N.Y.’s School Funding Illegal, Judge Rules

Painting a grim portrait of conditions in New York City’s public schools, a judge ruled Wednesday that the state’s system of financing education is unconstitutional.

In his decision, state Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse also said that the education provided to students in the city is so deficient that it violates Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act by having an adverse and disparate effect on minority public school children.

“The state’s school aid distribution system has for over a decade prevented the New York City public school system from receiving sufficient funds to provide its students with a sound, basic education,” DeGrasse said.

“Even the state commissioner of education testified that he does not understand fully how the [distribution] formulas interact,” he said.

The judge, who serves in Supreme Court, the lowest level court in the state, criticized as “unnecessarily punitive” the choice of the state to base its funding formula on the average attendance in school districts.

“It creates a perverse direction of state aid . . . away from districts with large numbers of at-risk students,” he said, since “the evidence demonstrates that at-risk students have much higher rates of truancy.”

The city’s minority students make up about 73% of the state’s total minority student population. New York spends about $2,000 less per student in the city than the statewide average, officials said.

In his ruling, DeGrasse also chided the state for its claim that students’ failure was the result of poverty and troubled families, not inadequate funding.

“Demography is not destiny,” the judge wrote. “The amount of melanin in a student’s skin, the home country of her antecedents, the amount of money in the family bank account, are not the inexorable determinants of academic success.”

DeGrasse ordered the state Legislature to have a plan in place by Sept. 15 to remedy the situation--and warned that he would intervene if reforms were not implemented.

With 1.1 million students, 1,100 schools, 78,000 teachers, 19,000 teachers’ aides and other personnel, New York City’s public school system is the largest in the nation.

And, the judge indicated, it is one of the most battered.

In his 191-page decision, DeGrasse said that graduation rates and test scores demonstrate students in the city “are not receiving a minimally adequate education.”

“The majority . . . leave high school unprepared for more than low-paying work, unprepared for college and unprepared for the duties placed upon them in a democratic society,” he said. “The schools have broken a covenant with students and with society.”

A spokesman for Gov. George Pataki said that the state was reviewing the ruling and had not decided whether it would appeal. In his State of the State address to the Legislature this week, Pataki himself labeled the current system of distributing school funds a “dinosaur.”

An appeal could throw the case into the courts for years. It took six years for the current case--brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a coalition of parents and civic groups--to be decided.

The judge’s giving the Legislature the politically sensitive issue of distributing more than $14 billion in school funds almost certainly will spark fresh competition among districts and intensive lobbying by teachers’ unions and local officials.