Alabama Is Back Where It Started

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU>]

Savage inequalities.  Printed in the New York Times.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/opinion/11MON3.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
March 11, 2002
After 10 Long Years, Alabama Is Back Where It Started
By ADAM COHEN

LOWNDES COUNTY, Ala. -- There was a rule, back when I was an education 
lawyer in Alabama, about visiting public schools: always go on a rainy day, 
so you can see how badly the roofs leak. It was just like old times last 
week when I dropped in on Russell Elementary, outside Hayneville, in the 
middle of a heavy downpour. As I talked with a county official about how 
little money he had to work with, we both dodged the puddle that was 
rapidly forming in the hall outside the principal's office.
I was in Alabama to say goodbye ? to a school-funding lawsuit, of all 
things. More than a decade ago, I had helped file it on behalf of a class 
of poor children, mostly from schools in the Black Belt, the swath of rich 
farmland that was once home to Alabama's large cotton plantations. The suit 
maintained that under the State Constitution, children who lived in shotgun 
shacks in Dallas County were entitled to as good an education as students 
in the wealthiest Birmingham suburbs.
The first step in this kind of suit is collecting stories of educational 
inadequacy, which, in the Black Belt, proved all too easy. One high school 
student in Selma told us he was having trouble keeping up in physics 
because his school could afford only four physics textbooks, and when he 
wanted to do homework, he had to call around to see if anyone was done with 
a book. A teacher in a Wilcox County elementary school led us to a 
ramshackle library, with a single wall of shelves, where a book still being 
read by students cheerfully predicted that "one day man will walk on the 
moon."
The more we traveled the country roads of south-central Alabama, the 
grimmer the tales became. Monroe County, home of Harper Lee, author of "To 
Kill a Mockingbird," had two high schools. The main one in Monroeville was 
far from opulent. But the second one, Monroe County Senior High School, 
which served an isolated, all-black farming community, was so poor it did 
not offer basic science and math classes. That meant, the principal 
explained, that no matter how hard his students worked, they could not meet 
the admissions requirements of the University of Alabama.
The worst situations verged on Southern Gothic. One first grade teacher, 
asked what her biggest problem was, said fire ants regularly crawled 
through the floorboards during naptime and bit the children. A mother in 
Choctaw County, a rural district hard up against the Mississippi border, 
told us her wheelchair-bound son's therapy required him to get out of the 
chair at least once a day and crawl around. But the only room the school 
had available had a concrete floor, which the school could not afford to 
carpet. She had to organize a bake sale, she told us, to buy one.
At trial in Circuit Court in Montgomery, where our case on behalf of poor 
students was combined with one by poor school districts, a team of 
educational experts supplemented this anecdotal evidence with objective 
studies. Alabama ranked 49th in the nation in spending on elementary and 
secondary education, and the experts explained how this translated into 
inadequate education.
Alabama made the defense that states often do in these suits: that money 
does not make the difference in school quality. It seems hard to believe. 
(Try telling the Pentagon that money does not make a difference in waging a 
war.) But an academic subspecialty has arisen, in part to defend against 
this sort of case, arguing through regression analysis that spending levels 
do not correlate significantly with academic achievement. Unfortunately for 
the state defendants, the highly paid Northern academic they hired to study 
Alabama bungled his numbers, and was discredited on the witness stand. The 
state was also hurt when the governor's education adviser, whose job it was 
to defend the status quo, appeared to be crying when she testified about 
conditions in the worst schools.
Back in the 1950's, in an attempt to block desegregation, Alabama enacted 
Amendment 111 to the State Constitution, removing the right to a public 
education as a matter of law. The first step in bringing this suit was 
getting the trial judge to rule that Amendment 111 itself violated the 
equal protection clause of the United States Constitution, because it was 
passed to deprive blacks of an equal education. Early in the case, 
Amendment 111 was struck down. The trial court found that the Alabama 
Constitution guaranteed children an adequate and equitable education, and 
that the school system was failing to provide it. In the remedy phase, the 
parties negotiated for months and hammered out a settlement, which the 
court issued as a formal remedy order. It required the state to ensure that 
schools throughout the state met specific standards for teachers, 
facilities and other educational "inputs," which meant the Legislature 
would have to come up with more money.
That ruling turned out to be the suit's high-water mark. In the intervening 
years, some of us drifted away ? I went off and became a reporter ? while 
the case dragged on. On four separate occasions, the Alabama Supreme Court 
affirmed that the trial court's decision was final. Still, the remedy plan 
was not being implemented.
Each year, as new justices joined the Supreme Court, the balance shifted 
away from the lawsuit. In 2000, Roy Moore was elected chief judge on his 
record of bringing the Ten Commandments into the courtroom (last year, he 
had a two-ton Ten Commandments monument installed in the Alabama Supreme 
Court building), and it seemed inevitable that if elected, he would work to 
overturn the school-funding lawsuit.
In January of this year, Judge Moore and his colleagues laid the groundwork 
to do just that. On its own motion, the court decided to reopen the case 
for argument about questions that were settled long ago. It invited the 
parties to brief a variety of procedural questions, and to reopen the 
status of Amendment 111.
The dissenting justices accused the majority of acting lawlessly to wipe 
away a decision they didn't like; one called the January order "blatant 
judicial activism and a raw abuse of power." The Birmingham News, in an 
editorial, said the one thing the edict proved was that "we need some new 
justices on the Alabama Supreme Court." But it seems all but certain that 
the school-funding case will be over before that happens.
The Supreme Court majority hasn't bothered to argue that Alabama's public 
schools are adequate today, or that much has changed in the last decade. 
The Legislature has come up with a little more money, and there have been 
some modest improvements. Monroe Senior now offers a fuller curriculum, and 
the school with the fire ants has been torn down.
But much has remained just the same. Last year, the Alabama papers reported 
that in Dallas County, elementary school students were forced to hold 
raffles not for field trips or extracurricular activities, but so their 
schools could afford paper towels and janitorial supplies. Students are 
still sharing textbooks. And the additional financing the Legislature has 
provided has only taken Alabama from 49th in per pupil spending to 48th.
The betting right now isn't on whether the Alabama Supreme Court will end 
the case, but what legal rubric it will use to do it. Some supporters of 
the lawsuit are hoping the court will revive Amendment 111. It would, they 
say, put the issues in stark relief if the right to education in Alabama 
was taken away by the restoration of that relic of the state's Jim Crow past.



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