Obs 1 harms and inherency
a. The current system makes it impossible to provide all students with an equal opportunity for an excellent education.
Ogletree and Robinson 16 — Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“The K-12 Funding Crisis,” Education Week, May 17th, Available Online at Accessed 06-07-2017)
Current discussions about K-12 education often highlight the reforms that seek to improve the quality of schooling. Some of these measures—the common-core standards, teacher evaluation, and, most recently, the Every Student Succeeds Act—undoubtedly have the potential to improve educational opportunities for students. However, what is often missing from education reform conversations is how these reforms can create sustainable changes to the education system. We believe the system'svery foundations are broken, and school funding is one of the most pressing issues in need of repair.
Most states have failed to create school funding systems that provide the necessary foundation for all children to receive equal access to an excellent education. The nation's children deserve no less, particularly in view of evidence that money spent wisely on education matters. In a 2012 review of studies that looked at the effect of funding on student outcomes, education scholar Bruce D. Baker found that ongoing improvements that enhance the amount and distribution of funding can increase student achievement.
School funding took a substantial blow after the Great Recession began in 2007, even as federal funding from the economic-stimulus package in 2009 softened the impact. Despite the improving U.S. economy, school funding has been slow to recover, and schools still feel the recession's effects nine years later. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found in a recent report that although 35 of the 46 states surveyed increased their general state aid per student in 2016, 25 are still providing less general state funding than they were in 2008. And at least seven of those states have cut 10 percent or more from their general state funding per student since the recession.
And as a result of the recent drop in oil, coal, and gas revenues, Alaska, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, among other states, have had to make deep cuts in their K-12 school budgets and must now find new funding streams.
Whether in tough or strong economic times, families and education funding advocates lack a way to insist on the equitable financing needed for excellent schools. This absence arises in part from the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez decision, which affirmed that the U.S. Constitution neither explicitly nor implicitly provided a remedy for closing the funding gaps across school districts. This decision closed the federal courthouse door to future decisions that could address K-12 spending gaps and, ultimately, the gaps in educational opportunities and resources among children across districts.
The decision thus remanded the design and implementation of more-effective school funding systems to the laboratory of the states. The Supreme Court's decision also noted the need for changes to school funding and expressed concern about the long and heavy reliance on local property taxes.
Despitesubsequent decades of state-level litigation on school finance, most changes to finance systems have failed to provide equal access to a high-quality education for all children. Most states continue to build education systems funded by property taxes that vary greatly depending on a child's ZIP code, rather than a child's needs and the desired educational outcomes.
Significant school finance reforms can, in fact, lead to improved educational and social outcomes for children.
A 2015 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which followed children born between 1955 and 1985 through their adult lives in 2011, found that disadvantaged students completed an additional 0.46 years of schooling when districts had a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for the 12 years the children attended public school. In adulthood, their earnings increased by almost 10 percent, and their likelihood of living in poverty was reduced by roughly 6 percentage points, while children in districts without such spending increases did not experience similar benefits.
The study also found that increasing spending by 25 percent per student throughout the course of a K-12 education could erase the attainment gaps between students from low-income and nonpoor families.
b. Public school funding remains unfair and inequitable — the latest study proves.
ELC 17 — Education Law Center, a non-profit organization in New Jersey that advocates for equal educational opportunity and education justice in the United States,2017 (“School Funding Remains Unfair For Most Students Across The Nation,” Press Release Announcing Release of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, January 25th, Available Online at Accessed 06-14-2017)
Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card (NRC), released by Education Law Center (ELC) today, finds that public school funding in most states continues to be unfair and inequitable, depriving millions of U.S. students of the opportunity for success in school.
The sixth edition of the NRC uses data from the 2014 Census fiscal survey, the most recent available. The NRC goes beyond raw per-pupil calculations to evaluate whether states are making sufficient investments in public education and distributing funding relative to need, as measured by student poverty. To capture the variation across states, the NRC uses four interrelated "fairness measures" – Funding Level, Funding Distribution, Effort and Coverage – that allow for state-by-state comparisons while controlling for regional cost differences.
The NRC released today shows almost no improvement since the end of the Great Recession in those states that do not provide additional funding to districts with high student poverty. There is also no change in the vast differences in levels of funding for K-12 education across the states, even after adjusting for cost. The states with the highest funding levels, New York and New Jersey, spend more than two and one-half times that of the lowest, Utah and Idaho.
Key findings include:
* Funding levels show large disparities, ranging from a high of $18,165 per pupil in New York, to a low of $5,838 in Idaho.
* Many states with low funding levels, such as California, Idaho, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas, are also low “effort” states, that is, they invest a low percentage of their economic capacity to support their public education systems.
* Fourteen states, including Pennsylvania, North Dakota, New York, and Illinois, have “regressive” school funding. These states provide less funding to school districts with higher concentrations of need as measured by student poverty.
* Students in certain regions of the country face a “double disadvantage” because their states have low funding levels and do not increase funding for concentrated student poverty. These “flat” funding states include Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in the Southeast, and Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico in the Southwest.
* Only a handful of states – Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Jersey – have “progressive” school funding. These states have sufficiently high funding levels and significantly boost funding in their high poverty districts.
* States with unfair school funding perform poorly on key indicators of resources essential for educational opportunity. In these states, access to early childhood education is limited; wages for teachers are not competitive with those of comparable professions; and teacher-to-pupil ratios in schools are unreasonably high.
