California could be next battleground in national debate over adequacy 

It seems like a no-brainer: if Americans are serious about ensuring that every schoolchild meets minimum achievement standards, they must first figure out how much it costs to educate students and ensure that schools get the resources they need to do the job.

The stakes are even higher these days, with the federal government requiring that every American student meet high standards in reading and math as part of the No Child Left Behind Act.

“If you require certain things of kids, the argument is that the state has a commensurate responsibility to give schools the resources they need,” said Sacramento Bee education columnist Peter Schrag, a speaker at CSBA’s Annual Education Conference and author of “Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America’s Schools.”

“If a state demands that schools and students be accountable – for meeting state standards, for passing exit exams and other tests – the state must be held equally accountable for providing the wherewithal to enable them to do it,” he said. “That means calculations to determine the cost of those resources. The most mundane entrepreneur asks the same question: how much will it cost to produce each unit?”

But that’s not how school financing works in California or any other state. Instead of figuring out how much schools need to educate students, lawmakers typically decide how much they can afford to allocate to education; schools must make do with what they’re given.

Increasing numbers of public school advocates in state after state are crying foul. They are going to court, arguing that it’s unfair and illegal to require students to meet specific achievement standards without calculating the cost of the job and ensuring that schools get adequate support.

A recent Education Week survey of legal challenges to school financing plans in a number of states concluded that all six major judicial decisions in the last 18 months favored plaintiffs who argued that schools do not get enough money to ensure every student is proficient in basic subjects.

The subject of adequacy was a major topic at the conference. In his report to the Delegate Assembly, CSBA’s Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin told school board leaders that the association is considering a number of possible strategies to bring the issue of adequacy to the fore, including a possible legal challenge to the state’s system for financing its schools.

Schrag said he is very optimistic that CSBA’s efforts will succeed.

Some school advocates had hoped that the Williams lawsuit would raise the issue of adequate school resources and initiate a serious discussion of how much it costs to educate a California child.

CSBA and other school advocates will be working to ensure that the next case “addresses the central issue of adequacy” head on, Plotkin said, rather than “fiddling around the edges” the way Williams did.

CSBA and other Williams critics consistently argued that the plaintiffs, who hoped to ensure every student had clean school facilities, books and quality teachers, filed the wrong lawsuit. Instead of asking whether schools received adequate resources, Williams plaintiffs asked for more rules and inspections and reached an agreement with the state that will not fundamentally change the system.

A few state lawmakers, led by Sen. Dede Alpert, D-San Diego, have tried to raise the adequacy issue directly. Two years ago, the state established the Quality Education Commission to determine the cost of educating a California student. But Gov. Schwarzenegger shows no inclination to appoint members to a commission that would most likely conclude that the state does not allocate enough money to California schools. It has never met.

Schrag urged the school board members who attended his lecture to turn up the heat on the governor and Legislature to appoint members to the QEC and support its work.

“It’s easy to understand why no governor would want this commission to do its work,” Schrag said, “because its recommendations would most likely cost the state money. The QEC could give us a chance to create a vision for where the state ought to go; if we let it die, we miss a great opportunity.”