In an epic legal battle over how Connecticut funds local education, Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher ruled Wednesday that the state’s method for distributing education aid is irrational and unconstitutional, but he declined to second-guess the General Assembly on the ultimate level of state spending.
Moukawsher said the plaintiffs failed to meet their high burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the quality of public education violates the state Constitution by the standards of minimum funding or the adequacy of instruction in the state’s classrooms. But he gave them a solid victory on the question of how aid is distributed.
The judge gave the legislature 180 days to revise how it provides state aid.
Over about 90 minutes, Moukawsher read aloud a carefully calibrated decision that made clear the limits of judicial intervention, while scolding the legislature for recently stripping $5 million in aid from some of the neediest school systems and giving it comparatively wealthy communities.
“In desperate times, $5 million is a lot of money,” he said.
The decision by Moukawsher came 11 years after a coalition of parents, students, teachers and municipal officials sued the state and just a month after final arguments in a months-long trial not far from the State Capitol, examining, among other things, the adequacy, fairness and rationality of how local schools are funded.
The lawsuit, the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding vs. Rell, is the latest in a series of legal and political battles to define the state’s constitutional obligation to fund local schools and to prod the General Assembly to offer a more rational and expansive system of financial relief to municipalities dependent on property taxes.
The fight revolved around decades of legislative decisions, prior court cases and two terse sentences in the state Constitution: “There shall always be free public elementary and secondary schools in the state. The general assembly shall implement this principle by appropriate legislation.”
“The Constitution identifies the General Assembly as the sole entity charged with enacting ‘appropriate legislation’ and fulfilling this weighty responsibility,” the plaintiffs argued. Quoting previous case law, they said, “Despite the long history of local control over education in Connecticut, Article Eighth of the Constitution squarely ‘places the ultimate responsibility for the education of the children of Connecticut on the state.’ ”
In 2010, the Connecticut Supreme Court concluded in response to the coalition’s lawsuit that Article Eighth implied a qualitative standard of a minimally adequate education, and that the state is responsible for ensuring that level of adequacy is met.
It was left to Moukawsher, a former Democratic legislator named to the bench by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in 2013, to both define the standard and determine if the state was meeting it. The state currently provides about $2 billion annually in school aid through its Education Cost Sharing formula.
The plaintiffs, whose legal team was led by Joseph Moodhe, did not ask the judge to provide a solution, leaving that for “further legal proceedings.”
“This request is insupportable,” the state said in a reply brief. “The evidentiary phase of this trial is complete, both sides have rested, and there is no legal basis for this court to engage in ‘further proceedings’ regarding potential remedies.”
If remedies in an education case are constitutionally required, the Supreme Court has left no doubt “our courts should and will defer to the legislature, in the first instance, to provide those remedies,” wrote the state, whose legal team was led by Associate Attorney General Joseph Rubin.
The decision came as the state struggles with chronic fiscal challenges.
The legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis is projecting a $1.3 billion deficit built into 2017 – 18 state finances, a gap of about 7 percent. And unless adjustments are made, it is expected to top $1.4 billion in 2018 – 19 and $1.5 billion the following year.
Further complicating matters, the Malloy administration reported in late June that it had downgraded expected income tax receipts for the outgoing fiscal year by $75 million, and sales tax revenues by $28 million.
During final arguments, Moukawsher pointed to a list showing the distribution of Education Cost Sharing grants and questioned whether the state had a rational approach to distributing education aid, regardless of what it ultimately can afford.
“I was particularly hoping you could provide me an explanation,” Moukawsher told Rubin, the state’s lead attorney. “I found $5.3 million of cuts to poor communities like Bridgeport. And then, I also found $5.1 million of increases to rich communities. So that you have poor towns like Bridgeport taking $1 million cuts and rich towns like West Hartford taking a $1 million increase.”
“How,” the judge asked, “can a rational budget process allow that in a time of financial crises to happen?”
Rubin said he did not know why the legislature funneled money where it did, but the vast majority of the over $2 billion in state education aid not tied to retirement benefits goes to high-poverty school districts.
“Saying that every single dollar, every single appropriation must be explained particularly and specifically and that, if it’s not, it’s not rational, I submit to the court that that’s not the constitutional test of rationality,” Rubin said.
The lawsuit focused on educational deficiencies in six districts that the plaintiffs said were representative of high-need schools: Bridgeport, East Hartford, Danbury, New Britain, New London and Windham.
The state argued that the judge should not infer there is a systemic problem even if he determined the plaintiffs proved that the state is not fulfilling its obligation in those six school districts.
But the landmark Horton vs. Meskill decision in 1977 that ordered the state to overhaul how it funded schools was brought by a lone plaintiff who was an elementary student in Canton.
Moukawsher did not hint last month how broadly he would rule, saying Rubin’s argument got to the question of whether the court should “order relief to these six districts, or are you going to do something larger than this?”
We can no longer fund education from real property alone. Education represents the biggest single expenditure in most town/ city budgets.
Education is not merely a local responsibility with some state aid thrown in; it is a national priority and should be nationally funded by increased income taxes on the wealthy. The middle class has shouldered the burden historically, but jobs have diminished and so has the middle class.
We need increased federal funding to the states, then increased taxation of wealthy individuals and non-profits with assets or income in excess of $1,000,000. Let the charter schools look to the Gates Foundation and the hedge funds. The government should fund ONLY
public education with supplements for special needs students.
It can be done.