62 Speech Challenge

Explanation/Instructions1. Students will prepare and deliver speeches to individual instructors during this afternoon’s lab session. Together, the lab will deliver 62 speeches in front of instructors and record 62 speeches for later review for a total of 124 speeches.

2. There are four speech setups in this document. All students will prepare all four speeches. Each student will sign-up for and deliver two of these speeches to an instructor. Students will record the other two speeches on their phones and submit them for later instructor review.

3. Students may choose to replace one of their instructor-delivered speeches with a reworked speech from a practice debate. In order to be eligible for this replacement, students must sign-up for a slot with the instructor that listened to the initial version of the speech or they must have prior consent from another instructor. However, students that choose to replace one of their speeches with a reworked speech must still record and submit all three of the speeches from this setup.

4. To sign-up for speeches, students will use this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gCFc5I71gtmZ3APwVvKM1Nk0_QJAuFuB8kQhH9iORbc/edit?usp=sharing. Please be courteous and respectful. All slots must be filled.

5. To record a speech for later review, use your dorm room. You should only be in your room for about ten minutes total; that’s all the time it will take to record two speeches. Only one person should be in a dorm room at any time. Make sure your recordings are clear and then upload them to Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/request/ByZ0UjxPdnLtKXKo2MCd. All speeches must be completed (delivered to an instructor or uploaded to Dropbox) by 5PM.

6. When not giving a speech to an instructor or recording a speech in your dorm room, students should be preparing in the lab room — not hanging out in the dorm. If you have finished all four speeches, you should work on your research assignments. The lab room must be a silent preparation area. If you are found hanging out, you will be referred to the office for discipline and we will cancel any future speech sessions. Do not ruin this for everyone.

#1 — Topicality vs. Deschooling

Explanation/Setup1. Assume the Deschooling 1AC below.

2. Assume that the 1NC included the topicality argument below.

3. Assume that the 2AC responded with the frontline below.

4. Students should prepare a five-minute negative block speech that extends topicality. They may not read any new evidence, but they may reference the existence of the Illich “topical version” cards in the activity document.

1AC — Deschooling (Practice)Education through schooling has reached the point of no return - the focus on traditional education reinforces a schooled society that utilizes pedagogical warfare to subjugate the population. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) School has become a social problem ; it is being attacked on all sides, and citizens and their governments sponsor unconventional experiments all over the world. They resort to unusual statistical devices in order to keep faith and save face. The mood among some educators is much like the mood among Catholic bishops after the Vatican Council. The curricula of so-called "free schools" resemble the liturgies of folk and rock masses. The demands of high-school students to have a say in choosing their teachers are as strident as those of parishioners demanding to select their pastors. But the stakes for society are much higher if a

significant minority loses its faith in schooling. This would endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the coproduction of goods and demands, but equally of the political order built on the nation-state into which students are delivered by the school.Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited investment or we rediscover that legislation and planning and investment, if they have any place in formal education, should be used mostly to tear down the barriers that now impede opportunities for learning, which can only be a personal activity.

If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information .

Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates. Increasingly larger numbers of bureaucrats will presume to pose as teachers. The language of the schoolman has already been coopted by the adman . Now the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by masquerading as

educators. In a schooled society, warmaking and civil repression find an educational rationale . Pedagogical warfare in the style of Vietnam will be increasingly justified as the only way of

teaching people the superior value of unending progress .

Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the coming of the mechanical Messiah. More and more countries will resort to the pedagogical torture already implemented in Brazil and Greece. This

pedagogical torture is not used to extract information or to satisfy the psychic needs of

sadists. It relies on random terror to break the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for the teachings invented by technocrats. The totally destructive and constantly progressive nature of obligatory instruction will fulfill its ultimate logic unless we begin to liberate ourselves right now from our pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.Many people are just awakening to the inexorable destruction which present production trends imply for the environment , but individuals have only very limited power to change these trends. The manipulation of men and women begun in school has also reached a point of no return , and most people are still unaware of it. They still encourage school reform , as Henry Ford II proposes less poisonous automobiles.

Daniel Bell says that our epoch is characterized by an extreme disjunction between cultural and social structures, the one being devoted to apocalyptic attitudes, the other to technocratic decision-making.

This is certainly true for many educational reformers, who feel impelled to condemn almost everything which characterizes modern schools-and at the same time propose new schools.

