The legal cash machine: a New York adequacy case tests the limits of fiscal coherence

Education Next, Summer, 2005 by Joe Williams

The various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have
inherited it from their fathers ... might look in vain for truth at the
bottom of it between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with
bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits,
issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly
nonsense, piled before them.--Charles Dickens, Bleak House

A crowd of protesters gathered on the sidewalk outside a government building in Lower Manhattan last June, collectively demanding that the city and state reach an agreement on how to pump billions of new dollars into New York City schools--and settle its contentious, decade-long school adequacy lawsuit.

City councilman Robert Jackson, a Democrat from Manhattan and one of the original plaintiffs in the 1993 suit, took it upon himself to lead the crowd in a chant.

"What do we want?" he shouted.

"Money!" came the perfect protest reply. (In subsequent rallies the voices of actresses Susan Sarandon and Cynthia Nixon were part of the medley.)

"When do we want it?"

"Now!"

It's a rare occasion when a sound bite meant for news crews so succinctly sums up a complicated issue like the one surrounding the Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, one of the longest and most hotly contested school "adequacy" lawsuits in the country.

In the rawest of terms, these cases are, as the protesters shouted, about one thing: money. What has made New York's case worth watching is the eye-popping amount of dollars being shouted about. On February 14, 2005, State Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse, who had overseen the case from the beginning, awarded the city a staggering $5.6 billion more per year for its schools, a 43 percent increase to the city's $12.9 billion school budget, an amount that would raise per-pupil spending to more than $18,000 per year and make New York City's huge school district (with more than a third of the children in the state) among the richest in the state, if not the country. (In fact, it would propel per-pupil spending to the top 3 percent of districts nationwide.) It was an amazingly generous Valentine's Day gift to the city's 1.1 million schoolchildren.

Or was it for the children?

While the players in this multibillion-dollar drama wrangled over Justice DeGrasse's order last winter, the question at the heart of the New York case was the one debated across the country: Will more money improve children's education or simply feed an already bloated and ineffectual bureaucracy? How much is enough? Does money buy adequacy?

Nationwide, public school spending in the United States has more than doubled in the past 30 years (even adjusted for inflation), while there has been no appreciable improvement in academic outcomes. The United States spends more of its gross national product on education than any industrialized country, yet languishes near the bottom of lists comparing those countries' reading and math scores.

Nonetheless, the adequacy lawsuit has emerged as a prominent, if largely unnoticed, reform strategy, using the courts to force even more education spending on state and local governments. How many total dollars these suits have contributed to the rapid increase in education spending is unknown, but we do know that, since 1989, adequacy lawsuits have been launched in more than 30 states, and a vast majority of them have resulted in a court award to plaintiffs mandating more money for schools.

In fact, while the Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York poses the question of adequacy with characteristically New York bluntness and extravagance, many wonder if the case hasn't become a victim of those excesses and, during the 12-year brawl over the merits of linking financial input with academic output, been overtaken by events. (See Robert Costrell's analysis of the landmark Hancock decision, page 28, to see how Massachusetts's highest court addressed the adequacy question.)

The Road to Adequacy: Paved with Equity

Much has changed since the fledgling Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE), 14 New York City community school boards, and 23 individual parents and their children lodged the initial complaint charging the State of New York with denying "thousands of public school students in the City of New York their constitutional rights to equal educational opportunities."

Indeed, the city's fiscal disadvantage in 1993 was clear to everyone: its schoolchildren received some 12 percent fewer dollars than their counterparts elsewhere in the state; 11.8 percent of the city's teachers were uncertified, compared with 7.3 percent statewide; the city's students had 1 computer for every 19 students, compared with 1 for every 13 students statewide; there was 1 guidance counselor for every 700 city students, compared with 1 per 350 students in the rest of the state; there were 16.5 library books per pupil in the state, but only 10.4 in the city. In the year preceding the suit, New York City, which then had 37 percent of the state's students, received less than 35 percent of the state's education dollars; the city got some $3,000 per student while the average student outside of New York got $3,400.