Board of Ed., Levittown Union Free School Dist., Nassau County v. Nyquist

• Decision Date: 26 October 1981
• Citation: 83 A.D.2d 217,443 N.Y.S.2d 843
• Parties: , 1 Ed. Law Rep. 361 BOARD OF EDUCATION, LEVITTOWN UNION FREE SCHOOL DISTRICT, NASSAU COUNTY, et al., Plaintiffs-Respondents-Appellants; Board of Education, City School District, Rochester, New York, et al., Plaintiffs-Intervenors-Respondents, v. Ewald B. NYQUIST, Commissioner of Education, et al., Defendants-Appellants-Respondents.
• Court: New York Supreme Court — Appellate Division

Page 843

443 N.Y.S.2d 843

83 A.D.2d 217, 1 Ed. Law Rep. 361

BOARD OF EDUCATION, LEVITTOWN UNION FREE SCHOOL DISTRICT NASSAU COUNTY, et al., Plaintiffs-Respondents-Appellants Board of Education, City School District, Rochester, New York, et al., Plaintiffs-Intervenors-Respondents, v. Ewald B. NYQUIST, Commissioner of Education, et al Defendants-Appellants-Respondents.

Supreme Court, Appellate Division Second Department.

Oct. 26, 1981.

Robert Abrams, Atty. Gen., New York City (Shirley Adelson Siegel, Sol. Gen., Amy Juviler, Rosalind S. Fink, Robert L. Schonfeld, Clement H. Berne and Evelyn Tenenbaum, Asst. Attys. Gen., New York City, of counsel) for defendants-appellants-respondents.

Kramer, Lowenstein, Nessen, Kamin & Soll, New York City (Daniel P. Levitt and Alan Jay Stein, New York City, of counsel), for plaintiffs-respondents-appellants.

John Silard, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., Elliott C. Lichtman and Mary M. Levy, Rauh, Silard & Lichtman, Washington, D.C., for plaintiffs-intervenors-respondents. (Adam Kaufman, Counsel for Rochester Bd. of Ed., Rochester, Allen G. Schwartz, New York City Corp. Counsel by James G. Greilsheimer and Doron Gopstein, New York City, David M. Garber, Syracuse Corp. Counsel, Syracuse, and Joseph P. McNamara, Buffalo Corp. Counsel, Buffalo).

Shearman & Sterling, New York City (Wayne D. Collins, William M. Kelly and Dennis P. Orr, New York City, of counsel), for the Public Ed. Ass'n, the New York Urban Coalition, and the City Club of New York, amici curiae.

Before HOPKINS, J. P., and LAZER, GIBBONS and WEINSTEIN, JJ.

LAZER, Justice.

The educational command of New York's Constitution is simple and direct: "The legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of the state may be educated." ¹ That single sentence comprises the essential constitutional underpinning for a multifaceted fiscal and administrative structure encompassing a central authority, more than 700 school districts, and over 4,000 schools in which some 200,000 professionals conduct the education of 3,000,000 of the State's children. Twenty-seven of the school districts, four of the five largest cities in the State, and a number of school children and their parents have joined in challenging the statutory scheme under which the public educational system receives its fiscal support. Basing its conclusions on detailed findings of fact, the trial court (94 Misc.2d 466, 408 N.Y.S.2d 606) has declared the public school finance system violative of the equal protection clauses of the State and Federal Constitutions and the education article of the State Constitution. Although we depart from a portion of the rationale for the trial court's opinion and disagree with its determination of the Federal question, we concur with the ultimate conclusion--New York's method of financing public education is constitutionally defective.

I

This litigation symptomizes the continuing struggle between dual forces: the desire of society's members to have educational opportunity for all children and the desire of individual families to provide the best education they can afford for their own children. ² The struggle has been spurred to its current stage of intensity by two sociodemographic events--the post-World War II population explosion with its attendant outmigration from city to suburb and the in-migration of the poor and disadvantaged to the cities. ³ With the decline of the cities and the emergence of wide variances in suburban community wealth, disparities in the quality of education based upon real estate wealth have spawned widespread dissatisfaction with property-oriented educational finance systems. While the ensuing litigation first focused on the Federal Constitution, subsequent judicial events have transformed the critical question--the existence of a constitutional requirement for equal educational opportunity--to one of State constitutional interpretation.

