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STATE FUNDING EQUITY

Fall 99 (v3#3)
Lawsuit:
Washington Heights Parent May Change Funding for Schools

Robert Jackson was angry. He vowed to find out whether anything could be done about the condition of the schools that his daughters and other children in New York City were forced to attend. Ultimately, this parent activist was the spark that started the lawsuit against the state for failing to provide a sound basic education. In a significant decision issued June 14, 1995, the Court of Appeals gave the green light to the plaintiffs in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York to proceed with their suit charging that the current system for funding New York City schools is a violation of the state constitution and federal civil rights law.

This is not the first time that Robert Jackson has taken action. When he was a high school student at Benjamin Franklin High School, all the fire exits were kept closed with chains to stop students from running out of the building. "It was a pretty rough school even then," he remembers, "and not only were all the fire doors chained, but no one could ever leave the building, even at lunch time–it was run like a prison." So young Robert helped plan a student demonstration that got press attention. The news stories alerted the Fire Department, and finally the school administrators were forced to remove the chains from the fire doors.

From a poor family, Robert Jackson learned harsh lessons from early on. The wages of his father, a waiter in Chinese restaurants, had to be supplemented by odd jobs by the nine children in the family. Robert’s first job at 8 years of age was selling Sunday newspapers at "Moms" newsstand in Harlem. If he or the other children brought back too many newspapers or soiled copies, "Moms," a legendary character with all the attributes of a villain out of a Dickens‚ novel, forced her little workers to eat part of a page or two. "That’s right, we had to eat the newspaper in front of her. She’d tear off a piece and you had to chew it in front of her." After awhile, the new children learned not to take more papers than they could sell or to drop them. At 10, Robert escaped to work Friday afternoons through Sunday nights in a grocery store that then became "Robs Barbecue" until he graduated from high school.

The work ethic of his family did not shield them from tragedy, however. A brother got into a fight and was stabbed to death when he was only 21 years old. Though two other siblings were to die early deaths, "The first hit the family hard, we never really got over it, the shock of remembering him as he walked out the door in his nice Saturday night clothes, and then a few hours later he was cold and covered in blood."

Robert’s path out of the ghetto and low-wage jobs started with the running talent of his older brother. Raymond Jackson was a track star at Benjamin Franklin (he held the city-wide high school record for 2 1/2 mile cross country for 4 years). Because his brother and the coaching staff hoped that Robert would also prove to be a track star, he was urged to enroll in Benjamin Franklin even though the family had moved to the Bronx. Robert was a "tolerable" runner, but what changed his life was a form thrust into his hand by Coach Irving Goldberg with the command to "bring it back tomorrow filled out." It was an application to Upward Bound, a federal program targeted for low-income high school students with low grades but potential to succeed in college if given adequate preparation during high school years.

With the help from this program, he got into SUNY New Paltz under a state funded program now called E.O.P. (Education Opportunity Program, which the Governor wanted to eliminate in his last budget proposal, but was saved by the Assembly). Robert found himself part of only a few dozen, very visible African-Americans in a sea of white students. But he made himself even more visible as a student activist who for a period of time went into nearby Newburgh to do community organizing (the Newburgh police once traced his car to find out who the "outside agitator" was). It was also during his college years that he met his wife, Faika, a student from Tanzania. His eldest daughter, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, is now a student at his alma mater (no surprise, Robert Jackson is an area recruiter for his college).

Upon graduation, he went to work for the New York State Department of Labor as an investigator of unemployment insurance fraud, became a shop steward, and then went to work for his union, the Public Employees Federation. When his eldest daughter, Saadya, was four, Robert and his wife looked at private schools and at public schools. They decided on enrolling their daughter in the public school, but made a commitment to themselves that they would become active in the parents association to ensure that she got a good education. "Faika talked to a parent activist at PS 187 and," he laughs, "she volunteered me." Active in the PS 187 parents association ever since, Robert went on to get elected to Community School Board 6, where he has served for 10 years, most recently as president.

With some irony, Robert Jackson remembers one of the times he lost a vote on CSB #6. The board was choosing an attorney to hire to handle legal issues for the district. Guillermo Linares, now a member of the City Council, recommended Michael Rebell, who was ultimately retained rather than an attorney that Robert Jackson favored. But after a short time, Robert grew to respect the attorney’s judgment. So in 1992, after a meeting of the Consultative Council (a body made up of representatives from all the community school boards throughout the city) where Robert found out that the Stavisky-Goodman state law would not be bringing in more resources to New York City schools, he contacted Michael Rebell and asked him if there was any type of law suit that could succeed in getting adequate funding for children in the city’s public education system. Robert then went to talk to Norm Fruchter, then a foundation program officer and long-time parent activist and president of CSB #15, about the need to take some legal action. Within a short period of time, Michael Rebell, Robert Jackson, and Norm Fruchter had gotten over a third of the community school districts and several education reform organizations interested in proceeding on a legal challenge to the unfair distribution of state school funding. They called themselves Campaign for Fiscal Equity and ultimately 14 school districts became plaintiffs along with parents and children attending New York City schools.

