Elizabeth Green of GothamSchools.org and I explore the aftermath of the landmark Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit that was supposed to guarantee New York City schoolkids an adequate education, and where it went wrong.

In December 2004, it seemed that New York City schools’ pocketbook woes might finally be at an end. For a decade, a coalition of city parents and education advocates had been battling Albany in state court over long-standing inequities in funding that had left New York City schools with only about $10,469 per student, as opposed to $13,760 per student in the neighboring suburbs.

In 2001, a judge had ruled that the state had a constitutional obligation to provide a “sound basic education,” and ordered the legislature to boost funding to city schools, but the legislature didn’t act. Now, the courts were promising to do what state senators and assembly members would not… [read more]

(Note: The Village Voice website runs subheads as its headlines for some reason, so you get the Babylon 5 reference up top instead. [UPDATE: My Voice editor informs me that the web heads are done independently of the print heads, since pithy stuff like “Equity Denied” doesn’t play nice with things like Google search engines, which actually makes sense. So it’s a feature, not a bug. Apologies to the Voice content management system for any aspersions cast.])