A well-educated citizenry is essential to democracy. The Education Law Center reports good news for the schools and students of Illinois:
On September 30, the Illinois Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in Cahokia Unit School District No. 187 v. Pritzker, a case challenging inadequate and inequitable school funding that could potentially alter the landscape of school funding jurisprudence in the state.
The plaintiffs in the Cahokia lawsuit are twenty-two, low-wealth school districts across the state. They filed their lawsuit in 2018, charging that the State of Illinois has persistently underfunded their schools, depriving their students of their right to a high quality education under the Education Clause of the Illinois constitution.
The plaintiffs are represented by Thomas Geoghegan of the law firm Despres, Schwartz & Geoghegan, Ltd. in Chicago.
In 1996, in Committee for Educational Rights v. Edgar, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the Education Clause was a non-justiciable political question because the “quality of education” was not “capable of or properly subject to measurement by the courts.” The Court held that defining the quality of education was a matter for the State Legislature.
In the ensuing years, the Legislature took up that mantle, adopting the Illinois Learning Standards, which detail the specific educational experience to which all students in Illinois are entitled. The State also adopted tests to measure students’ progress on the Learning Standards.
In 2017, in response to intense political pressure, the Legislature enacted the Funding Act of 2017, designed to provide the resources essential for all students to achieve the State’s Learning Standards. In 2018, the State Board of Education determined, pursuant to the Funding Act’s criteria, that an additional $7.2 billion was required to provide adequate and equitable resources for all students. The Funding Act established a deadline of 2027 for full funding of the adequacy amount.
However, even in the first year of the Act’s decade-long phase-in to full funding, the state failed to provide the requisite installment of state school aid. This failure lies as the heart of the Cahokia lawsuit, in which the plaintiffs contend that the State is already so far behind on funding the new formula that full funding will not be achieved even by 2047.
The Cahokia plaintiffs presented data establishing a correlation between inadequate State and local per-pupil funding and failure rates on state assessments. The plaintiffs also demonstrated a wide disparity in passing rates on state assessments between students in low-wealth districts, which are inadequately funded, and in affluent districts.
In July 2018, the State defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that the case was beyond the reach of the courts, or “not justiciable,” based on the Supreme Court’s 1996 Edgar ruling. The trial court agreed and dismissed the complaint. In April 2020, in a split decision, the Appellate Court of Illinois affirmed the dismissal, noting that the Legislature’s enactment of the Illinois Learning Standards did call into question the holding in Edgar. However, the appeals court also ruled that overturning this precedent is the exclusive province of the Illinois Supreme Court.
Appellate Court Justice Milton S. Wharton filed a vigorous dissent, asserting that the court has a duty to address the issues in the case “instead of ignoring or postponing this critical issue of utmost urgency and importance to our citizens and our State with an overly broad application of Edgar ‘s holding.” Justice Wharton concluded that since Edgar, the Legislature has “determined the education students must receive” and, as a result, “courts no longer need to make that determination in order to resolve claims that students in under-resourced districts are not receiving the high quality education mandated by our State constitution.”
The Cahokia plaintiffs filed a petition for leave to appeal in the Illinois Supreme Court in July. The Supreme Court’s decision to accept the case provides the opportunity to revisit its decision in Edgar in light of the Legislature’s actions since 1996 that have defined the substantive contours of a quality education for Illinois public school students.
In 2017, in a case very similar to Cahokia, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reconsidered its previous ruling that constitutional education adequacy claims were non justiciable. In William Penn School District, et al., v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, et al., the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs (a coalition of school districts, parents, children and advocacy groups) were entitled to proceed to trial on their school funding claims. The Court declined to follow its earlier decision, now holding that it was possible to devise a judicially enforceable standard of educational adequacy. The Court further held that failure to adjudicate school funding claims would make a “hollow mockery of judicial review.”
A similar decision by the Illinois Supreme Court would allow the plaintiffs to proceed to trial to prove their case and would finally provide, as Justice Wharton declared, “an avenue [for] under-resourced school districts like the plaintiffs to insist on funding that is adequate to serve their students” in the manner to which they are entitled under the Illinois constitution.
Education Law Center is providing assistance to the Cahokia plaintiffs’ attorneys and working with the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on an amicus brief before the Illinois Supreme Court.
Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
Education Law Center
60 Park Place, Suite 300
Newark, NJ 07102
973-624-1815, ext. 24
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
So they are going to use test scores to somehow prove the adequacy or inadequacy of schools? Haven’t we already been down that route? What will they use as a benchmark? If they use norm referenced tests, someone will always be “needy.” Even if they don’t, test scores themselves are woefully inadequate to describe the success of a school district.
Agree. Full funding will not be achieved even by 2047. That applies only to schools and the many cohorts of students who will have completed their education long before that. Even full funding of schools will not address the larger problem of divestment in many communities where schools are located.
The main problem for students who are labelled “underperforming” are causally related to poverty in the communities were schools are located, and the entrenched patterns of discrimination against people who are poor and also too often black and brown and learning to speak English.
Standards and tests are in no way a path to ending deep-seated poverty and neglect. “A judicially enforceable standard of educational adequacy” cannot rest on expecting EVERY student to pass tests or the false belief that tests reflect standards, or the false belief the written standards are meaningful and achievable.
I’m nobody, who are you?
I’d like to tell you, folks,
It’s really just a hoax
With nobody infected
And nobody affected
Mild Symptoms?
