Gaps Between Rich, Poor Schools Ignite Legal Fights : Education: A growing reform movement could force states to hike taxes, overhaul funding to provide equity.

The public school in rural Thomson, Ill., is so strapped for cash that it cannot fix a badly leaking roof and older students must drive miles to other towns for physics, chemistry and advanced math courses.

Still, not long ago, administrators found a cost-free way to replace some chipped and broken classroom furniture. The “new” desks and chairs were yanked from a dumpster where they had been discarded by a much wealthier school down the road.

“They had the luxury of getting rid of stuff that was better than what we were using,” sighed John Bickell, the school superintendent in Thomson, a farming town about 150 miles west of Chicago near the Mississippi River.

Scrounging hand-me-downs from another school’s rejects may be unusual, but the kind of funding disparities which led Thomson officials to do it are anything but.

Across the nation, huge variations exist from district to district in the amount of resources available to teach children. In Illinois, for instance, it is not uncommon for some schools to spend three times as much per student as others. At the extreme, the annual spending range stretches from $2,100 per youngster in the worst-endowed district to more than $12,000 in the most flush.

A drive to narrow such gaps is rapidly picking up steam among school reformers, who argue that students from poorly funded schools are doomed to lag behind those from richer backgrounds when they enter the workplace. Increasingly, these advocates of change are turning to the courts to force reluctant lawmakers to ante up more money in the name of equity.

“This (equity) is the educational issue of the ‘90s,” predicted Mary Fulton, a school finance analyst for the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.

The movement actually began in California in 1971, when the state Supreme Court invalidated the state’s property-tax-dependent school finance system. Coupled with tax limitations imposed later by Proposition 13, the ruling has transferred responsibility to Sacramento for dispensing the lion’s share of school funding.

Now the movement is blossoming into a force that could result in major overhauls of school finance mechanisms as well as significant tax increases in states across the nation. Just since 1989, legislatures in New Jersey, Kentucky and Texas have risked voter backlash by approving billions of dollars in new taxes to stave off court-mandated takeovers of state school systems.

Lawsuits demanding better and fairer funding are pending in more than a dozen states from Oregon to Massachusetts, and experts say more are on the way. All the suits have been filed in state courts because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the federal Constitution does not guarantee equal access to educational opportunities. However, most state charters do have education clauses.

Illinois was the latest to join the list when a coalition of 47 of the state’s more than 950 districts, ranging from tiny Thomson, with only 365 students, to Chicago, with more than 400,000, filed a lawsuit this month in Cook County Circuit Court. It alleges that the state’s rules for raising and dispensing school money create gaping inequities that violate the equal protection clause of the Illinois Constitution.

“You can’t learn to compute if you don’t have a computer, and you can’t learn to do the calculus if you don’t have a calculus instructor,” said James Nowlan, an organizer of the lawsuit and a political science professor at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. “Our poorer school districts simply aren’t able to offer the same mix of courses in science, math and foreign languages (as the richer districts). No rational person would design a system like this.”

But the equity campaign runs smack into a cherished tradition of American public education--local control of schools bolstered by a heavy reliance on locally generated revenues to pay for them. In Illinois, for example, the state government on average kicks in only 38% of the money to operate public schools. In theory, the system gives parents and local taxpayers a greater voice in determining the quality of their schools. If they want to spend more on education, all they need do is vote to raise their own real estate and property taxes.

Equity backers, however, say the reality is quite different. Poor communities, or those without big shopping centers or factories, often have trouble generating adequate revenues from local sources even when they dramatically boost taxes.

Property values in Thomson, for example, were hit hard by the farm crisis, and that has helped undermine the tax base. As a result, the school budget over the last two years has been more than $113,000 in the red. But if voters were to raise school levies by a whopping 22%, it still would generate a mere $55,000 annually in extra revenue--less than half of what is needed to cover the deficit.

An even more vivid illustration exists in Mt. Morris and Byron, two small neighboring communities in northwestern Illinois. School taxes in Mt. Morris are double the rate of Byron’s, yet Byron generates $10,085 in revenue per student while Mt. Morris nets only $3,483. The difference: Byron is home to a huge nuclear-powered electric generating plant owned by a Chicago-based utility.

As a result, Byron can offer better pay to its teachers than Mt. Morris, has a far richer mix of courses in science, agriculture, computers, literature, business education and industrial arts and has a more modern physical plant. Byron built a new high school in 1980, while Mt. Morris says it can’t afford the $900,000 it would cost to rid its 39-year-old high school of asbestos.

