单选题
Until recently, the main villains of the piece had seemed to be the teachers" unions, who have opposed any sort of reform or accountability. Now they face competition from an unexpectedly destructive force: the court. Fifty years ago, it was the judges who forced the schools to desegregate through Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Now the courts have moved from broad principles to micromanagement, telling schools how much money to spend and where - right down to the correct computer or textbook.
Twenty four states are currently Stuck in various court cases to do with financing school systems, and another 21 have only recently settled various suits. Most will start again soon. Only five states have avoided litigation entirely.
Nothing exemplifies the power of the courts better than an 11-year-old case that is due to be settled (sort of) in New York City, the home of America"s biggest school system with 1. lm students and a budget nearing $13 billion. At the end of this month, three elderly members of the New York bar serving as judicial referees are due to rule in a case brought By the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a leftish advocacy group, against the state of New York: they will decide how much more must Be spent to provide every New York City pupil with a "sound basic" education.
Rare is the politician willing to argue that more money for schools is a bad thing. But are the courts doing any good? Two suspicions arise. First, judges are making a lazy assumption that more money means better schools. As the international results show, the link between "inputs" and "outputs" is vague--something well documented by, among others, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Second, the courts are muddling an already muddled system. Over time, they have generally made it harder to get rid of disruptive pupils and bad teachers.
The current case could be even worse. The courts have already said that, in order to determine the necessary spending, they may consider everything from class size to the availability of computers, textbooks and even pencils. This degree of intervention is all the more scandalous because the courts have weirdly decided to ignore another set of "inputs"--the archaic work practices of school teachers and janitors. David Schoenbrod and Ross Sandier of New York Law School reckon the demands of the court will simply undermine reform and transform an expensive failure into a more expensive one.
And of course, the litigation never ends. Kentucky, for example, is still in court 16 years after the first decision. A lawsuit first filed against New Jersey for its funding of schools in 1981 was "decided" four years later--but it has returned to the court nine times since, including early this year, with each decision pushing the court deeper into the management of the state"s schools. Bad iudges are even harder to boot out of school than bad pupils.