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

Education Next, Summer, 2005 by Joe Williams

This optimistic positioning ran counter to the core of CFEs legal argument: that spending in city schools was so low that a "sound basic education" was not achievable. And so CFE had little choice but to take its campaign statewide--to avoid the Bloomberg paradox.

There was also the Klein contradiction. New York City's education chancellor, Joel Klein, had gained fame for his hard-nosed--and successful--prosecution of the antitrust case against Microsoft while he was at the Justice Department. And when brought to New York City by Mayor Bloomberg to run the city's schools, Klein was meant to signal the mayor's willingness to crack down on profligacy. That, of course, was counter to the CFE's adequacy case. But when it was discovered that Klein had been involved in a school equity lawsuit in Missouri in the 1980s, there was more embarrassment for CFE. Representing the state in that case, Klein had argued that more money wasn't the answer to education problems.

The Final Irrelevancies

Politics have also forced New York governor George Pataki into taking contradictory positions at times regarding schools and money. Though he has argued that the problem with the city's schools wasn't a lack of money but a lack of managerial safeguards, he has also taken credit for "massive increases" to education budgets as proof that he has supported education improvement.

Such was the stalemate between these elephantine contenders that the courtroom erupted in laughter last January after DeGrasse asked the lawyers in the case about the likelihood that the state would file an appeal. And, a week later, answering the question once and for all, Pataki proposed a state budget that all but ignored the payments required in the CFE case. At one point during the stalled talks in 2004, New York Sun columnist Jack Newfield referred to the state's two legislative leaders, the governor and the mayor, as "The Four Horsemen of Paralysis."

Justice DeGrasse, meanwhile, has attempted to walk a fine line between showing the state he means business (by ordering that the state simply cough up the additional funding) and setting the stage for a constitutional battle that might overturn his order. Because of this, the city, state, and CFE have attempted to reach a settlement on their own to avoid another drawn-our appeal that could cost them much more to win than to lose.

Whether city schools will ever see that money is still anyone's guess. Where once there was hope that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case would radically alter the way education is delivered in the city, crucial issues like accountability, choice, and much-needed changes to bargaining contracts have been virtually swept aside by New York-style interest-group politics. After more than a decade of legal wrangling, including stacks of constitutional briefs, expert testimony, dueling costing-out studies, and the like, one of the most significant school adequacy cases in American history has been reduced to little more than a wire transfer.