Legal Clips, [May 2007]The Nebraska Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit by the Nebraska Coalition for Educational Equity and Adequacy (NCEEA), a coalition of 43 school districts, claiming that the state’s system of funding public education violates its duty under the Nebraska Constitution to provide for an “adequate” and “quality” education. The court found that the case presents a nonjusticiable political question. A state district court had dismissed the suit on the same ground. In affirming this decision, the supreme court began by summarizing NCEAA’s main arguments as: (1) taken together, the constitution’s religious freedom and free instruction clauses require the legislature to provide a free education that “at a minimum, [is] sufficient to allow each student to become an active and productive citizen in our democracy, to find meaningful employment, and to qualify for higher education,” and (2) the legislature has failed to perform this duty. The court summed up the state’s responses as: (1) a determination that the plaintiff districts lack adequate funding to provide a quality education would require one district court to examine the adequacy of virtually every educational resource and program of the plaintiff districts; and, therefore (2) what constitutes adequate funding for education is inherently a political question that is not subject to judicial review. NCEEA argued the court would not violate the separation of powers doctrine by ruling the funding system unconstitutional and urged the court to adopt the view of other state courts that the issue is justiciable. However, the Nebraska court concluded that those other decisions are not helpful, either because the plaintiffs in those cases based their claims on equal protection or uniformity clauses in their state constitutions or because their states’ constitutional provisions are significantly different from Nebraska’s.
Relying on the criteria set forth in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), for determining whether an issue presents a nonjusticiable political question, the court found that the duty of providing public education is “clearly directed to the [state] Legislature and that the duty to adopt the method and means to furnish free instruction has been left by the state Constitution to the Legislature.” Likewise, “[t]he plain language of the religious freedom clause also textually commits to the Legislature the duty to encourage schools.” The high court agreed with the district court that under Baker “there are no qualitative, constitutional standards for public schools that this court could enforce, apart from the requirements that the education in public schools must be free and available to all children.” The lack of qualitative standards in the free instruction clause, the court held, was further evidence that the framers of Nebraska’s Constitution intended the determination of adequate school funding to rest solely in the legislature’s discretion. The court rejected NCEEA’s argument that the legislature’s general duty under the religious freedom clause to pass suitable laws encouraging schools adds qualitative standards. The clause imposes no affirmative duty on the legislature to encourage schools beyond the establishment of school districts with authority to raise taxes, the court concluded. “Any judicial standard effectively imposing constitutional requirements for education would be subjective and unreviewable policymaking by this court,” and “the relationship between school funding and educational quality requires a policy determination that is clearly for the legislative branch.” Lastly, the court found that under Baker it would impossible for the court to decide the issue “without expressing lack of the respect due coordinate branches of government” because “[f]iscal policy issues are the very decisions that have been left to the Legislature by the Nebraska Constitution.”
Nebraska Coalition for Educ. Equity and Adequacy v. Heineman, No. 05-1357 (Neb. May 11, 2007)
[Full opinion]
[Editor’s Note: A news account of the decision is provided at the first link below. The Nebraska decision follows the recent ruling by the Oklahoma supreme court also finding that, notwithstanding state constitutional provisions concerning education, the adequacy of school funding is not justiciable. Generally this argument had not fared well in courts. Information on the Oklahoma decision and on the justiciability issue is available starting at the second link.]
WOWT.com
[Full story]
[NSBA School Law pages on Oklahoma Educ. Ass’n v. Okla.]