The last time there was a school funding suit in California, a decade ago in the Williams case, Gov. Gray Davis spent millions hiring high-priced lawyers to battle it tooth and nail. Then Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, and within months, settled the case, committing more textbooks, qualified teachers and school repairs for students in the lowest performing schools.

If the plaintiffs in the new funding suit filed Thursday, had a glimmer of hope that Schwarzenegger might do a reprise on his way out of office, he dispatched that notion hours after the suit was filed in Alameda Superior Court. “The Governor will oppose this lawsuit and believes the state will prevail,” a three-sentence statement from Bonnie Reiss, his secretary of education, began.

So Robles-Wong v California, which  fully challenges the underpinnings of the state’s school financing system, will soon fall in the lap of the next governor, who must decide whether to fight or settle a suit whose overarching claim appears patently obvious.

The ways that California funds its school are, as the complaint succinctly says, irrational, unstable and, three years into deep budget cuts, woefully insufficient. Its funding mechanisms are tied to legacy formulas dating back three decades, with no connections to the actual costs of the academic expectations and accountability demands that the Legislature and governors have imposed in the past decade. And the current system doesn’t build in extra funding for groups of students – English learners and low-income children – for interventions and extra help to which the Legislature has recognized, in flush years, they are entitled.

The lead groups bringing the lawsuit – the California School Boards Association, the Association of California School Administrators and the state PTA – aren’t asking for a dollar figure or percentage increase in spending. Instead, they want a judge to declare the current system unconstitutional and to order the governor and Legislature to “intentionally and rationally” design and fully fund a new one that incorporates costs of the state’s standards and programs. They are hanging their case, in part, on the state constitution’s requirement, dating to 1910, that from each year’s revenues, “there shall first be set apart the moneys to be applied by the state for the support of the public school system.” That goes beyond, they argue, Proposition 98’s requirement of minimum yearly funding – at least 40 percent of state revenue – for K-12 and community colleges. The level of funding should be determined not by expediency or fluctuating revenue tied to a volatile tax system but on meeting the fundamental right of all children to a public education preparing them to compete successfully and participate actively in the economy and a democracy.

Evidence behind the claim

That’s the broad constitutional argument, and the complaint backs it up with lengthy citations of the states’ failings: 37 percent proficiency rates for Hispanic and African-American students in English language arts;  37 percent proficiency for low-income children and 32 percent for English learners in math; rankings between 45th and 50^th among states in ratios of students to administrators, counselors, librarians and teachers; $2,131 per student less in spending than the national average.

The complaint cites condemnations of the current governance and funding systems in Getting Down to Facts, the 20-study report coordinated by Stanford in 2007, and in the report of Schwarzenegger’s own Committee on Education Excellence, which concluded, “Our system is simply not preparing every student to be successful in college or work; it is not producing the results that taxpayers and citizens are counting on and that our children deserve.”

A judge wouldn’t have to take long to declare the current mess unconstitutional. From there, though, things could get sticky.

Difficulties with adequacy cases

The history of states’ adequacy suits is not encouraging. Some suits, like the one in New Jersey, have lasted decades. Most have led to huge outlays of money, with little to show in terms of student improvement. Kansas City, which got $2 billion from a court settlement starting in the 1980s, is now bankrupt and is about to close half its schools, may be the worst case.

The pro bono attorneys*** for the plaintiffs say that Robles-Wong is not a traditional adequacy suit, in which experts argue over the cost of providing a quality education, and a frustrated judge eventually picks the price. But the case could evolve into one, if the next governor(s) stalls and his experts lowball and quibble over cost estimates to meet various state standards. There are various methods for estimating the costs of an adequate education, and the results can wildly vary.

While quoting liberally from the Governor’s Excellence Committee and Getting Down to Facts, the plaintiffs omitted an important qualifier: Both the commission and the researcher concluded that simply adding more money to a broken system would unlikely lead to improvements.

“While meaningful reform will likely require added investment, it is also clear that absent reform, directing more money into the current system is unlikely to result in the dramatic improvements in student achievement needed to reach state goals,” the summary report stated.

Giving a principal more authority to hire effective teachers, granting more authority of local districts to make educational decisions, rewriting tenure laws and replacing the current automatic pay scale with pay incentives wouldn’t cost more money. Yet they underlie an effective use of more dollars.

Of course, both Getting Down to Facts and the Excellence Commission predated the implosion of state revenue; they were written when new money appeared on the horizon. By the plaintiffs’ calculation, schools have lost $17 billion over the last two years, with more losses coming.

Schools need more money just to catch up, and a rational way to determine how much more in the future. A smart governor would see the path to a settlement  in combining the funding system that the plaintiffs advocate with the underlying reforms that, in the suit, they ignore.

*** Attorneys for the plaintiffs include Stanford Law Professor Bill Koski and the Mills Legal Clinic at Stanford Law; Bill Abrams and Sandra Zuniga of the Bingham McCutchen law firm in East Palo Alto;  Deborah Caplan and Joshua Daniels of Olson Hagel & Fishburn in Sacramento; and Sacramento attorney Abhas Hajela.