Rural Matters

Marty Strange, Policy Director, Rural School and Community Trust

“No, not us,” said the Nebraska Supreme Court when asked by rural students, parents, and school districts if Nebraska’s miserly school funding system does enough to educate her youth.

The Nebraska Constitution requires “free instruction in the common schools” of the state. The plaintiffs wanted to know if those words have any meaning in a court of law, or are they just so much constitutional blather?

The Court said the meaning of those words is a “political question” for the legislature and the governor, not the courts, to decide. The court found for blather.

Political question? Don’t kid yourself. Courts decide the questions they want to decide. The ones they don’t want to decide they label “political.”

While it is true that courts should not legislate, it is also true that words have meaning, and it is the Court’s duty to interpret their meaning, especially when those words are part of the Constitution.

But according to the Nebraska Supreme Court, the words “free instruction in the common schools of this state” can mean a coloring book, a crayon, and a tree stump for a desk if the politicians say so.

Then the judges suggested the plaintiffs were merely angry and sullen sinners who could go to hell for daring to ask these Wizards of Oz to come out from behind their curtain and perform their public duty to interpret the Nebraska Constitution.

Mind you, the Supreme Courts in over a dozen states have had no trouble ruling that their state’s school funding system is inadequate without ducking behind the “political question” curtain for cover.

Continue reading "Searching for Justice in the Stygian Swamp" »

Posted by Marty Strange at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Turmoil reins supreme over both urban and rural education issues in Nebraska, and the session promises to be filled with horse-trading at its best – or worst. LB 1024 enacted last year split the Omaha district into three, arguably along implicit racial lines, and then forced over a dozen districts in the metropolitan area to merge tax bases into a “learning community” that shared resources and had to meet uncertain integration goals. That legislation is stalled by a court order in a suit filed by the Omaha Chicano Awareness Center, and no fewer than seven alternative bills have been introduced to amend or replace it. Meantime, LB 126, a bill passed two years ago forcing the consolidation of Nebraska’s elementary-only “Class I” districts and high school-only Class VI districts was repealed by voters in a referendum in November – but only after it had been implemented. The issue of whether the closed districts are brought back to life is both in the courts and in the Legislature, where at least four bills are pending on the subject. Governor Dave Heineman was the big winner last year, as he vetoed both LB 1024 and LB 126, cultivating the favor of both suburban Omaha and rural Nebraska, although both vetoes were overridden.

There is also pressure to reorganize Nebraska’s educational service units governed by locally-elected boards that some lawmakers call “inefficient.” Meantime, a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Nebraska’s funding system is pending a decision from the Nebraska Supreme Court on the issue of whether the state constitution mandates adequate funding. To head that off, the Governor is calling for an additional $171 million to “fully” fund the state aid formula, which the lawsuit plaintiffs say is not enough.

Posted by Robin Lambert at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

United States Department of Education-approved assessment systems apparently don’t help, if the purpose is to boost achievement scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called nation’s report card.

That’s the best sense you can make out of comparing the NAEP scores of the four states whose assessment systems have received USDE’s full seal of approval with the scores of the 10 states whose systems are so wretched, according to USDE, that it is withholding federal funds from the state education agency. USDE passes judgment on state assessment systems under the authority of No Child Left Behind, a bumbling federal law well-recognized for its consistently perverse effects.

Continue reading "No, No, Doug, USDE Approval Counts, Learning Doesn’t" »

Posted by Marty Strange at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)