Early in the recent decade--which witnessed school finance litigation in nearly two-thirds of the States ⁴--the California Supreme Court concluded that differences in educational quality based on the wealth of a child's parents or neighbors undermined core principles of representative government and violated guarantees of equal protection of the law (see Serrano v. Priest, 5 Cal.3d 584, 96 Cal.Rptr. 601, 487 P.2d 1241 The post-Serrano wave of educational finance reform ⁵ was quickly stifled, however, when the United States Supreme Court found school district wealth not a suspect classification, education not a fundamental right and the equal protection mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment not contravened by the Texas method of financing education (see San Antonio School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 93 S.Ct. 1278, 36 L.Ed.2d 16 Although two of our neighbor States subsequently determined that their educational finance systems did not meet the mandates of their State constitutions (see Robinson v. Cahill, 62 N.J. 473, 303 A.2d 273 cert. den. sub nom. Dickey v. Robinson, 414 U.S. 976, 94 S.Ct. 292, 38 L.Ed.2d 219; Horton v. Meskill, 172 Conn. 615, 376 A.2d 359 and California took the same path (see Serrano v. Priest 18 Cal.3d 728, 135 Cal.Rptr. 345, 557 P.2d 929 the pall of Rodriguez continues to overcast all educational finance jurisprudence.

This State's litigation commenced in June of 1974 when the Board of Education of the Levittown Union Free School District joined with the boards of 26 other districts and 12 elementary and high school students to seek judgment declaring the method of financing the State's public education system unconstitutional. The Boards of Education of four of the five largest cities in the State--New York City, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse--plus 12 city school children subsequently served a separate complaint as intervenor plaintiffs. The defendants are the Commissioners of Education and of Taxation and Finance of the State of New York, the State Comptroller, and the University of the State.

Both groups of plaintiffs claim that New York's method of financing public education violates the State ⁶ and Federal equal protection clauses and section 1 of article XI of the State Constitution. ⁷ The original plaintiffs contend that the quality of education actually delivered by the State depends upon the degree of real estate wealth within the respective school districts. With most educational revenue deriving from local real property taxes, the same rate of taxation produces gross disparities in per pupil tax yield between districts rich and poor in realty wealth, depriving the poor of the ability to match the rich in per pupil expenditures and quality of educational services even if they tax at higher rates than do the rich. Since State aid formulas are inadequate and often counterproductive in their equalization aspects, low-wealth districts cannot furnish what is obtainable elsewhere--smaller class size, more experienced and effective teachers, low student/teacher ratios, broader curricula, extensive extracurricular activities, more modern equipment and special programs for both the disadvantaged and the specially gifted. New York thus denies plaintiffs the educational resources available to wealthy districts and compels the offer of inferior education in contravention of the equal protection clauses of the State and Federal Constitutions.

The statutory scheme is also attacked as violative of the education article of the State Constitution, which the original plaintiffs viewed as envisioning a single State-wide school system instead of more than 700 distinct systems under which students, who may be equivalent except for district of residence, do not receive equivalent educational advantages. In selecting a financial structure which permits the existence of such gross disparities, New York has failed to fulfill its duty to provide a "system" where "all the children" of the State may be educated.

The intervenor cities argue that despite their real property resources they are so fiscally incapacitated by "municipal overburden," labor market differences and needs differentials as to be the least capable of relying on locally raised revenues to finance education. The overburden results from the necessity to devote such high proportions of the municipal tax base to noneducational services as to deprive education of its rightful due. Furthermore, the State's equalizing devices bear no fair and substantial relationship to equalization of capacity because they measure capacity by per pupil property wealth, and the special statutes designed to assist districts with pupils requiring compensatory school services provide less per pupil aid to the urban districts which have the highest concentration of such children.

In response, the defendants first challenge the justiciability of the issues and the plaintiffs' standing to maintain the action. On the merits, they assert that the State Constitution requires only that the State guarantee sufficient funds to ensure a basic minimum education for all its children, and that the constitutional requirement has been met by the current education system; that the legislative scheme for financing education is a rational one designed to preserve local control over education; and that the numerous components for distributing State aid under the formulas are rational exercises of legislative judgment. Finally the defendants contest the intervenors' assertions that inexorable municipal and educational overburdens require compensatory adjustments in the aid formulas to reflect these urban realities.

After a trial spanning 122 days, 23,000 pages of transcript and involving the testimony of 128 witnesses and the admission of 400 exhibits, Trial Term rendered 487 findings of fact and, in a remarkable opinion (Board of Educ. v. Nyquist, 94 Misc.2d 466, 408 N.Y.S.2d 606), concluded that New York's school finance system violated the equal...