Are courts going out of the school budgeting business? Maybe, though I have my doubts.
Back in October 2006, Sol Stern wrote about what happens when a politician, beholden to a teachers union, must then find a way to pay when the union’s demands threaten to impose significant burdens on the state.
A group in New York sued the state for another $5 billion in school funding, and won. And there we get the strange world of lawyers determining school budgets.
Anticipating the results of the next month’s election, Stern had this to say: “[Soon to be Gov. Elliot] Spitzer knows all the reasons why this case has been a perversion of the judicial process, why it has nothing to do with education improvement and why it poses a grave threat to the state’s fiscal future.
After all, it was Attorney General Spitzer, acting as the state’s lawyer, who noted that the court started down a perilous path when it decided that a single sentence in the state Constitution – one that merely requires New York to provide a “system of free common schools” – allowed judges to substitute their judgment about school funding for that of the legislative and executive branches.”
The journal Education Next, by the way, offers a review of these sorts of lawsuits in its 2007 Summer edition.
The New York group didn’t get the $5 billion, but “only” $1.9 billion. Josh Dunn and Martha Derthick see in the New York case, as well of others, signs that courts are growing wearing of handling such cases.
“Staring into the political abyss of adequacy litigation has apparently prompted some state courts to step back from the edge. Over the past two years, the highest courts of New York, Texas, and Massachusetts have decided to end or limit their support for adequacy plaintiffs. These decisions have all professed respect for separation of powers. However, the rulings seem motivated just as much by the recognition that courts lack the capacity to solve the problems of education and the institutional resources to enforce their decisions.”
The state’s highest court recognized that budgetary questions belong with the legislature. “Deference to the legislature is especially necessary where it is the State’s budget plan that is being questioned…. The Legislative and Executive branches of government are in a far better position than the Judiciary to determine funding needs throughout the state and priorities for the allocation of resources.”
On the other hand, the high court in Kansas went in the other direction (PDF), forcing the state into spending hundreds of millions of extra dollars. Once again, the legislative function of determining budgets was outsourced to courts and hired guns.