Debate was just wild
But symptoms are mild
I’m stating a fact
My brain is intact
“A taste of my own medicine”
The Hydrochloroquine is mine
And so is household bleach
Injected in the central line
As I have oft beseached
surely we should all send a little bleach to the WhiteHouse
Good one!
Correct me if I am wrong, but the Cahokia district must be named for the famous Cahokia Mounds of East St. Louis. Thus inadequate funding will not only be because the location of East St Louis makes them a step-child for Illinois but also for the city of St Louis as well. Border areas have a long history of being ignored.
Pity that the state had to develop “educational standards” before a judge would look at a grievance. As Diane would say: “sad”.
School funding will never be fair if states can just renege on their end of the bargain without consequences. Some power of enforcement should be part of the decision. There is little to be gained by symbolic victories. New York still owes under funded school districts a lot of money from a court decision on school funding, and Cuomo ignores the ruling without consequence. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/education/2020/02/17/usccr-new-york-education-funding-inequitable-inadequate-foundation-aid/4737790002/
We have had two terrible cabinet members for more than ten years, serving as secretary of education. They should play a national role, with the formation committees of teachers and parents playing a significant role in the judgement of public school funding inadequacy. The teachers are likely to make sure that the low value of the testing industry is recognized….Devos has been terrible, but her predecessor was worse because he was taken seriously.
her predecessor was worse because he was taken seriously
Yes. Duncan did enormous damage.
For good reason.
He had a serious jump shot and did denormous damage to the opposing team in the Celebrity All Star game.
And of course, that was why Obama hired him.
Trump is experiencing only mild symptoms, and he was just joking when he said that doctors should look into having people inject bleach, and I’ve just about finished work on my perpetual motion machine and people dream because Queen Mab sprinkles fairy dust in their ears.
Would work on a perpetual motion machine ever really be finished?
LOL. Good one, SomeDAM!
There you go, exposing my magical secrets! How’s this one: you can pack more circles together if you use the square ones.
Yes, work on the machine continues, but I will need funding indefinitely.
If Trump is only showing mild symptoms, it’s no wonder the disease is considered by epidemiologists to be so serious.
I used to be an atheist
But now I’m not so certain
If God is not
Then tell me what
Is pulling back the curtain?
Love this one, SomeDAM!
When enters the random
There comes a conundrum
Of whether the change is divine.
For man, who is tiny
And thinks he is fine he
Will find the conclusion each time
That God is behind it
The faith conpreveinent
Seems proof to those looki for sign.
When enters the randumb
You know it’s his fandom
The wearer of MAGA attire
The ones who are maskless
And coughing and clueless
And jumping right into the fire
Trump is being moved to Walter Reed Hospital. Given Trump’s age and physical attributes, this is serious. I’ve read about incidents in which an older person gets sick and is gone within a few days.
If Ugh! dies, Mike Spence becomes president, who is easily linked to Ugh! by Biden. Spence has no track record as vice-president. Biden wins!
😁
I very much do want to see a Harris-Pence debate this Wednesday., & it best not be postponed or cancelled. I’m sure most of us here believe that Harris will eat Pence’s lunch. Should Pence wind up testing positive, having mild symptoms or appearing asymptomatic, I say “virtual debate,” * nothing less should be tolerated by the American people. Then, should circumstances arise that put Pence in the WH, I would think that Biden-Harris would win in a landslide.
“Mother, help!”
I’d say the debate should be virtual regardless of whether Pence has Covid.
These people are incapable of behaving in a civil or even human manner.
While I love a derailed conversation, I would like to further comment on the Cahokia case.
Living and teaching in a rural location, I am accutely aware of the effect of unbalanced funding of education. Back in the 80s, I think, 66 rural Tennessee districts sued the state over funding. On the verge of winning, a compromise solution was hammered out that never really came to pass. We are still lacking in the availability of programs for the population.
Now, however, there is another dimension to the problem. It is more local, and hence more problematic. On a county level, different counties are able to pay different amounts to teachers, making some counties the source for training and others the destination for final professional attainment. I teach in the former. We lose teachers every year to one of three places where you get a better deal as a teacher.
Under-funding schools where the student body has a lion’s share of problematic students takes place in urban locations as well. Teachers burn out trying to teach those hard to reach, and off they will go to the suburbs or magnets. So no matter where you are, the kids who need the most attention get less and the kids who could almost do it themselves get more.
Funding has got to change. We could dramatically increase funding today, and it would do no good, because we allocate money on a per-pupil basis instead of a per-need basis. Teaching some students as much as they have the capacity to learn is more intense than doing the same for others. I do not know how to do this, but we will lose the public in education if we cannot figure it out to the satisfaction of everyone in our communities.
What could Pence debate on? Lots of people salute the flag and worship God.
😁
“a well-educated citizenry”
Skeptics suggest Trump is faking Covid to get the bump in popularity that Boris Yeltsin got
after his stint with Covid. Also a rationale for lying, Trump wants to divert attention away from his taxes and the debate.
Boris Yeltsin died in 2007. It’s Boris Johnson. 😮
Eddie
Thanks.
I was wondering how Boris Yeltsin got covid or why it mattered if he did.
Although I would not be surprised in the least that people!e are still voting for him.
Mike Pence, not Mike Spence. My mistake. 😮
Glad to see this case accepted. We’re having an interesting battle in Mn where some of us would like to add words “high quality” to Mn Constitution guarantee re public education.