Over 60 years ago, the United States Supreme Court made a landmark decision that would forever change American education. Brown v. Board of Education is one of the most important and well known court cases to ever take place in the U.S. Similarly notable is an earlier case, State of Tennessee v. Scopes, commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial. Add Engel v. Vitale, Tinker v. Des Moines, Serrano v. Priest. Each one demonstrates the power that the court has in influencing how the United States educates its youth.
Though not in the U.S. Constitution, every state constitution contains a provision that awards its citizens the right to an education. In Connecticut, the judiciary has recently been forced to scrutinize just what exactly that provision entails. As the state grapples with enormous disparities between the educational success of rich and poor students, it must ask whether such conditions indicate that the state is not fulfilling its constitutional duty to provide its citizens with an education.
The case spurring these conversations is Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding v. Rell, which first came before the court in November of 2005. The plaintiffs, fifteen students and families from across Connecticut, alleged that the state was failing to meet its constitutional obligation to provide free elementary and secondary education to its citizens. They argued that the state constitution prescribes more than just the existence of schools; it prescribes an adequate education—a right largely denied to significant numbers of underserved students. And recently, Connecticut district court Judge Thomas Moukawsher ruled in favor of that argument, saying that the state has defaulted on its duty to provide an adequate education.
Yale Law School’s Education Adequacy Project Clinic represented the plaintiffs as they first took their complaints to court. The clinic, directed by Messrs. Alex Knopp, Esq. and David Rosen, provides pro bono legal service to students, parents, and organizations dealing with issues of educational inadequacy. Though most of the legal work is actually done by students in the clinic, Knopp, a former mayor of Norwalk and Connecticut state legislator, and Rosen, a nationally recognized appellate and employment attorney, play crucial roles as advisors with extensive backgrounds in education law and policy.
Rosen spoke about the lawsuit in an interview with The Politic, telling that its purpose was to establish that the right to an adequate education exists in Connecticut law. He said that “the clinic mobilized this very broad and fundamental claim for an adequate education,” a claim that had already worked its way into the laws of some states, but that Connecticut had yet to establish in its own.
The distinction between those students receiving an adequate education and those who were not fell mostly along socioeconomic lines. Connecticut students were succeeding, but only in the state’s wealthier areas. Students in the state’s poorer areas demonstrated higher dropout rates, and those who did graduate tended to do so with low literacy rates and test scores, often unprepared for integration into society or higher education.
Thus, it fell upon the court to determine whether the constitution’s education provision sanctions for more than just the existence of schools. Article Eighth, Section One of the Connecticut constitution mandates that “there shall always be free public elementary and secondary schools in the state.” In 2010, the Connecticut Supreme Court determined that this provision requires that the state’s education system also be adequate.
Reflecting on this ruling in an interview with The Politic, Knopp declared that the case “has already achieved landmark status in Connecticut law, because … [it]’s the first time that the education clause has been interpreted to have a positive, or substantive component.” The Supreme Court had decided to extend the law’s requirement to beyond just an education; it needs to be an adequate education.
Following this ruling, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Superior Court of Hartford. It was then the responsibility of the Superior Court to determine whether Connecticut’s education system meets this constitutional standard of adequacy.
After a lengthy six years of discovery, Judge Moukawsher concluded that the state was not meeting the standard set by the constitution. He mandated that the executive propose a new education system to the court within 180 days of his ruling.
Moukawsher based his decision on extensive data and anecdotes from those within the current system. Over the course of the trial he heard testimony from school administrators, teachers, and education and policy experts, and he reviewed myriad cases with precedential significance, studies on effective educational practices, and reviews of the current state of Connecticut’s education system.
This evidence led him to the four core elements of his ruling: that the state is ultimately responsible for the condition of its schools, that the state must distribute its education funding rationally, that the state must have a reasonable definition of primary and secondary education, and that schools must evaluate educators based on their ability to educate.
The first element holds the state accountable for the conditions of its schools. This element is critical during an era in which educational responsibility is often deferred to individual school districts. It implies that the state, not individual school districts, must act to resolve educational issues such as those of today’s Connecticut.
Element number two helps to define the specific inadequacies of the current education system. In his analysis, Moukawsher determines that the state “has no rational, substantial, and verifiable plan to distribute money for education aid and school construction.”
As in most states, local property taxes provide most of the funding for Connecticut’s public schools. This means that wealthier municipalities often have much larger coffers to draw on for public school funding, whereas poorer ones must rely heavily on state aid. As it currently stands, the state does give greater aid to the poorer districts. But, as Moukawsher points out, the mere allocation of greater state funding does not imply that these poorer districts are receiving enough.
Fueling this problem, he argues, is the issue that there seems to be no rational formula for aid distribution. One example he cites is an amendment the legislature made to the 2016 fiscal year budget. The amendment reduced funding to Bridgeport, one of the state’s poorest districts, by $905,293. Meanwhile Branford, a comparatively wealthy district, received a funding increase of $304,456 in the same amendment.