“The wealthier school districts in Illinois have twice the percentage of teachers with master’s degrees than do the poor ones,” said G. Alan Hickrod, head of a citizens’ group which is behind the lawsuit here. “The richer schools have lower teacher-pupil ratios (and) . . . more experienced teachers . . . and there are vast differences in test scores.”

In Illinois, as in most other states where equity actions have been filed, supporters say they want to wean school districts from their heavy reliance on these widely uneven local sources of revenue and centralize the bulk of funding at the state level. The goal, backers insist, is to increase funding for poor schools, not punish rich ones by forcing them to scale their spending back.

Still, critics worry that, with lawmakers already walking a tightrope between strained budgets and tax revolts, court-ordered reforms could do little more than diminish the quality of good schools.

“If equity means reducing disparity and there’s no money to bring the lower districts up, then the only way you reduce disparity is by pulling down the top districts,” said Joan Levy, a school board member at New Trier High School in Winnetka, one of Illinois’ best-financed and best-performing high schools. “In the name of equity or in the name of improving education, there’s absolutely no value in that.”

Sponsors of the Illinois equity action say it would take at least $800 million and maybe much more in extra spending annually just to bring all districts up to what is now the median spending level for schools in Illinois. That would surely require a hike in state income or sales taxes, an action most politicians seem loath to take without at least the threat of court action hanging over their head.

“Changing school finance systems is a little like a Russian novel,” explained John Augenblieck, a Denver-based school finance consultant. “It’s long, it’s boring and in the end everyone gets killed. For a legislator, this is a tough issue to deal with.”

Some education experts question whether simply throwing more money at poor schools will make a significant difference. Eric Hanushek, a school finance expert at the University of Rochester in New York, said research conducted by both he and others has called into question any systematic link between higher spending per pupil and improved student performance in tests and other educational barometers.

Other factors, such as parental involvement and differences in family income, may be as important as spending when it comes to determining why suburban students generally do better in school than their urban counterparts, Hanushek said. “If the kids in the suburbs didn’t go to any schools, they would probably outperform the kids in Chicago,” he added.

Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative think tank, predicted that equity-inspired reforms would hasten the exodus of wealthier students from public schools and intensify demands for school vouchers or tax credits to help pay for private or parochial educations.

“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” said Bast of the equity advocates. “They’re hastening the demise of the very thing that they say they want to save.”

Indeed, many school finance experts point to the situation in California as an example of equity gone amok.

As a result of the 1971 state Supreme Court decision and the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, per-pupil spending is now virtually equal in 96% of school districts across California, according to Alan Odden, a school finance expert at USC. But while the goal of equity has been achieved and spending at poor schools has risen, Odden said overall levels of school funding across California have slipped badly.

“We used to spend in the top 10 of (state) school districts in the country, and now we’re in the bottom 20%,” he said. “In part, that’s because only one level of government is funding it--the state--and they’ve got too much to fund.”

The 1971 California decision ushered in a flurry of similar suits in other states, with mixed results. Over the years, courts have upheld the school finance systems of 14 states, while striking down as unfair similar systems in 12 other states.

After a lull in court activity during most of the 1980s, the equity issue has roared back with a vengeance. In Kentucky last year, the state Supreme Court not only invalidated the state’s school finance structure but scrapped the entire school system itself. The action prompted lawmakers to raise $1.3 billion in new taxes to pay for education reforms, among them the establishment of new preschool programs, more school choice flexibility and an injection of more cash into districts, poor and rich alike.

In Texas, after missing several court-ordered deadlines to revamp state school finances, a recalcitrant Legislature last June hiked sales taxes and voted $528 million in new school money after a judge threatened to impose a plan that would take money from rich districts and redistribute it to poor ones. But backers of the lawsuit say the new finance scheme is also inadequate and are scheduled to argue their case to the Texas Supreme Court this week.

Similar court action in New Jersey led Democratic Gov. James J. Florio to champion sweeping tax hikes to finance schools in that state. That, in turn, led to a dramatic drop in Florio’s popularity in the polls. It has also hurt other politicians tied to the governor--most notably Sen. Bill Bradley, a Democrat with presidential aspirations who narrowly won reelection this month against a Republican challenger who mounted only a token campaign.