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The Sacramento Bee
Published: March 19, 2007

Lawsuits lurk over cost of fixing schools
By Laurel Rosenhall - Bee Staff Writer

California lawmakers now have more than 1,000 pages of research documenting loads of problems with the state's schools and estimating how much it would cost to successfully educate every child.

The landmark package of 22 studies released last week by Stanford researchers calls for at least a 40 percent increase in education funding and an overhaul of the way the state governs its schools.

It's too soon to know if the research will prompt real change in California's politically fractured Legislature. Even though a bipartisan group commissioned the studies, reactions to the findings already have diverged along party lines.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger welcomed the suggestions for change but dismissed the call for more money. Democrats, on the other hand, called for both policy reforms and an increase in funds.

But state leaders should have a strong incentive to keep this call for change from devolving into a political stalemate.

That's because a wave of litigation has been sweeping the country in recent years trying to address one of the major questions the Stanford study raises: how much it costs to adequately educate a student.

And if California lawmakers don't enact some of the funding and policy proposals in the Stanford studies, that litigious national trend could extend here.

Lawyers call them "adequacy" suits -- and about 30 states have been slapped with them, said Molly A. Hunter of the National Access Network, a New York advocacy group that tracks litigation over school funding.

"What typically generates a lawsuit is school districts feel like they're not getting enough money from the state ... to do what the state is asking them to do," Hunter said.

And that usually means getting students to meet increasingly rigorous academic standards. Over the past decade, many states have ratcheted up their expectations of schools and students without giving the schools more money -- prompting the wave of adequacy suits.

California set the bar high for what students should learn when it created academic standards in the 1990s.

Then came a testing program that measures how well students are meeting those standards. Now schools are judged twice on those test scores: first by the state, then by the federal government.

California says every campus should achieve an Academic Performance Index score of 800, a tally that reflects the entire student body's test performance.

The federal government -- through the No Child Left Behind law -- expects all students to be proficient in math and English by 2014. Schools must meet tougher targets in these subjects every year until then. If students fail to meet the performance targets, schools face a series of sanctions.

California schools right now lag far behind both the state and federal goals. Statewide, 45 percent of students are proficient in English and 48 percent are proficient in math. The average API is 720, with elementary schools scoring higher and middle and high schools scoring lower.

The state already spends roughly half its budget -- or about $54 billion -- on education.

The Stanford adequacy studies look at what it would take to get California students to meet the state and federal goals. They examine the link between what a state puts into its schools -- resources -- and what it gets out of them -- student performance.

The researchers try to predict how much student achievement would grow if schools had more money for a variety of things: preschool, smaller class sizes, after-school tutoring, nurses, more administrators to deal with behavior problems, more specialists to help students with disabilities, more English support for students who are not native speakers.

One study concludes that schools need 53 percent to 71 percent more funding to get students to meet the No Child Left Behind goals for 2011-12, which call for about 78 percent of them to be proficient in math and English. Another study determines that schools need about 40 percent more funding to meet the state goal of an API of 800.

Both studies say that schools with large numbers of low-income children need vastly more funding than schools that serve the middle class to achieve the same results.

"This is the largest bipartisan adequacy study in the country that's not (driven by) a court order," said state Superintendent Jack O'Connell.

O'Connell, along with the governor and legislative leaders, had requested that the adequacy studies be done. He said their request had nothing to do with adequacy lawsuits in other states.

"My motivation was simply on the merits of addressing funding and reform for public education," O'Connell said.

Others speculate that the state asked for the studies to prevent being hit with an adequacy lawsuit.

"The perceived need for that kind of research exists in the shadow of adequacy suits having been filed around the country and the obviousness of California's insufficiency of funding education," said Catherine Lhamon, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

"As I read the tea leaves, they are trying to get out ahead of a lawsuit."

Lhamon was among the lawyers who sued the state in 2000, alleging that California did not provide its lowest-achieving students with basic tools for learning: up-to-date textbooks, safe school buildings and credentialed teachers.

The state settled the so-called Williams case in 2004, acknowledging its failure to give all students the supplies, classrooms and teachers they needed -- and agreeing to pour an additional $1 billion into the lowest-scoring schools.

But that case did not address the idea of "adequacy" -- it focused on the concept of fairness by looking at the vast differences in school conditions. The Williams case established an educational "floor" that the state must provide at all schools, Lhamon said. An adequacy case, on the other hand, would determine a "ceiling" -- what the state must do to ensure that students receive a proper education.

"We weren't trying to solve the whole ball of wax" in the Williams case, said John Affeldt, another lawyer who worked on the case.

"We were saying it's unconscionable that these kids don't have books, that their facilities are so decrepit and that their teachers are not qualified," said Affeldt, of the San Francisco public-interest law firm Public Advocates.

Both lawyers expressed hope that the state would use the adequacy research to solve its educational problems through the political process. They said they'd be watching over the next couple of years to see if lawmakers approve substantive changes.

"It's a historic opportunity for the state to address continuing inadequacies in a smart way," Affeldt said. "Without litigation."