raise additional revenues.
No costing study has been ordered in North Carolina — yet. So far, Gov. Mike Easley and the General Assembly are trying to spend just enough to keep Manning satisfied.

Paul Chesser is associate editor of Carolina Journal.