Nat'l School Funding Conference Themes: Pre-School, Court Budgets & Pay Your Own Way

Thanks to the Claremont Coalition, I attended the “Winning Educational Opportunity for All” Conference in Denver last week.  The conference was convened by the Education Law Center of New Jersey and was attended by 30 of the leading school funding litigators from around the country.  The old hands who have led school funding litigation efforts for decades in New York, New Jersey and California were in attendance, as were new comers just embarking on litigation in Wisconsin and Colorado.   The Colorado litigation, which challenges the adequacy of school funding in poor districts, is much like ours in that the lawyers are all volunteers and there is a lead firm that has trained and supervised a team of about 18 lawyers.   Trial is set to begin in August.  Unlike New Hampshire, school funding disparities in Colorado and in a number of other states appears racially tinged and some of the litigation focuses on racial disparities.

There were three points that dominated discussion during the conference that are worthy of passing along to readers in New Hampshire.  First, the efficacy of pre-school and early grade education remains a constant.  If money is tight, it should be triaged in favor of preparing children to learn and getting them strong basic skills before the third grade.  The remedial costs of catching up after third grade are high and the methods used are not always empirically supported.  Perhaps the Obama administration will add a focus on pre-school and early grade learning to its current efforts to promote healthy foods in schools?

Second, courts are not immune to scarce resources and there is a general concern that legislative tightening of judicial budgets has an effect on court rulings in the school funding arena.  Courts that rule in favor of poor school districts may feel the pinch in their own appropriations in following years.  New Hampshire unfortunately experienced this response to the Claremont decisions and I shared anecdotes with my colleagues at the conference about efforts undertaken in New Hampshire to remove Chief Justice Brock and punish his court after their school funding rulings.

Third, and finally, there was widespread recognition that school funding remedies cannot be crafted in a vacuum and that when litigators propose remedies, they must also work to identify the source of revenues necessary to pay for those remedies.  This recognition led to discussion of school inefficiencies that, once cleared, could free up funds to be used to remedy inequities.    It also led to discussion of tax revenues and tax fairness, topics closely related to school funding concerns.   Many states simply do not have the ability to raise additional funds through taxes.  Arizona and California were two striking examples of states with huge, longstanding deficits.  Other states, like ours, appear to adopt the story line of a widespread recession/depression while overlooking direct local experience that shows recovery and improvement.