In his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that such dissonance inevitably precedes the emergence of a new cognitive paradigm. The facts reported by those who observed free fall, by those who returned from the other side of the earth, and by those who used the new telescope did not fit the Ptolemaic world view. Quite suddenly, the Newtonian paradigm was accepted. The dissonance which characterizes many of the young today is not so much cognitive as a matter of attitudes--a feeling about what a tolerable society cannot be like. What is surprising about this dissonance is the ability of a very large number of people to tolerate it.The capacity to pursue incongruous goals requires an explanation. According to Max Gluckman, all societies have procedures to hide such dissonances from their members. He suggests that this is the purpose of ritual. Rituals can hide from their participants even discrepancies and conflicts between social principle and social organization. As long as an individual is not explicitly conscious of the ritual character of the process through which he was initiated to the forces which shape his cosmos, he cannot break the spell and shape a new cosmos. As long as we are not aware of the ritual through which school shapes the progressive consumer --the economy's major

resource-- we cannot break the spell of this economy and shape a new one.

The resolution’s understanding of the education imperative feeds children into capitalism’s industrial machine. Absent an interrogation of the social ideologies that turn children into natural resources, education will remain corrupt and ineffective. Note* there are few links to specific things not highlighted – Educational technologists and R&D, the Free-school movement, teachers unions, behaviourists. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) I believe that the contemporary crisis of education demands that we review the very idea of publicly prescribed learning , rather than the methods used in its enforcement. The dropout rate--

especially of junior-high-school students and elementary-school teachers-- points to a grass-roots demand for a completely fresh look . The "classroom practitioner" who considers himself a liberal teacher is increasingly attacked from all sides. The freeschool movement, confusing discipline with indoctrination, has painted him into the role of a destructive authoritarian. The educational technologist consistently demonstrates the teacher's inferiority at measuring and modifying behavior. And the school administration for which he works forces him to bow to both Summerhill and Skinner, making it obvious that compulsory learning cannot be a liberal enterprise . No wonder that the desertion rate of teachers is overtaking that of their students.America's commitment to the compulsory education of its young now reveals itself to be as futile as the pretended American commitment to compulsory democratization of the Vietnamese.

Conventional schools obviously cannot do it . The free- school movement entices unconventional educators , but ultimately does so in support of the conventional ideology of schooling. And the promises of educational technologists , that their research and development --if adequately funded--can offer some kind of final solution to the resistance of youth to compulsory learning, sound as confident and prove as fatuous as the analogous promises made by the military technologists.

The criticism directed at the American school system by the behaviorists and that coming from the new breed of radical educators seem radically opposed. The behaviorists apply educational research to the "induction of autotelic instruction through individualized learning packages." Their style clashes with the nondirective cooption of youth into liberated communes established under the supervision of adults. Yet, in historical perspective,

these two are just contemporary manifestations of the seemingly contradictory yet really complementary goals of the public school system. From the beginning of this century, the schools have been protagonists of social control on the one hand and free cooperation on the other, both placed at the service of the "good society," conceived of as a highly organized and smoothly working corporate structure. Under the impact of intense urbanization, children became a natural resource to be molded by the schools and fed into the industrial machine. Progressive politics and the cult of efficiency converged in the growth of the U.S. public school.* Vocational guidance and the junior high school were two important results of this kind of thinking. [*See Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Cuaderno No. 50. Centro Intercultural de Documentacin, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971.]It appears, therefore, that the attempt to produce specified behavioral changes which can be measured and for which the processor can be held accountable is just one side of a coin, whose other side is the pacification of the new generation within specially engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders. These pacified in society are well described by Dewey, who wants us to "make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeate it with the spirit of art, history and science." In this historical perspective, it would be a grave mistake to interpret the current threecornered controversy between the school establishment, the educational technologists and the free schools as the prelude to a revolution in education. This controversy reflects rather a stage of an attempt to escalate an old dream into fact, and to finally make all valuable learning the result of professional teaching. Most educational alternatives proposed converge toward goals which are immanent in the production of the cooperative man whose individual needs are met by means of his specialization in the American system: They are oriented toward the improvement of what--for lack of a better phrase--I call the schooled society .

Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young , especially to the poor, an obligation to process them , whether by love or by fear, into a society which needs disciplined specialization as much from its producers as from its consumers and also

their full commitment to the ideology which puts economic growth first . Dissent veils the contradictions inherent in the very idea of school. The established teachers unions , the technological wizards , and the educational liberation movement reinforce the commitment of the entire society to the fundamental axioms of a schooled world, somewhat in the manner in which many peace and protest movements reinforce

the commitments of their members--be they black, female, young, or poor--to seek justice through the growth of the gross national income.

Slow violence outweighs — the biopolitical project of schooling scripts the world in violent ways that makes extinction inevitable Nixon 11 — Rob Nixon, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011 (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries, p. 2-4)Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink—politically, imaginatively, and theoretically—what I call “ slow violence .” By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight , a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I

believe, to engage a different kind of violence , a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous , but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational,

narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that

can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that

result from war’s toxic aftermaths or [END PAGE 2] climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions—from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential , operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-

turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time? [END PAGE 3]This book’s second, related focus concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Our media bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated as disposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously exacerbating the vulnerability of those whom Kevin Bale, in

another context, has called “ disposable people.” 2 It is against such conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent environmentalism of the poor, particularly (though not exclusively) across the so-called global South. So a central issue that emerges is strategic: if the neoliberal era has intensified assaults on resources, it has also intensified resistance, whether through isolated site-specific struggles or through activism that has reached across national boundaries in an effort to build translocal alliances.

Schooled society reproduces dominant neoliberal values that cause social inequality, dehumanization, and the ecological destruction of Earth. Jandrić 14 – Petar Jandrić, Professor at University of Applied Sciences in Zagreb, Former Senior Lecturer at The Polytechnic of Zagreb, Ph.D. in Information Science from Sveučilište u Zagrebu, MSc in Education from The University of Edinburgh, 2014 “Deschooling Virtuality,” Open Review of Educational Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, pg. 84-98, December 2nd, Available Online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23265507.2014.965193?scroll=top&needAccess=true, Accessed 6-2-17) Implicitly or explicitly, educators have always recognized their position in and against dominant social forces commonly described as Gramsci's (1992Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]) superstructures: political power relationships, institutions, culture and the state. At the one hand, education is supposed to liberate people from ignorance and

poverty; at the other hand, educational ‘liberation’ is brought by middle-class teachers who, often

unwillingly and/or unconsciously, inculcate dominant value systems and reproduce traditional social inequalities . This power dynamic creates a vicious circle on all levels of educational praxis, including but not limited to the nature of teacher employment. Working

within the current educational systems, educators are intrinsic parts of educational

Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser,   2008 Althusser,   L.   (2008).   On ideology.   London:   Verso.   [Google Scholar] ) which contribute to increasing social inequality . (To make things worse, they are also blamed more than ever for any perceived shortcomings in ‘the system’.) Those who resign might feel better with themselves, but the next person in line will step into their places and perpetuate the system. Adapted from collective work of the small group of British scholars called London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (Mitchell et al., 1979Mitchell, J., Mackenzie, D., Holloway, J., Cockburn, C., Polanshek, K., Murray, N., McInnes, N.,

& McDonald, J. (1979). In and against the state. Retrieved 18 March 2013 fromhttp://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979 ), the concept in and against superstructures succinctly summarizes Illich's argument against schooling. However, while the majority of radical educators seek solution in opposition   from   this unfavourable position (Mitchell et al., 1979Mitchell, J., Mackenzie, D., Holloway, J., Cockburn, C., Polanshek, K., Murray, N., McInnes, N., & McDonald, J. (1979). In and against the state. Retrieved 18 March 2013 fromhttp://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979 ), Illich asserts that all such attempts are deemed a failure and looks for radically different approaches.Illich's argument departs from his wide critique of institutionalization of the contemporary society. ‘Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work’ (Illich, 1971Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. [Google Scholar], p. 3). Institutionalized society is dialectically intertwined with institutionalized education. ‘The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new’ (Illich, 1971Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. [Google Scholar], p. 3). Institutionalized educational systems are necessarily dehumanized. Hence, institutionalized society reduces people to producers and consumers. In the context of learning it could be argued that this is not always bad, as a form of the relationship between producers and consumers naturally underpins learning (beyond schooling). What makes institutionalized educational systems dehumanized , however, are the static models of ‘ delivering’ education and often perverse ways they feed into capital. Following the line of argument very similar to Frankfurt School critiques of technologies exposed in Herbert Marcuse's One-dimensional man (1964Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society. New York: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]) and Martin Heidegger's ‘Only a God can save us' interview (1981Heidegger, M. (1981). “Only a God can save us": The Spiegel interview. In T. Sheehan (Ed.), Heidegger: The man and the thinker (pp. 45–67). Chicago, IL: Precedent Press. [Google Scholar]), Illich shows that stability of institutionalized society is based on constant economic growth . Deeply rooted in the spirit of 1960s and

1970s, he finally concludes that such a model inevitably leads towards ecological destruction of our planet .

