Connecticut Supreme Court Overturns Sweeping Education Ruling

It was a 12-year legal battle that began as a challenge to Connecticut’s education funding system and came to touch on issues ranging from graduation requirements to teacher evaluations. On Wednesday, it reached its likely conclusion when the State Supreme Court said Connecticut was fulfilling its constitutional obligation to its public school students.

States across the country have faced legal challenges about how they spend money in schools and whether they spend enough on poor students, but this case, Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding v. Rell, took a remarkable turn in 2016 when a judge deemed the funding system irrational and ordered the state to reform nearly every pillar of its education policies. This week, the state’s highest court overturned that ruling, saying such reforms should be left to the political process.

“It is not the function of the courts, however, to create educational policy or to attempt by judicial fiat to eliminate all of the societal deficiencies that continue to frustrate the state’s educational efforts,” said the decision, written by Chase T. Rogers, the chief justice.

“Once a determination of minimal adequacy has been made,” the chief justice wrote, “courts simply are not in a position to determine whether schools in poorer districts would be better off expending scarce additional resources on more teachers, more computers, more books, more technical staff, more meals, more guidance counselors, more health care, more English instruction, greater preschool availability or some other resource. Such judgments are quintessentially legislative in nature.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/nyregion/connecticut-supreme-court-education-funding.html