<p>In what may, or may not be a watershed decision, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that public school students are guaranteed an “adequate education.” No, I don’t know what this means either. But in a state where some public schools graduate less than half their students, the ruling may be a harbinger of significant change.</p>
<p>“Horton v. Meskill, in 1977 established that Connecticut students have the right to a substantially equal education. The plaintiffs in this case argued that the state constitution also guarantees students the right to an adequate public education. Their lawsuit argued that the state failed on both fronts, not providing students with either a suitable or substantially equal education system.”</p>
<p>We went through this in NH a long time ago. The Supreme Court left it up to the legislature to decide on what adequate meant. They just took a budget number and divided it up by the number of kids going to public schools.</p>
<p>Kansas City went way down this road to the extent of building new schools and heavily funding the inner city schools. The results–hardly any improvement. Now the system is broke and closing many schools as enrollment declined over 50%.</p>
<p>The education problem in CT is that public schools are entirely funded through property taxes, with each town becoming its own fiefdom. This created huge differences in quality of education with some of the best public schools in the US concentrated in the wealthy suburbs of Fairfield County with some of the worst schools in large cities. the problem was never mismanagement or excess capacity but simply inadequate funding for many school districts by any reasonable measure.</p>
<p>Connecticut has been trying to “equalize” education for at least thirty years … since the Horton vs. Meskill decision. I chased down a summary of that decision (excerpt below) and it sure looks a lot like the current decision. As best I can determine, though I’m no expert, Horton vs. Meskill dealt with unequal funding of education … whereas the current decision deals with unequal adequacy. I’m not sure how the state plans to measure “adequacy” but I’m sure they’ll come up with something creative.</p>
<p>“The Court held that … Connecticut’s recognition of the right to education in its constitution made education a fundamental right. It said that the wealth discrimination found among school districts differed from a traditional equal protection case because the students in property-poor towns still received an education, but of a lower quality. In most equal protection cases, the complaining party has been absolutely denied a right, rather than the qualitative denial of the type at issue in Horton. The Court agreed with the trial court and the plaintiffs’ assertion of “the sheer irrationality” of the state’s system of financing education based on property values. The trial court cited a Yale Law Journal Note which said the system “would be similar and no less tenable should the state make educational expenditures dependent upon some other irrelevant factor, such as the number of telephone poles in the district” (81 Yale L.J. 1303, 1307).”</p>
<p>The other main aspect of a better education is the parents who work with their kids from day 1. It’s pretty hard to find an amount of money that equalizes that playing field. I guess the easiest thing to do is use a statewide tax. The income and sales taxes do that. NH implemented a statewide property tax so we now have two tiers of property taxes. It really didn’t change much in funding though. Everyone still complains.</p>
<p>MA does a decent job of redistribution but everyone hurts with a declining pot.</p>
<p>Texas dealt with this by passing the “Robin Hood” law - once a district hits a certain taxable value per student, the rest passes to the state to distribute to lower income school districts. Problems too many to mention although I agree in theory with the idea.</p>
<p>The NJ constitution guarantees a “thorough and efficient” education, whatever that means. End result was spending huge amounts of state funds on urban schools, with little to show for it.</p>
<p>Yes, the next battle is the inequality of results AKA “the achievement gap”–the fact that many minority students still do much worse than other groups in equal quality schools.</p>