Executive director's note: CSBA files historic lawsuit against the state 

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the California School Boards Association’s Education Legal Alliance, in partnership with the Association of California School Administrators, the California State PTA, and a coalition of school districts, students and parents, has filed our long-planned school finance lawsuit against the state of California. Backed by solid evidence of the dramatic imbalance between the state’s high academic standards and its anemic school funding—which places us near the bottom in the nation in per-pupil expenditures—we’re asserting that California’s system of school finance is unconstitutional, and we’re calling on the courts to order the governor and Legislature to provide the funding necessary to meet those high standards.

Years of preparation have gone into this action. Nearly 40 states have seen similar legal action, with mixed results. In some cases, the litigation has taken years and resulted in little or no change in the way states fund their schools. In other states, however, the litigation has set the stage for political action that has measurably improved their public school funding.

We’ve studied the arguments and outcomes in every case, and we believe that our lawsuit will result in an historic win for California’s schoolchildren—and for the state itself, which can only benefit from a greater investment in the future those children represent.

I know each of you has personal stories of having to do more with less, but here are just a few measures of the challenges we all face:

• The state’s ongoing budget debacle has resulted in cuts to public education rivaling those of the Great Depression era.
• The “Getting Down to Facts” studies, commissioned by the governor and legislative leaders and published in 2007, concluded that getting every kid to the state’s Academic Performance Index goal of 800 in language arts, math and science would require an investment of nearly 40 percent more school funding than is presently provided—and that doesn’t begin to address such crucial programs as the visual and performing arts and career and technical education!
• We have seen a steady decline in per-pupil funding ever since the public schools in California became a state-financed system that relies principally on state resources rather than local property taxes.
  

The passage of Proposition 98 in 1988 failed to halt that decline. Indeed, I believe a good case can been made that Proposition 98 has done more to prevent a coherent conversation about adequate funding for the public schools than it has to provide the safety net it promised. These last few years provide ample evidence of this problem, particularly with the manipulation of the Proposition 98 guarantee by a succession of Democratic and Republican governors and legislatures that has resulted in the sorry state of affairs that we face today.

With think tanks of the left and the right concluding that California has among the highest academic standards in the country, it’s clear that there is a fundamental disconnect between the state constitution’s admonition to “provide for a system of common schools” and the Legislature’s abject failure to adequately support that system.

This simply cannot go on. We are long past yearning for the “good old days” when Ronald Reagan was governor and California’s public schools were in the top 10 among the states in per-pupil funding. Now we’re at the point where tens of thousands of teachers and classified staff have been laid off from their jobs—severely limiting our ability to meet our high standards and literally destroying the support system that our kids need in their schools.

So what happens next?

A full-court press, complete with opposing teams of lawyers refereed by a black-robed judge, is a distinct possibility—and one we’re fully prepared for. More likely, though, are out-of-court settlement talks that could take months, even years, to complete.

More money is not the solution to this unconstitutional system—although that is certainly one of our goals. We’re really after fundamental change in the funding structure, to free boards from the cyclical feast-or-famine budgeting they’re trapped in now.

Like strategic chess players, we’re already studying all the potential end-game scenarios. Beyond the resources that we have committed to this case through CSBA’s Education Legal Alliance, we are working to identify effective and politically practical funding reforms that could be presented to the governor and Legislature, and ultimately to the voters, if that’s what it takes.

CSBA and its partners will keep our members informed about the progress of the lawsuit. We’ve launched a new website, www.fixschoolfinance.org, to provide a clearinghouse for information on the case. (The latest news about K–12 education in general, written or selected especially for school board members, can always be found on CSBA’s own site.)

As you can imagine, all this is an expensive enterprise. We are very grateful for the financial support we have received through CSBA’s Education Legal Alliance and ACSA’s Education Legal Support Fund; we hope that we can count on your continued support.

In the meantime, CSBA will continue its efforts to secure the funding our public schools need through the current, conventional means that are open to us. This means working with the governor, Legislature and opinion leaders throughout the state when we can, and impressing on them the devastating impact that budget cuts have had on our ability to provide the best possible educational system for the students of this state.

On both the political and legal fronts—especially with the 2010 election year upon us—we will soon find out who’s for kids, and who’s just kidding.