School Funding Litigation Seems Endless But Proves Essential
According to David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center and lead counsel in the New Jersey school funding case, Abbott v. Burke, “There is a decades-old and stubborn unwillingness by governors and legislators in state capitols to remedy the stark disparities in educational opportunity that mark the education landscape in most of our states.”
Noticing that states do not adequately compensate for enormous disparities in local taxing capacity from school district to school district, Eduardo Porter, writing a month ago in the business section of the NY Times, wondered: “If education is a poor child’s best shot at rising up the ladder of prosperity, why do public resources devoted to education lean so decisively in favor of the better off?” This question is related to the much discussed international PISA scores released last week, an international score ranking in which the test scores of U.S. students in schools segregated by poverty and race pulled down the average for our society.
Even before last week’s despair about PISA scores, Porter raised the central issue: “The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students, according to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).” The OECD that conducted the research on comparative school funding equity is also the sponsor of the PISA exams.
Porter quotes Andreas Schleicher, in charge of the PISA assessments for OECD: “The bottom line is that the vast majority of OECD countries either invest equally into every student or