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| from top, Richard Perry; Chris Maynard; Nicole Bengiveno |
| A basic education, as defined by a New York court, will prepare students to vote, to hold low-level jobs, and to serve on a jury, but not necessarily for anything more. |
For almost a decade, New York State has been involved in a legal battle over whether the state is paying its fair share toward New York City's vast and ailing public school system.
In the course of years of motions, arguments and news conferences, the struggle largely appeared to the public to be a complex rhetorical war over money: how much the city's schools need, whether the suburbs were getting more per student, and who should pay to bring the city schools up to a higher standard.
But two recent rulings in the case, including one on Tuesday by a state appeals court, highlighted a more fundamental question underlying the dispute — one more philosophical than financial; one involving the Constitution, not a calculator: what is the minimal obligation of government to educate its children?
New York is only one of more than two dozen states where courts have grappled with this issue, and some educators said they found the appeals court's ruling comparatively stingy. Reversing a lower court decision issued last year, the court ruled that schools were obligated by the state Constitution to do nothing more than prepare students for low-level jobs, for serving on a jury and for reading campaign literature — the equivalent, the court suggested, of an eighth- or a ninth-grade education.
"Defining an adequate education that minimally sounds like giving up," Gerald Graff, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said of the ruling, by the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court for the First Department.
But others saw the ruling's narrowness as a gesture not of parsimony but of wisdom, a recognition that money is not necessarily the cure for an ailing system.
"It's kind of a brave decision," said Clayton Gillette, a professor at New York University School of Law. "They're willing to say that dollars in does not necessarily equate with equality out, that there are other factors: poverty, immigration, labor contracts."
In its decision, the appeals court did not dispute that New York City schools are plagued by low-paid and undertrained teachers, large classes, antiquated books and deteriorated buildings.
But in reckoning with that sad state of affairs, they suggested that it was the court's job not to set an ideal — or, as the judges called it, an "aspirational" standard — but to determine what is a constitutional human right to education. New York City, however troubled its schools, met that standard, however limited the bar.
Barring a catastrophically low level of student achievement, the court suggested, it was up to politicians to make decisions about education and be voted out of office if citizens were unhappy with the judgments of the people they elected. The city's Board of Education is a functioning bureaucracy, the judges wrote, fully capable of solving the problems on its own. The judges even went so far as to allude to mayoral control of the system, which will take effect tomorrow, as a possible palliative for some of its ills.
The decision will be appealed by the coalition whose lawsuit led to the ruling, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and it is not yet clear whether the state will ultimately have to start imposing higher standards — and paying for them.
Whatever the outcome, the ruling has exposed a perhaps underappreciated and intriguing debate about what is meant by the state's guarantee of a "sound, basic education" for all its children.
Those words, so familiar to New Yorkers, are not actually contained in the state Constitution, which says only that the state is required to provide "the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools wherein all the children of this state may be educated."
The phrase "sound, basic" was coined by the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, as an interpretation of what the state Constitution requires. That court also decreed in 1995 that schools must prepare students to "function productively as civic participants capable of voting and serving on a jury."
The two courts that have ruled on the New York case have interpreted those words in varying ways. Both agreed that the requirement means more than just turning out people who can find their way to courthouses and voting booths.
But beyond that, they offered divergent views on what it means to "function productively" as a citizen.
In his January 2001 ruling, Justice Leland DeGrasse of State Supreme Court in Manhattan emphasized the difficult decisions citizenship can entail. "Jurors today," he wrote, "must determine questions of fact concerning DNA evidence, statistical analyses and convoluted financial fraud, to name only three topics." The state appealed his ruling.
Where Justice DeGrasse found that the city schools did not prepare students to meet that challenge, the appeals court disagreed, contending that "the skills required to enable a person to obtain employment, vote, and serve on a jury are imparted between grades eight and nine, a level of skill which plaintiffs do not dispute is being provided." Another question that drew lengthy discussions from both courts was the career options for which a "sound, basic education" should prepare students. Conceding that schools should not be required to prepare students for an "elite four-year college," Justice DeGrasse nonetheless ruled that students should be prepared for "competitive employment," meaning something more than "low-level jobs paying the minimum wage."
To the appeals court, that smacked of social engineering. Instead, a student should simply be provided "the ability to get a job, and support oneself, and thereby not be a charge on the public fisc," wrote Justice Alfred D. Lerner for the majority.
Courts in other states have been more willing than New York's to tackle the question of what states owe to their poorest communities, and to set a higher standard.
At what point, courts have asked, does the State Legislature have to make decisions that might go beyond the minimum constitutional requirement but that reflect deeper social values?
In New Jersey, it was a more expansive view of the state's obligation to its schoolchildren that drove the courts to order the state to equalize the difference in spending between school districts with wealthy property tax bases and those with poor ones.
In stark contrast with the New York appellate court, the New Jersey Supreme Court took the view that schools should be responsible for remedying educational deficits that might have their roots in larger social problems, like crime and poverty.
Legal scholars say that differences among court decisions have more to do with how willing courts are to become involved in making public policy than with interpreting any constitutional mandate.
The United States Constitution does not guarantee public education, and state constitutions, which do, contain language so bland that it is only minimally prescriptive.
"I'm not sure a lot has turned on the language of state constitutions," said Richard Briffault, a vice dean and professor at Columbia Law School. "Courts are wading into an area which is not their strong suit, but with the justification that there is a constitutional command to actually provide this service."
In New Jersey, for instance, the Constitution requires only "a thorough and efficient system of education," a far less radical proposition than the redistribution of property-tax wealth that has been imposed by the New Jersey courts to achieve equality among school districts.
Several states offer more poetic language. The California Constitution requires the Legislature to "encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral and agricultural improvements."
North Carolina's Constitution says: "Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools, libraries and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
In Florida, citizens have tried to pave the way for judicial intervention by shoring up the constitutional requirements. In 1998, voters approved a constitutional amendment that expanded Florida's guarantee of an "adequate" education to include an education that was 'efficient, safe, secure and high quality'."
The amendment was instigated by advocates who were contemplating a lawsuit, said Michael P. Griffith, a policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, though the lawsuit has not yet been filed.
A 1989 Kentucky Supreme Court decision provided one of the most expansive definitions of what makes an adequate education. It required schools to fulfill seven educational goals, including grounding in the arts; the ability to make informed choices about economic, social and political systems; and preparation for advanced training in academic and vocational fields.
In the wake of the court decision, Kentucky overhauled its educational system, and test scores rose significantly. "It's considered something of a success story," Professor Briffault said.
The evolution in litigation has coincided with the rise of the educational standards movement, and many courts have used the high school graduation standards developed by their states as benchmarks for what school systems should provide. While it may seem to contradict its relatively low threshold of a sound, basic education, New York State is now phasing in tougher Regents tests in five subjects as part of its graduation standards, though it is not yet clear how much the state will be willing to pay to help implement them.
It is too soon to tell whether New York will be forced to undertake changes similar to Kentucky's. Given the issue's political weight — and the large amounts of money involved — it was perhaps inevitable that the decision would fall to the state's highest court, which could begin hearing arguments on the city's school system as early as this fall.