The sixth edition of the NRC released today underscores the persistence of unfair school funding as a major obstacle to improving quality and outcomes in the nation’s public schools. Most states finance public education purely on political considerations from year-to-year, and not on assessments of the actual cost of delivering rigorous academic standards to all students. Most states also continue to use outmoded methods of funding public education that fail to allocate additional funding to address concentrated poverty and other risk factors, including English language proficiency and disabilities. These antiquated methods are the cause of persistent funding disparities between low wealth, high poverty and high wealth, low poverty districts, even in states with high funding levels, such as Connecticut and New York.
“School finance reform is long overdue,” said Bruce Baker, the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education Professor who developed the report's methodology. “States must develop, and then fund, school finance formulas that identify the costs of providing essential education resources to students, accounting for diverse student needs and taking into account local fiscal capacity.”
“Lawmakers in states with deeply regressive and flat funding, like Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Arizona, urgently need to overhaul their finance systems to give students a meaningful opportunity to succeed in school,” said David Sciarra, ELC Executive Director. “Even states with higher funding levels, such as Ohio and Maine, need to do more to ensure fair funding for each and every student.”
“President Trump is flatly wrong when he says our schools are flush with cash,” Mr. Sciarra added. “In fact, for students in many states and entire regions, their schools are woefully underfunded, depriving them of the qualified teachers, support staff, reasonable class sizes and other interventions they must have to succeed in school. It's time to put fair school funding at the top of the nation's education reform agenda."
Plan = The Supreme Court of the United States should overturn San Antonio v Rodriguez and rule that there is a federal right to primary and secondary education on the basis of human dignity jurisprudence
Contention ( ): Solvency
A, requiring equal access to an excellent education is vital to close opportunity and achievement gaps
Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 205-206)
I contend that the United States should strategically restructure and strengthen the federal role in educationto establish the necessary foundation for a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education. This restructuring and strengthening of the federal role in education would require shifting some power away from the state and local governments and toward the federal government. The United States would then need to adopt a new understanding of education federalism that embraces the federal government as the guarantor of equal opportunity, because it is the only government with the capacity and sufficient incentive to lead a national effort to achieve this widely supported, yet persistently elusive, goal. Although this would not require federalizing the nation's education system as at least one scholar has recommended, it would require acceptance of a larger federal role in education to hold the states accountable for ensuring that all students receive equal access to an excellent education.7
I define equal access to an excellent education as the opportunity for all students to attend a high-quality school that enables them to effectively pursue their life goals, to become engaged citizens, and to develop their abilities to their full potential.8 Equal access to an excellent education enables all students to receive “a real and meaningful opportunity to achieve rigorous college- and career-ready standards.” 9 If the United States pursues equal access to an excellent education as the primary goal for its education system, it will break the traditional link between low-income and minority status and inferior educational opportunities. This goal recognizes that educational opportunities should be tailored to meet the individual needs of students that may vary dramatically depending on a variety of factors, including family structure and stability, students' health and nutrition, and neighborhood climate. This goal also embraces closing the opportunity gap as an essential prerequisite for closing the achievement gap. Furthermore, embracing racially and economically diverse schools is essential for achieving this goal given compelling research regarding the harms of racial and class isolation, the benefits of diversity, and evidence of diverse schools providing important educational benefits that cannot be duplicated by alternative reforms. 10 An excellent education for all schoolchildren should be the nation's ultimate [end page 205] education goal, because all families ultimately want a first-rate education for their children and because the United States would benefit economically, socially, and politically from providing such an education.
B, comprehensive federal action is needed for successful reform.
Robinson 16 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“Fisher’s Cautionary Tale and the Urgent Need for Equal Access to an Excellent Education,” Harvard Law Review (130 Harv. L. Rev. 185), November, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
B. Overturning Rodriguez
To be most effective, a comprehensive federal agenda requires the assistance of all three branches of government. The executive branch enjoys the fewest obstacles to reform because it could use its existing authority to accomplish incremental shifts to education federalism through modest reforms that employ its existing authority and resources. n295 Nevertheless, given the full scope of the shift to education federalism that I recommend, reforms instituted without any significant involvement of Congress or the Court would lack the comprehensive nature that ensuring equal access to an excellent education for all schoolchildren will ultimately demand. Legislation consistent with this agenda would send an even more powerful message that the agenda represents the will of the people and thus may encourage greater state and local buy-in. n296 However, the eight-year delay in reenacting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which eventually led to the reduction of the federal role in education in the Every Student Succeeds Act, n297 and the great difficulties that Congress is experiencing in passing legislation n298 suggest that legislative reform consistent with my proposal is unlikely in the near term.
[*231] Fortunately, the Court possesses the authority to unleash a powerful tool that could help to reduce the opportunity and achievement gaps that lead universities and colleges to rely on affirmative action in admissions. It could overturn Rodriguez, which held that the Constitution does not protect education as a fundamental right. n299
For over forty years, Rodriguez has served as a roadblock to access to federal courts for those who hope to address the entrenched disparities in funding and resources that relegate many disadvantaged and minority students to inferior educational opportunities in the United States. n300 Because the Court held that education was not a fundamental right, Rodriguez applied rational basis review to the funding gaps between districts within Texas. n301 The Court determined that Texas easily met this standard because its funding approach advanced local control of education, the Court lacked the expertise to second-guess the Texas system, and a ruling for the plaintiffs would greatly upset the balance of federalism. n302 The Court nonetheless noted the need for reform of school funding and challenged the states to undertake this reform. n303Although many states have implemented funding reform since Rodriguez and state litigation has resulted in some important victories, these state efforts have fallen far short of the reforms required to provide all children equal access to an excellent education. n304In light of the continuing disparities in educational opportunity, numerous scholars, myself included, have argued that Rodriguez was wrongly decided and should be overturned to provide a consistent and powerful federal remedy to address these disparities. n305