According to Attorney General Johnny-Woke, courts can AND SHOULD determine whether “the State” is “fully funding” an “adequate education,” as long as they don’t try to determine how much it costs to “fully fund” an “adequate education.” I kid you not … from New Hampshire Business Review:
Attorney General Formella’s team is not seeking to justify the state’s contribution to funding public schools. Instead, they primarily mount their defense on two propositions, one that relies on the separation of powers and the other that restricts the cost of an adequate education to the factors enumerated in statute.
First, the state asserts that the court “lacks jurisdiction to award any relief to Plaintiffs other than a simple declaration that the State is, or is not, complying with its constitutional duties.” Instead, the means of meeting the state’s constitutional duties is vested in the Legislature, which “possesses the exclusive discretion to determine what programs and what levels of funding are necessary and appropriate.”
“This case,” the state’s brief reads, “presents one or more non-justiciable political questions due to a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards, the impossibility of deciding the issues without making policy determinations of a kind clearly reserved to nonjudicial discretion.”
Attorney-General Johnny-Woke’s position is that it is possible to be just a “little pregnant.” The problem is that once you accept the premise that “the State” has a “constitutional duty” … more specifically
The State does not contest the underlying law applicable to the issues in this case. Under our education funding jurisprudence, Part II, Article 83 of the State Constitution “imposes a duty on the State to provide a constitutionally adequate education to every educable child in the public schools in New Hampshire and to guarantee adequate funding.” Claremont School Dist. v. Governor, 138 N.H. 183, 184 (1993). To comply with that duty the State must “define an adequate education, determine the cost, fund it with constitutional taxes, and ensure its delivery through accountability.” Londonderry Sch. Dist. v. State, 154 N.H. 153, 155-56 (2006) (quotation omitted).
you are PREGNANT. That is, you have accepted the premise that the Court has the FINAL SAY on the definition of an adequate education, how to determine the cost, how to fund it, and what “accountability” looks like.
All of the Claremont “duties” are “non-justiciable political questions.” To name but a few examples, whether to have a single statewide definition of an “adequate education” versus letting school districts create their own definitions, whether to use “adequacy” or some other measure as the aspirational standard, whether to utilize pervasive and meaningful school-choice as the means to “deliver” an “adequate education” are ALL “non-justiciable political questions.”
