Courting Failure: Education Experts Expose the Politics behind the Nation's School Finance Lawsuits.

STANFORD, Calif. -- As the final ruling of one of the most contentious school finance lawsuits in the nation nears -- New York's Campaign for Fiscal Equity case -- Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education releases Courting Failure: How School Finance Lawsuits Exploit Judges' Good Intentions and Harm Our Children, edited by Eric A. Hanushek (Education Next Books, 2006).

The complete text of Courting Failure is available online at www.KoretTaskForce.org.

Courting Failure exposes the politics behind the education "adequacy" lawsuits now sweeping the nation and challenges the flawed arguments behind many of the judicial decisions. These lawsuits charge that students fail to learn because public schools are underfunded. Given enough money, the argument goes, schools would be able to meet their state's educational goals. This claim, however, lacks any real scientific proof to substantiate it and dramatically oversimplifies the problem.

See the "10 Myths of School Finance Adequacy" below, which exposes the half-truths and presents the essential facts every citizen should know. Courting Failure addresses each myth with evidence.

The New York case, a model of notoriety in this kind of litigation and one of the motivations for the book, has become a leading example of critical errors in judicial judgment that are the result of political maneuvering and good intentions gone awry. And New York is by no means alone in this struggle over school finance. As of 2005, almost half the states had active "adequacy" cases in the courts at some stage of the judicial process. And only five states have never had a school finance court case in the past three decades.

"Even though our schools need improvement, these lawsuits are leading in the wrong direction and are actually thwarting more productive reforms," explains Hanushek, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and member of the board of directors of the National Board for Education Sciences.

One of the most devastating elements in these trials is the high-profile "costing out" studies used to calculate the price tag of an adequate education. None of the studies effectively deals with any of the inefficiencies that currently exist in public schools, presuming that what is needed to get the desired student outcomes is simply more of the same -- and more money to support it. Indeed, some of the studies explicitly choose the most expensive way of running an educational program rather than the least expensive, inflating the costs and completely ignoring any possible change in the incentives or operations of public schools.

Unfortunately, the courts have frequently sided with these recommendations. Judges, bent on doing good but with little expertise with which to make sense of the science, or lack thereof, behind the studies, have used the findings to be very prescriptive in their orders, setting dangerous and costly precedents.

In New York City, for example, the trial judge declared that the current funding for operations and maintenance should be increased by $5.63 billion a year, an amount that would push spending to double the national average. In Wyoming, the legislature, under pressure from the courts, pushed state spending on education up to the fifth highest in the nation in 2003. Consultants hired by the legislature counseled that this spending was still substantially insufficient, leading to further massive increases in 2006. In Kansas, the court directed the legislature to appropriate the amount judged by the consultants to be necessary for adequacy in the state's education system -- a more than 20 percent increase.

In the end, these cases, whose full impact has yet to be felt, are unlikely to improve America's public schools and may very likely hurt them.

10 Myths about School Finance Adequacy

1. MYTH: Courts, because they are not political, are the best place in which to make educational funding decisions.

FACT: Courts are very prone to politics, as shown in the dramatic events surrounding the New York City court case (Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York). Decisions of the courts reflected political pressures.

2. MYTH: The spending called for in court judgments in school finance adequacy cases is based on careful scientific analysis.

FACT: The attempts to "cost out" the resources needed for an adequate education violate standard scientific rules and instead are political documents aimed at increasing funding for schools. The consultants providing these estimates never predict that student outcomes will increase at all with the additional funds they identify as being required.

3. MYTH: Performance of U.S. schools has shown the importance of increased funding and resources.

FACT: U.S. performance has been flat for 35 years, despite more than tripling spending per student (after adjusting for inflation). Thus, past efforts to lower class size and to seek better teachers have not had a discernible impact.

4. MYTH: Improved student performance necessarily requires additional funding.

FACT: Schools should first focus on how current money is being spent rather than on the question of how much should be spent. For example, an important constraint on schools is the amount of time for student instruction. Good use of this time -- involving sound academic curricula -- does not generally cost more than bad use of the time but gets much better results.

5. MYTH: With sufficient funding, schools serving disadvantaged populations have shown success.

FACT: A number of school systems -- Kansas City, Cambridge, New Jersey, "Abbott schools," and others -- have enjoyed very large infusions of resources but have failed to show any improved student outcomes, even with judicial monitoring and educator-designed programs.

6. MYTH: School districts currently direct additional funds to educate disadvantaged students.

FACT: Even though the adequacy lawsuits call for extra funding to go to disadvantaged students, most school systems do not have accurate data on what they currently spend on various students. Moreover, disadvantaged students frequently receive fewer, not more, resources.

7. MYTH: Schools serving high-poverty populations cannot succeed.

FACT: A large number of high-poverty schools have shown that they can attain high student achievement. These schools, which repeat these educational feats year after year, concentrate on educational solutions, not simple spending.

8. MYTH: Improved student outcomes have resulted from past finance lawsuits.

FACT: Very little analysis has gone into assessing the results of past lawsuits. In every case where such an assessment has been made, however, little or no effect on student achievement has been seen.

9. MYTH: School finance adequacy lawsuits are a straightforward extension of equity court cases.

FACT: Equity lawsuits that have been argued for more than three decades are based on variations in spending that might be inequitable. Adequacy lawsuits, by contrast, presume that all differences in student achievement are due to the schools and can be corrected by the schools, taking courts into areas in which they have no expertise.

10. MYTH: Private school performance is about the same as public school performance.

FACT: An analysis of private schools indicates that, although student achievement appears similar, private schools achieve these results with significantly fewer resources. One component of this is ensuring that students are deeply involved in their own education, something that happens less frequently in the public schools.

Eric A. Hanushek, editor of Courting Failure, is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He serves as a member of the board of directors of the National Board for Education Sciences. Contributors to Courting Failure include Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton, Eric A. Hanushek, E.D. Hirsch Jr., Alfred Lindseth, Paul E. Peterson, Marguerite Roza and Paul Hill, Sol Stern, and Herbert J. Walberg. On the basis of the findings of these analyses, the Koret Task Force makes a series of recommendations in the volume about how to truly improve our schools.

The members of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education are among America's foremost education scholars, brought together by the Hoover Institution with the support of the Koret Foundation. More information about the group can be found at www.KoretTaskForce.org.

The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic public policy and international affairs, with an internationally renowned archive. For more information on the Hoover Institution, visit www.Hoover.org.