Robert says forcefully, "This lawsuit isn’t about Robert Jackson and his two daughters. It’s about all the children. Children who are sitting in classrooms where the window panes are falling in. It’s about kids that literally don’t have a chair to sit in and have to lean against the wall or prop themselves up on a radiator for hours at a time. Kids are being taught in supply closets or in gyms with three other classes. In my district, we have schools with lunch periods that are 20 minutes long because the cafeteria was built for a student body of 750, not 2,000– 20 minutes! We have schools where there is just one guidance counselor for 1,200 children. A class with 36 or 37 children seems just like a college class to me, and I just know that there are few opportunities for the students to ask questions in a classroom this big. Some of these children go away from the class not fully understanding the lesson. But the teacher is so overwhelmed she can’t give students the individual attention that some might need. I can’t stand it when schools ask parents to send in paper and paper towels. And I can’t stand it when I hear that a child with special needs has to wait 6 months before the problem is evaluated. That should happen right away ˆ suppose it’s a hearing problem? We have got to get the basic funding to provide the human resources and physical environment that every school should offer. We don’t have the basics, and the people in Albany know it or should care enough about children to know it."

But Robert can also laugh. He hopes that the lawsuit is heard before his youngest daughter, Sumaya who is in 4th grade in PS 187, will graduate from high school so she can benefit "a little bit" before she goes on to college. Michael Rebell predicts that the lawsuit will probably be heard at the earliest in 1997 at the New York State Supreme Court level and that by 1998 the case will be heard by the appellate level and possibly the Court of Appeals.

Children have had to wait for too long already for "the basics." In 1982, in a long-awaited decision, the Court of Appeals in Levittown v. Nyquist reversed lower court decisions that New York State’s finance system violated the state constitution on the basis of large differences in per-pupil spending between districts. Since then, these per-pupil disparities have grown much larger, making New York State among the five states in the nation with the highest level of education funding differences. For ten years, while numerous court challenges were initiated in other states, civil rights and education advocates were reluctant to initiate more legal action in New York State.

Initially, a group of property-poor Long Island school districts, faced with soaring homeowner property taxes and yet unable to keep up with education standards set by affluent school districts, brought a law suit (Reform Education Financing Inequities Today (R.E.F.I.T. v. Cuomo). The plaintiffs argued that Levittown should be revisited because the disparities had gotten worse over the decade. On the day the Court of Appeals gave the green light to CFE to proceed to trial, the Court also dismissed the R.E.F.I.T. lawsuit on the grounds that the issues in Levittown had been decided by the court and could not be reconsidered. A lawsuit brought by the City of New York and the Board of Education, on grounds similar to CFE, was also dismissed because the court ruled that municipalities were created by the state and therefore did not have standing to sue their creator.

The main thrust of the arguments in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity is that New York City public education students have a right to a sound, basic education under Article XI of the state constitution, which is being denied by the state’s system of inequitable school funding. The CFE lawsuit also claims that the state’s public education finance system violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Ace prohibiting racial or ethnic discrimination in programs receiving federal funds. 74% of the state’s minority student population attends city schools, yet on a per-pupil basis city students receive $1,100 less than the average for students in the rest of the state. This "gap" in resources should not be so large. The state’s school finance system is supposed to provide more money to lower-wealth districts so they support their schools and more money to school districts with a higher than average concentration of "at risk" students. Since New York City’s property and income wealth falls slightly below the state average and since the New York City school district has a high concentration of "at risk" students, city students should be receiving more state resources in order to meet the basic minimum standards of education.

The New York Times failed to provide extensive press coverage about this Court of Appeals decision (the decision came out the same day as Chancellor Cortines‚ resignation). But newspapers in the rest of the state put the story on their front pages. Since then, however, The Times editorial page and newspaper editorials in the rest of the state have urged Governor Pataki and the legislature to reform the state’s school finance system before the highest court hands down its decision. In some states where there have been successful legal challenges against school finance systems, legislative negotiations around creating new systems have dragged on for years. Unfortunately, this year the Governor has proposed, yet again, that school districts receive the same amount of funding that they received in the 1993-94 school year. This freeze in school aid actually shifts funds from low-wealth school districts to higher wealth school districts and particularly hurts districts, like New York City, with growing student populations.

Because in some states legislative action following a court decision on school finance has been contentious and unpredictable, with some remedies actually making per-pupil disparities no different, the Educational Priorities Panel, working with the League of Women Voters of New York State, the Urban League of New York, and the State Communities Aid Association are working together to sponsor three conferences and a hearing on options in state school aid reform.

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