Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 19, 1994                   TAG: 9404190137
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DISPARITY DECISION WASN'T A SHOCKER

The state Constitution, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled, requires only that basic school standards be set and met. It does not require every school district to be equally funded.

One result, as House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell of Vinton observed, is to ease the pressure on the General Assembly to send more school money to poorer localities, and to make it harder to win the anti-disparity votes that have produced $300 million in anti-disparity school appropriations over the past two bienniums.

But the now-vanished threat posed by the lawsuit isn't the only reason for state lawmakers to boost school funding, particularly in poorer districts.

In the state constitutional prescription for "an educational program of high quality" to be "established and continually maintained" for all children, perhaps a more activist court could have discovered some sort of equal-funding requirement. But the actual ruling is no shocker. The state has established basic standards of quality, as constitutionally required, and it does apportion its general-education money according to a wealth-based formula.

The court's unanimous decision confirms the point that the outcomes of school-funding suits are unpredictable from state to state. At issue in each state is its adherence to its own constitutional requirements, not to any national norm. The constitutional language varies from state to state, as does each state's school-funding system - and, for that matter, the ideological composition of each state's highest court.

Despite the ruling in Richmond, wide disparities - too wide to be rationalized as region-to-region cost-of-living differences - in fact exist between what some of the richest and some of the poorest districts spend per student. In large part, that's because some Virginia localities are more able or willing than others to spend their own money to exceed state-set minimum standards.

The question left begging by the ruling is whether Virginia has set those minimum standards high enough.

That issue is related to the funding-disparity debate, because of the wealth-based feature of the state's funding formula: The higher the basic standards are set and thereafter funded, the more easily can the poorer districts narrow the disparity gap.

The question of school standards, however, is as much about the kind of future the commonwealth is to have as about funding disparities.

With or without the possibility of court-ordered change, Virginia is enmeshed in a worldwide economic web. In this global economy, the race increasingly is going to the best-educated, the most information-proficient.

Just as it's a mistake to assume that educational quality inevitably follows school spending, so would it be a mistake to assume that making Virginia's schools as good as they need to be - that is, as good as any in the world - is achievable without money.

Just as it's morally wrong to restrict educational opportunity simply on the basis of where a child resides, so would it be wrong to assume that taxpayers in the state's wealthier jurisdictions have no economic interest in the quality of schooling available to all young Virginians.