- Originally published in the NY Times on April 20, 2005 [here]
By SAM DILLON
Opening a new front in the growing rebellion against President
Bush's education law known as No Child Left Behind, the nation's
largest teachers' union and eight school districts in Michigan, Texas
and Vermont sued the Department of Education today, accusing it of
violating a passage in the federal law that prohibits any requirement
that states spend their own money to carry out its mandates.
Some legal scholars said the union had assembled a rigorous
complaint, thoughthey said it was difficult to judge the suit's
prospects because the case has few close precedents. But it was clearly
another headache for Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who is
trying to quash a federal-state conflict that has taken on several new
forms in recent days. Hours before the suit was filed, Utah's
Republican-dominated Legislature approved the most far-reaching
legislative challenge to President Bush's signature education law.
Both the Utah bill, which requires educators there to spend as
little state money as possible in carrying out the law's requirements,
and the teachers' union lawsuit filed today, rest heavily on the same
section of the federal law, which forbids federal officials from
requiring states to spend their own money on the law. The Connecticut
attorney general announced the state's intentions to sue the Department
of Education on the same grounds two weeks ago.
"If the facts about educational spending are as the plaintiffs
allege, then this lawsuit has good prospects of winning," said David B.
Cruz, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern
California. "It is a very strong case because the statutory language is
clear. The law says nothing in the act shall be interpreted to impose
requirements that aren't being funded."
More than 30 states - including many Republican strongholds - have
raised objections to the law. Some, like Connecticut's, argue that the
federal government is not adequately financing its requirements, which
include a broad expansion of standardized testing. Others object to
federal intrusion into an area long considered the domain of the states.
Margaret Spellings took office pledging to quickly improve
relations with the nation's educators, which had frayed under her
predecessor. Both Republicans and Democrats applauded her appointments.
But in recent weeks, her diplomacy appears to have failed on several
fronts. Lawyers for the teachers union, the National Education
Association, filed their complaint today in Federal District Court in
Detroit, which has jurisdiction over one of the plaintiff school
districts, in Pontiac, Mich., an urban system with 21 schools and
11,000 mostly African-American students.
"School budgets have been eaten up by the requirements of this
law, so on behalf of parents and children we're filing suit," said the
president of the National Education Association, Reg Weaver. He tangled
last year with the former secretary of education, Rod Paige, after the
secretary referred to the union - which has 2.7 million members - as a
"terrorist organization."
The other districts that joined the teachers union suit include
Laredo, Tex., a mostly Hispanic district in the Rio Grande Valley, with
23,000 students and 30 schools, and six one-school rural districts in
Vermont, with a total attendance of some 1,500 students, most of them
white.
In its complaint, the union argues that the federal law has
already obligated the nation's 50 state departments of education,
15,000 school districts and 90,000 local schools to spend billions of
dollars more to comply with its requirements than they have received in
federal money. The Bush administration has vehemently contested this
assertion, pointing to significant increases in federal education
financing since he took office.
But law professors said the plaintiffs would need only to prove
that the law is even modestly underfinanced in order to prevail,
because of the clarity of Section 9527 of the federal law, which was
written by Republican lawmakers during the Clinton administration.
"Nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize an officer
or employee of the federal government," that section says, "to mandate
a state or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any
costs not paid for under this act."
The Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who
announced earlier this month his intention to sue the Department of
Education in Federal District Court in Hartford, said today that the
teachers' union suit would "add weight to our independent legal action
against unfunded mandates imposed unlawfully on Connecticut and other
states.
"We welcome this highly significant ally to the legal battle that looms ahead," Mr. Blumenthal said.