David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center and Wade Henderson, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, have co-authored a chilling opinion piece in this morning’s NY Times. In What’s the Matter with Kansas’ Schools?, Sciarra and Henderson describe Gannon v. State of Kansas, the school funding case awaiting a decision of the Kansas Supreme Court.
The Gannon case was brought by parents protesting a 16.5 percent cut in Kansas’ education funding since 2008. Sciarra and Henderson explain: “The cuts were accelerated by a $1.1 billion tax break, which benefited mostly upper-income Kansans, proposed by Governor Brownback and enacted in 2012.” “A three-judge trial court ruled in January 2013 for the parents, finding that the cuts reduced per-pupil expenditures far below a level ‘suitable’ to educate all children under Kansas’ standards.”
Governor Sam Brownback and the legislature are unrepentant. In the event that the Supreme Court upholds the decision of the lower court, law makers have threatened to amend the state constitution to remove the requirement for “suitable” funding, which would “strip Kansas courts of jurisdiction to hear school finance cases altogether.” If that amendment were to fail, they say they would defy any court order to increase school funding. I have blogged previously about this case here.
Sciarra and Henderson defend the right of “children who, as a last resort, seek legal redress to vindicate their fundamental right to an education.” The courts, intended to provide checks and balances, are particularly important to protect funding for education in these tax-cutting times when so many states, like Kansas (and Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin along with several more) have conservative Republican majorities in their statehouses along with a far-right Republican governor.
One thinks of the prophetic words of the late Senator Paul Wellstone: “That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond.”
janresseger 