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

Education Next, Summer, 2005 by Joe Williams

The bottom line, said the plaintiffs, was that the state aid formula for school districts (at the time the state provided 42 percent of the total spent by the districts) was "an incoherent, unsystematic aggregation of approximately 50 different formulas" that were "reformulated each year." It was a poorly kept secret that the governor and the state's two top legislative leaders sat down each year with a funding scheme that met their political needs and then came up with funding streams to provide the same result.

Though the CFE brief sounded like a classic equity argument, it was in fact breaking ground for adequacy. New York's court of appeals, the state's highest, had already rejected equity as grounds for reforming education finance in 1982 (in Levittown v. Nyquist), concluding that the state's constitution did not require it. But as CFE and its lead attorney, Michael Rebell, knew, the court had left a door open: the possibility of reconsidering that holding if the state's financing system was shown to have "gross and glaring inadequacy." Expressed positively, the court lay down a new constitutional standard: a "sound basic education." (As proof of the vicissitudes of the judicial enterprise, the actual article in the state constitution that formed the basis of this conclusion, and the Herculean struggles surrounding the CFE suit, contain these 26 words: "The legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated.")

Though the distinction between equity and adequacy would become more significant in later years, in 1993 few education observers would dispute CFE's list of the education crimes perpetrated on New York City's schoolchildren or the incoherency of the system that delivered them. Still, it took two years before the state court of appeals ruled that CFE's complaints met the adequacy standard (questioning that the state provided a "sound basic education") and six more years to bring the case to trial. When Justice DeGrasse finally ruled in CFE's favor, declaring New York State's education financing system unconstitutional, on January 10, 2001, school advocates, politicians, and the teachers union celebrated a victory they were sure would bring a bundle of cash to the city's struggling schools.

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Meanwhile, Back at the Revolution

But something happened on the way to the chancery--something more than just the back-and-forth struggles between contending parties arguing and appealing and re-arguing. Inequity was one thing. The difference between 10 library books and 16 was clear. But were 16 adequate for a "sound basic education" or were 10 enough? Or should there be 20? Beyond those questions was a portal leading through the looking glass.

In fact, those questions had all but been cast aside during the country's headlong pursuit of academic results and student outcomes in the previous decade. Between 1993 and 2005 the no-more-excuses standards and accountability movements swept through the education establishment, culminating with the passage (381 to 41 in the House and 87 to 10 in the Senate) of No Child Left Behind in 2001. In New York there was not only a new governor in the statehouse--a Republican--but he had pushed through a charter school bill and was now serving his third four-year term. The key players in the state's education department, including its commissioner, had all been replaced; the new administrators were issuing challenging curriculum standards, requiring new statewide tests, and demanding more accountability.