Moukawsher argues that in order for its education system to be adequate, Connecticut must have a formula to allocate state funding rationally, based on the needs of the districts. Only then will all of the state’s public schools have the resources necessary to provide a meaningful education to all students.
The third core element of Moukawsher’s decision addresses what he views as the connection between going to school and receiving an education. He writes that the state’s education system “is constitutionally required to rationally, substantially, and verifiably connect an education degree to an education.”
This comes as a response to growing concern about the ease with which students can graduate from public schools without actually demonstrating the proficiencies expected of a high school graduate.
An explicit example of this phenomenon comes again from Bridgeport, one of the state’s poorest school districts. Last year, Bridgeport public schools had a graduation rate of 63.6 percent.
But despite this high graduation rate, the district performed quite poorly on the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium’s high school achievement assessments, which test for college and career readiness. In Bridgeport, only 26 percent of high school students tested as on track for college or career readiness in English, and a mere 12.4 percent tested as such in math.
Moukawsher further emphasizes this point, writing that the state’s poorest students are being “let down by patronizing and illusory degrees.” He contends that in an effort to boost graduation rates, the state has devalued a high school education. Secondary school degrees have atrophied to a point where the Bridgeport superintendent admitted that “a functionally illiterate person could get a Bridgeport high school degree.”
The judge suggests that the state produce some kind of objective graduation standard, such as the high school graduation tests already present in fourteen other states. He cites Massachusetts as the current gold standard for a high school graduation test, a state that requires students to pass a standardized educational proficiency test to graduate. Massachusetts has consistently ranked number one in Education Week’s annual Quality Counts state education rankings, claiming the spot every year since the index began in 2008.
The final core element of Moukawsher’s decision criticizes the current system in place for evaluating educators. Like graduation rates, he argues that teacher evaluations should be directly related to actual educational success of students.
He finds it unsatisfactory that teachers’ compensatory schemes are in almost no way linked to their effectiveness in teaching. Since most of the Connecticut education budget goes towards paying teachers, the people universally contended to play the most important role in children’s education, Moukawsher finds it inadequate that there is no rational, substantial, and verifiable teacher evaluation scheme and corresponding compensatory system.
“An inflated teacher evaluation system,” he argues, “is virtually useless. A virtually useless evaluation system is constitutionally inadequate to undergird the state’s largest financial commitment to education.”
He is quick to dismiss the notion that we should evaluate teacher effectiveness based on test scores. Rather than use a metric that can be largely influenced by outside factors, Moukawsher recommends measuring student improvement, a method he believes to be most fitting for evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness.
Of course, the explicit recommendations that Moukawsher makes throughout his decision have no bearing on how the state shall proceed if the decision is upheld.
But still, this analysis of Connecticut’s education system constitutes one of the most thoughtful examinations of American education to date within the judiciary. Whereas many cases focus simply on the amount of funding going into schools, Moukawsher takes the opportunity to delve deep into what works within education.
Professor Richard Hersh, lecturer and senior advisor to the Education Studies program at Yale University, spoke with The Politic about education as more than just a few independent variables. “Education is a system,” he claimed, “and [Moukawsher] tackles this in ways that nobody else does.”
Hersh mentioned that in the past, people have focused on fixing only a few variables in the hopes that it would remedy the problems our school systems face. Schools have attempted raising standards, curricular reform, or greater teacher accountability, each solution alone producing little effect. In reality, education is comprised of a vast array of variables that, operating together, synergistically improves learning. Research on effective schools, says Hersh, “has shown that in combination such things as simultaneously raising expectations and standards, improving teaching, providing students with far more timely and appropriate feedback, from tests, quizzes, papers, and homework, and increasing relevant reading and writing opportunities increase student success.”
Hersh claims that “we know a great deal about how people learn and the conditions that promote learning but we have too often ignored the best of what we already know or have not had the courage or support to make the necessary systemic change. This is why Moukawsher’s opinion is so important.”
But despite the thoughtfulness and rigor that the opinion treats education with, it has come under scrutiny as potentially overstepping the judiciary’s bounds. The state has appealed Moukawsher’s decision on the grounds that it creates a new judicial standard for adequacy, a standard that allows the judiciary to encroach on the powers of the legislature.
The state filed the appeal in September, and the Connecticut Supreme Court decided soon after that it would hear the case. The Supreme Court’s ruling will determine whether Moukawsher’s standards and mandates overstep the powers of the state’s judicial branch.
Though the case will not come into full effect unless the Supreme Court upholds it, Knopp maintained that it has already brought to light much of what needs fixing in Connecticut’s education system. “The main point,” he said, “is that the struggle for justice in education funding has to continue.”
And he’s right. The struggle must continue. For we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all persons are created equal—and with equality of being must come equality of opportunity.