Litigation in education: for 50 years, courts have been deciding whether states are meeting their constitutional obligations to provide a free and adequate education.

• Author: Smith, Steve

An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens.--Thomas Jefferson

Two centuries later, courts are playing a major role in deciding whether states are meeting their constitutional obligations to provide a free and adequate education to the citizenry. Marking the 50th anniversary of the landmark education case, Brown v. Board of Education, 25 states have been involved in school finance litigation. Although plaintiff strategies for litigation have changed over the years, the nature of the complaints--funding levels--has remained the same.

"It's truly amazing how many states are currently facing legal action. It has definitely picked up over the past couple of years, and I think it will continue," says Al Lindseth, an attorney who defends states in school finance cases.

The major issue in education finance litigation has shifted from equity to adequacy. Equity is the amount of funding one group of students in a state receives relative to other defined groups. Adequacy is the amount of funding required for all students to have a reasonable opportunity to meet education goals.

With the changes wrought by 20 years of evolving, standards-based education reform, finance systems are facing a new vulnerability in state courts. It is one that was more easily refuted before the implementation of accountability systems and mass student data collection.

Confronted with litigants well-armed with student performance information to support their claims, an increasing number of states are being forced to make difficult decisions about how their education funding systems operate.

STANDARDS-BASED REFORMS

Although plaintiffs were successful in the equity cases of the 1970s, the 1980s brought new challenges to plaintiffs as many states already had modified their finance systems to be more equitable. However, when states embraced standards-based reform during the 1980s, they laid the foundation for the modern adequacy movement.

In 1981, then-U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell created the National Commission on Excellence in Education to study the quality of American education. The commission issued its findings in the 1983 report "A Nation At Risk." It warned that the United States would be vulnerable in a burgeoning global economy if its education systems failed to improve.

Standards-based reform emerged from the controversy ignited by "A Nation At Risk" and public discontent with the nation's education system. Standards-based reform was proposed as a way of improving America's education systems and strengthening the nation's role in the global economy. Building on reform initiatives in the private sector and with the blessing of the business community, many states developed high academic standards and assessments that could measure progress toward reaching goals.

Raising the bar for education systems and requiring the increased use of standardized assessments to gauge academic progress was a widely lauded goal, supported by legislatures throughout the country. But it did have some unintended...