Absent a shift towards prioritizing social need over profit - the expansion of capitalism will cause extinctionRobinson 16 (William I. ROBINSON, professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, 16 [“Sadistic Capitalism: Six Urgent Matters for Humanity in Global Crisis,” Truth-out, April 12, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35596-sadistic-capitalism-six-urgent-matters-for-humanity-in-global-crisis)In these mean streets of globalized capitalism in crisis, it has become profitable to turn poverty and inequality into a tourist attraction.The South African Emoya Luxury Hotel and Spa company has made a glamorized spectacle of it. The resort recently advertised an opportunity for tourists to stay "in our unique Shanty Town ... and experience traditional township living within a safe private game reserve environment." A cluster of simulated shanties outside of Bloemfontein that the company has constructed "is ideal for team building, braais, bachelors [parties], theme parties and an experience of a lifetime," read the ad. The luxury accommodations, made to appear from the outside as shacks, featured paraffin lamps, candles, a battery-operated radio, an outside toilet, a drum and fireplace for cooking, as well as under-floor heating, air conditioning and wireless internet access. A well-dressed, young white couple is pictured embracing in a field with the corrugated tin shanties in the background. The only thing missing in this fantasy world of sanitized space and glamorized poverty was the people themselves living in poverty.

The “luxury shanty town” in South Africa is a fitting metaphor for global capitalism as a whole. Faced with a stagnant global economy, elites have managed to turn war, structural violence and inequality into opportunities for capital , pleasure and entertainment. It is hard not to conclude that unchecked capitalism has become what I term “ sadistic capitalism,” in which the suffering and deprivation generated by capitalism become a source of aesthetic pleasure, leisure and entertainment for others.I recently had the opportunity to travel through several countries in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, East Asia and throughout North America. I was on sabbatical to research what the global crisis looks like on the ground around the world. Everywhere I went, social polarization and political tensions have reached explosive dimensions.Where is the crisis headed, what are the possible outcomes and what does it tell us about global capitalism and resistance? This crisis is not like earlier structural crises of world capitalism, such as in the 1930s or 1970s. This one is fast becoming

systemic. The crisis of humanity shares aspects of earlier structural crises of world capitalism, but

there are six novel, interrelated dimensions to the current moment that I highlight here, in broad strokes, as the "big picture" context in which countries and peoples around the world are experiencing a descent into chaos and uncertainty.1) The level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented in the face of out-of-control, over-accumulated capital. In January 2016, the development agency Oxfam published a follow-up to its report on global

inequality that had been released the previous year. According to the new report, now just 62 billionaires -- down from 80 identified by the agency in its January 2015 report -- control as much wealth as one half of the world's population, and the top 1% owns more wealth than the other 99 % combined . Beyond the

transnational capitalist class and the upper echelons of the global power bloc, the richest 20 percent of humanity owns some 95 percent of the world's wealth, while the bottom 80 percent has to make do with just 5 percent.

This 20-80 divide of global society into haves and the have-nots is the new global social apartheid. It is evident not just between rich and poor countries, but within each country, North and South, with the rise of new affluent high-consumption sectors alongside the

downward mobility, “precariatization,” destabilization and expulsion of majorities.

Escalating inequalities fuel capitalism’s chronic problem of over-accumulation : The transnational capitalist class cannot find productive outlets to unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated, leading to stagnation in the world economy. The signs of an impending depression are everywhere. The front page of the February 20 issue of The Economist read, "The World Economy: Out of Ammo?"Extreme levels of social polarization present a challenge to dominant groups. They strive to purchase the loyalty of that 20 percent, while at the same time dividing the 80 percent, co-opting some into a hegemonic bloc and repressing the rest.

