Department of Legal Counsel
Education
CSS’s
legal advocacy work in education was initiated in the 1990’s
when it joined CSS lawyers and CSS community organizers together
to advocate for fair community school board elections, equitable
funding for poorer schools, and full participation of parent voters
in school elections. In the 1990’s CSS housed the Educational
Equity Litigation Working Group consisting of lawyers from the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the
Legal Aid Society, Bronx Legal Services, and the Puerto Rican Legal
Defense Fund, which focused on the inequitable funding formulae
of the city Board of Education and led to the filing of Caldwell
v. Board of Education. The model that we championed – utilization
of public policy analysts and public interest lawyers to develop
legal intervention strategies – garnered the attention of
the Ford Foundation and resulted in the CSS publication The
Educational Equity Litigation Working Group: Collaboration in Pursuit
of Social
Change (1997). CSS’s work on school financing issues led
to the publication of important papers on the inequitable distribution
of remedial dollars (“Promoting Poverty”) and on the
resources needed to fully fund the Board of Regents new graduation
requirements, especially in schools that lacked modern facilities,
curricula, and qualified teachers (“The New Regents High
School Graduation Requirements”). As a result, CSS became
part of the consortium – Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) – that
sued New York because the state’s funding of schools failed
to meet the state constitutional guarantee of a right to a “sound
basic education.” The case (Campaign for Fiscal Equity
v. New York) has resulted in two successful opinions from the New
York Court of Appeals.
Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. Marino (1994): This
was a state constitutional challenge in Albany County against the
Governor’s practice
of essentially exercising a “pocket veto” on a bill
that would have provided a minimum floor of education spending
for New York City schools. The courts eventually sided with us,
declaring the practice unconstitutional.
Caldwell v. New York City Board of Education
(1996): This administrative proceeding under the Education Law addressed
the inexplicable policy
of the Board of Education of allocating monies for guidance counselors
and para-professionals on the basis of the average teacher salary
of the community school district, not on per capita enrollment
or on need. The Board eventually eliminated its practice. |
