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

Education Next, Summer, 2005 by Joe Williams

Thus an appellate court reversal of DeGrasse's 2001 ruling was only a minor setback as CFE pursued an appeal--and won. The court of appeals weighed in again, this time with a ruling that ordered the state to determine the cost of a sound basic education in New York City and make sure to provide it. It gave the state until July 30, 2004, to come up with a number.

By now, it was clear that the case had nothing to do with equity and little to do with changing the way education was delivered to children. And so the argument shifted, with some finality, to the ambiguous standard of adequacy. The difficulty in defining that term was a clear invitation to the forces that drove politics in New York to continue the fight. And in New York fashion, it was anything but genteel.

In fact, the appeals court deadline came and went, with no agreement between the governor and the legislature on how to proceed. That didn't seem to bother Justice DeGrasse, who simply created his own panel to "ascertain the actual cost of providing a sound basic education in New York City."

Complicating the issue for the Republican governor (and the Republican-controlled state senate) was the reality that DeGrasse himself is a creature of the local Democratic Party machine. Judges in New York City are placed on the ballot by local party leaders and generally run without serious opposition, as DeGrasse had done in 1988 when he ran for his first 14-year term, and in 2002 for his second. Was it mere coincidence that when it came time to appoint the three "judicial referees" to make recommendations in the case, he appointed three Democrats? One of them, William Thompson Sr., was the father of the city comptroller, a former board of education president who had his eye on the mayor's office.

By this time, it had long been clear that education reform was not what this case was about. In fact, at one point during testimony before the referees, in the fall of 2004, lawyers for the city requested that the panel include a recommendation for the legislature to remove a statutory cap limiting the number of charter schools in the state, arguing that charter schools were one part of its strategy for overhauling the city's school system. Replied Thompson, dismissing the request: "This is about money."

But How Much Money?

The process of determining what a "sound basic" education was, much less how much it should cost, seemed equal parts science and voodoo. As the consultants who provided the plaintiffs' analysis explained, their job was to "identify and measure the impact of the major, systematic factors that underlie the variations in costs of achieving a specific set of outcome standards across the schools in New York State." That meant, essentially, that "state aid that districts receive should be sufficient to provide an opportunity for all of its students to meet the Regents Learning Standards and should be adjusted for variations in educational costs that are essentially beyond the control of local school districts."