Last week, CNN reported on recent events in Garfield Heights, Ohio, where austerity measures have led local school officials to shorten the schoolday to five hours, get rid of subjects like art, music, and PE -- and send kids home before lunch.
What didn't come out during the piece was that these drastic decisions were fueled in part by the community's refusal, over a 20-year period, to pass a levy that would help support the schools. Like many places across the country, Garfield Heights' residents were getting older, its younger people were moving away, and those that remained didn't see sufficient value in a measure that would be used to support the education of other people's children.
It wasn't that long ago that four U.S. Supreme Court justices believed the way we finance public education in this country was unconstitutional. Five of their colleagues disagreed, however, leading Justice Thurgood Marshall to speak forcefully in dissent. "The majority's holding," he wrote, "can only be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity and as unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives children in their earliest years of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens."
Marshall and his colleagues had been asked to rule on the funding policy of Texas, in which, like so many other places, the wealthier the community was, the more resources it had to provide for its schools. A group of poor parents brought suit, claiming that their state's policy of relying on property taxes to fund schools was an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Speaking for the narrow majority, Justice Potter Stewart disagreed, despite conceding that the Texas school system "can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust. . . . [But] it does not follow," Potter continued, "that this system violates the Constitution."
Marshall was incredulous. "The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed," he wrote, even though "no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society's well being."
Marshall's central point was simple: without equal access to a high-quality public education, democracy doesn't work. "Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights," he explained. "Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution."
Indeed, public education is our surest form of "national security." It provides the most likely path out of poverty, helps prepare young people to be successful workers and citizens, and reminds us all of who, on our best days, we aspire to be. And yet the reality is we continue to tolerate a system in which your zip code determines your access to the American Dream, and in which communities refuse to fund their schools because "their" children no longer go there.
We can do better. But first we need to correct the error the Court made in 1973. We need to admit that the way we fund public education in this country is unconstitutional, and we need to craft a new system that funds schools equitably.
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The tenth amendment says that the federal government cannot make any laws concerning education, by the way.
The fact that we have a bad method of funding public schools does not mean that we have an unconstitutional method of funding schools. In order for something to be unconstitutional, it has to go against something actually written in the Constitution.
So it comes down to a determination of "adequate" funding. And "adequate" changes over time in response to changes in society and the economy. What was "adequate" 100 years ago is no longer "adequate". I would argue that "adequate" schooling should prepare the student who is willing to study and work to successfully attend either academic or technical colleges - as appropriate to their skills and interests.
Students who are not willing to study and work are unlikely to succeed at anything.