The (Arguably) Most Important Question in the Gubernatorial Race That Everyone is Ignoring

Do you remember the ConVal education funding lawsuit? From my post back in June of last year:

So last week, a single Superior Court Judge decided he was the State’s Education-Czar and implicitly ordered -while, of course, claiming he was doing no such thing- the State to -at a minimum- triple spending on public education … which would require a massive expansion in spending by State government (at least an additional $1.6 billion annually according to the school districts that brought the lawsuit) that only could be funded by one or more “broad-based” taxes.

A few weeks ago, the appeal was heard by the New Hampshire Supreme Court:

According to DOE data, districts spend about $19,000 per pupil. Tierney [ConVal’s] attorney argued that the state’s per-pupil “base adequacy aid” of around $3,700 doesn’t cover what the districts are obligated to provide in order for students to receive an adequate education. Instead, Tierney said, that base adequacy aid should be close to $10,000.  

I cannot imagine that the Supreme Court will release its decision BEFORE the election because that would turn the race into a referendum on an income tax and likely lead to Republican majorities in both chambers of the Legislature.

I anticipate that the decision will resemble the Claremont framework. The Court will not accept ConVal’s price-tag because that would look too much like a violation of the Separation of Powers. Instead, the Court will … as it did in Claremont … try to make it look like it is not violating the Separation of Powers by ruling that the local property tax is funding some portion of the cost of an “adequate education.”

Because the State has “defined” “adequacy” and “determined” its “cost,” the Court will have to say that $3,700 per pupil is too low on its face (facially unconstitutional) because average spending is $19,000 per pupil … and, therefore, the local property tax is unconstitutional because it is funding some portion of the cost of an adequate education.

But instead of striking the local property tax down immediately, the Court will give the Legislature a grace-period to determine the cost of an adequate education and institute a “constitutional” funding scheme.

In other words, the Court … as it did in Claremont … will attempt to snooker and pressure the Legislature and the Governor into passing legislation that effectuates the Court’s policy preference … higher State spending on education. The snookering will take the same form as Claremont – the bogus claim that the “the State has a duty to define an adequate education and determine its cost” (or some similarly sonorous nonsense). The pressure will take the form of the court-imposed deadline on continuing to use the local property tax to fund public education.

Both candidates should be thoroughly interrogated about how they would respond to such a decision.

But … given the lack of any real journalists among the journalists in a position to push the candidates to answer such questions … we know that is not going to happen.