ShareThisCalifornia's system for funding public schools is irrational, unstable and in need of overhaul, a lawsuit filed this week asserts, and prevents 6 million students from receiving the education they are entitled to under the state Constitution.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday by a coalition of students, parents and education groups against the governor and the state, puts California on a growing list of states slapped with what lawyers call "adequacy" suits.
Thirty-three states have faced adequacy lawsuits, in which plaintiffs argue that a state does not give schools enough money to achieve that state's academic standards. In most cases, experts said, the states have lost in court and been forced to come up with more funds and a new way of paying for schools.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to fight the suit; his education secretary said the state will prevail because it already has in place a voter-approved education funding formula: Proposition 98.
Nonetheless, school funding experts across the country are turning with interest to California.
"This is going to be a nationally significant case," said Molly Hunter, an attorney with the New Jersey-based Education Law Center, which tracks school funding lawsuits. "Because California is so significant, how this case turns out will probably have some impact on other cases nationwide."
The Robles-Wong v. California suit was filed in Alameda Superior Court by the California School Boards Association, California State PTA, Association of California School Administrators, nine school districts and more than 60 public school students, including five from Folsom Cordova Unified. Lawyers are representing them for free.
At a Sacramento press conference announcing the suit, administrators and families said it is time for California to put money behind the standards it puts on paper. The state is among the top in the country when it comes to academic standards but at the bottom in terms of funding schools.
The budget crisis in the last two years has worsened an already bad situation, they said.
"Over the last 10 years, I have watched the educational opportunities for children diminish year by year by year," said Patrick Godwin, superintendent of the Folsom Cordova district. "This year, I had to propose doing away with middle school electives, closing schools, closing libraries, eliminating the most basic of counseling services just to balance the budget."
Similar cuts have taken place across the state, the suit argues, making it impossible for schools to educate students to the standards set out in California law.
Just half the state's students test as proficient in English language arts, state data show, and 46 percent test as proficient in math. National tests show California's fourth-graders place 47th among states in reading and the state's eighth-graders rank 46th in math.
The complicated funding formulas California uses to fund schools are a huge part of the problem, the suit alleges. A slew of "categorical" funding streams send money to schools that can be used only for particular programs, regardless of whether they are necessary on every campus.
(E-mail reporter Laurel Rosenhall at lrosenhall(at)sacbee.co.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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