Court ruling won’t help students

Regardless of how the Kansas Supreme Court rules on the upcoming funding adequacy appeal, students will be no better off.

The justices would violate the Constitution and ignore their own rulings if they order more funding, but they can’t make local school boards use the money to improve outcomes. Only the Legislature and the Kansas State Board of Education can do that, and neither has shown any interest in holding school districts accountable for improving outcomes.

The absence of accountability has allowed districts to operate inefficiently and waste money that could be spent on instruction, and that is probably a major factor in achievement remaining persistently low for most students.

The March 2014 ruling sending the adequacy determination back to a district court panel marked a sea-change in the Supreme Court’s view of school finance, as it told the panel to use a new test for determining whether adequate funding had been provided. It said adequacy “is met when the public education financing system provided by the Legislature for grades K-12 – through structure and implementation – is reasonably calculated to have all Kansas public education students meet or exceed the standards set out in Rose.”

But the districts using your money to sue you for more money can’t make their case, because they don’t know how to define or measure performance against the Rose standards.

The Supreme Court should dismiss the case. If the plaintiffs cannot define and measure Rose, they have no legal basis to claim they lack adequate funding to meet or exceed those standards.

The District Court judges ignored that fact, and they also ignored Supreme Court guidance on “reasonably calculated,” which declared “actual costs from studies are more akin to estimates than the certainties the panel suggested.” The judges defiantly based their unconstitutional funding order on the 2001 Augenblick and Myers cost study.

Even scholars who believe there is some correlation between spending and achievement say it’s how money is spent that makes a difference, rather than the amount spent. And most experts attribute the recent nationwide dip in test scores to transition to Common Core.

Ignoring facts and simply increasing funding didn’t improve outcomes before and never will without imposing a consequence on school districts for persistently low achievement.

This story was originally published September 20, 2016 at 5:03 AM with the headline "Court ruling won’t help students."