School Finance Reform and the Alabama Experience
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Description
In communities across the country, parents are increasingly going to court to enforce their children's state constitutional right to education. Many of these lawsuits claim that public schools have insufficient resources to provide their students with even a minimally adequate education. Conditions in rhe children's schools are often bleak: dilapidated and unsafe buildings, dirty and poorly maintained facilities, and widespread deficiencies of essential resources such as textbooks and equipment. Moreover, such schools are said to have low expectations of their students' ability to succeed, and standardized test scores and other conventional measures of learning are frequently unacceptably low. In response to these lawsuits, courts in about one-third of the states have struck down school funding methods and in some states have even found entire public school systems to violate state constitutional mandates. Judicial declarations that a state public school system is inadequate and inequitable have precipitated legislative efforts to increase school funding, to restructure public schools, and to hold school systems accountable for the achievement of students. This chapter addresses efforts by civil rights advocates in one southern state to use a state constitutional right to education as a lever to precipitate systemic school reform. The discussion proceeds from the perspective of a lawyer involved in the planning and litigation of education cases for the American Civil Liberties Union. The first part presents an abbreviated case study of Harper v. Hunt (the author served as one of plaintiffs' counsel), a lawsuit that successfully challenged the inadequacy and inequity of the public school system in Alabama. Because the case is pending, it is premature to offer conclusions about the lawsuit's effectiveness as a catalyst for educational improvement. But even if the comments of this chapter are provisional, it seems clear that the lawsuit can already claim at least one major victory: it has encouraged new constituencies to participate in the school reform process, thereby altering the political climate for educational change. The second part of this chapter describes three features of Harper that seem to have contributed to the lawsuit's constituency-building capacity: plaintiffs' use of a state constitutional adequacy theory; plaintiffs' reliance on the state court as the focus of judicial activity; and plaintiffs' collaboration, at both the liability and the remedial stages of the lawsuit, with legislative and executive officials. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that judicially precipitated reform may be most enduring when it is able to facilitate a more inclusive public discourse on the need for institutional change. But it also questions the sufficiency of deliberative dialogue as a solution to the problem of underresourced, underachieving schools.
Source Publication
Strategies for School Equity: Creating Productive Schools in a Just Society
Source Editors/Authors
Marilyn J. Gittell
Publication Date
1998
Recommended Citation
Hershkoff, Helen, "School Finance Reform and the Alabama Experience" (1998). Faculty Chapters. 775.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/775
