Education spending deficient, suit says; McDuffy litigants return to court
Worcester Telegram and Gazette
By Clive McFarlane
June 18, 2003
In Levy v. Dukakis, Worcester became one of the first districts in the commonwealth in the 1980s to challenge the equity of the state's education funding formula.
The Worcester case eventually became part of McDuffy v. Robertson, the landmark 1993 case in which the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the inequity in school district spending across the state was unconstitutional.
The court accepted as a remedy, at the time, the Education Reform law of 1993, which, during the past 10 years, poured billions of additional dollars into education funding and provided a blueprint for what students need to know and be able to do.
But this week the McDuffy litigants brought their case, now called Hancock v. Driscoll, back to the courts, claiming the state has not met its constitutional obligation to provide adequate education to all children.
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Norma Shapiro, president of the Council for Fair School Finance, said the $30 billion the state has spent on education funding since 1993 has helped, but falls short of what is adequate to support the plan the state has devised for public schools under the Education Reform law.
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Superintendent James A. Caradonio acknowledged that Worcester has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the state's education funding formula.
Between 1993 and 2003, for example, the Worcester public schools' budget rose from $87.8 million to $209.2 million.
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''It showed that money does matter and that resources matter,'' he said of what the city has been able to do with the increased funding.
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S. Paul Reville, executive director of the Center for Education Research and Policy at the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, will be called as a witness for the state.
He said the litigants have clearly shown in the past that their case has merit.
And should the court side with the litigants again, it would create a political dilemma for legislators, who, to avoid raiding the funding of other services to shore up education spending, would have to consider raising taxes, Mr. Reville said.
''The education reform set new and higher standards for all schools, and we can be proud to be one of the states that also allocated additional resources to meet those standards,'' he said.
''The question is whether or not we have delivered sufficient resources, and a reasonable argument could be made that the remedy has been insufficient.''
Nevertheless, money is not the sole determinant of whether a district can adequately educate its children, he said, noting that Cambridge, which has one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the state, has not met all of its academic goals.
''The amount of money you have is not the determining factor in educational quality,'' he said. ''It is a necessary precondition, but it is not about how much money, but how it is spent.''