Alongside the spread of frightening new systems of social control and repression is heightened dissemination through the culture industries and corporate marketing strategies that depoliticize through consumerist fantasies and the manipulation of desire.

As "Trumpism" in the United States so well illustrates, another strategy of co-optation is the manipulation of fear and insecurity among the downwardly mobile so that social anxiety is channeled toward scapegoated communities . This psychosocial mechanism of displacing mass anxieties is not new, but it appears to be increasing around the world in the face of the structural destabilization of capitalist globalization. Scapegoated communities are under siege, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Muslim minority in India , the Kurds in Turkey , southern African immigrants in South Africa, and Syrian and Iraqi refugees and other immigrants in Europe.

As with its 20th century predecessor, 21st century fascism hinges on such manipulation of social anxiety at a time of acute capitalist crisis. Extreme inequality requires extreme violence and repression that lend to projects of 21st century fascism.

2) The system is fast reaching the ecological limits to its reproduction . We have reached several tipping points in what environmental

scientists refer to as nine crucial " planetary boundaries ." We have already

exceeded these boundaries in three areas -- climate change, the nitrogen cycle and diversity loss.There have been five previous mass extinctions in earth's history. While all these were due to natural causes, for the first time ever, human conduct is intersecting with and fundamentally altering the earth system.We have entered what Paul Crutzen, the Dutch environmental scientist and Nobel Prize winner, termed the Anthropocene -- a new age in which humans have transformed up to half of the world's surface. We are altering the composition of the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans at a rate that undermines the conditions for life. The ecological dimensions of global crisis cannot be understated."We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed," observes Elizabeth Kolbert in her best seller, The Sixth Extinction. "No other creature has ever managed this ... The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust."Capitalism cannot be held solely responsible. The human-nature contradiction has deep roots in civilization itself. The ancient Sumerian empires, for example, collapsed after the population over-salinated their crop soil. The Mayan city-state network collapsed about AD 900 due to deforestation. And the former Soviet Union wrecked havoc on the environment. However, given capital’s implacable impulse to accumulate profit and its accelerated commodification of nature, it is difficult to imagine that the environmental catastrophe can be resolved within the capitalist system. “Green capitalism” appears as an oxymoron , as sadistic capitalism’s attempt to turn the ecological crisis into a profit-making opportunity , along with the conversion of poverty into a tourist attraction.

3) The sheer magnitude of the means of violence is unprecedented , as is the concentrated control over the means of global

communications and the production and circulation of knowledge, symbols and images. We have seen the spread of frightening new systems of social control and repression that have brought us into the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control. This real-life Orwellian world is in a sense more perturbing than that described by George Orwell in his iconic novel 1984. In that fictional world, people were compelled to give their obedience to the state (“Big Brother”) in exchange for a quiet existence with guarantees of employment, housing and other social necessities. Now, however, the corporate and political powers that be force obedience even as the means of survival are denied to the vast majority.Global apartheid involves the creation of "green zones" that are cordoned off in each locale around the world where elites are insulated through new systems of spatial reorganization, social control and policing. "Green zone" refers to the nearly impenetrable area in central Baghdad that US occupation forces established in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The command center of the occupation and select Iraqi elite inside that green zone were protected from the violence and chaos that engulfed the country.Urban areas around the world are now green zoned through gentrification, gated communities, surveillance systems, and state and private violence. Inside the world's green zones, privileged strata avail themselves of privatized social services, consumption and entertainment. They can work and communicate through internet and satellite sealed off under the protection of armies of soldiers, police and private security forces.Green zoning takes on distinct forms in each locality. In Palestine, I witnessed such zoning in the form of Israeli military checkpoints, Jewish settler-only roads and the apartheid wall. In Mexico City, the most exclusive residential areas in the upscale Santa Fe District are accessible only by helicopter and private gated roads. In Johannesburg, a surreal drive through the exclusive Sandton City area reveals rows of mansions that appear as military compounds, with private armed towers and electrical and barbed-wire fences. In Cairo, I toured satellite cities ringing the impoverished center and inner suburbs where the country's elite could live out their aspirations and fantasies. They sport gated residential complexes with spotless green lawns, private leisure and shopping centers and English-language international schools under the protection of military checkpoints and private security police.In other cities, green zoning is subtler but no less effective. In Los Angeles, where I live, the freeway system now has an express lane reserved for those that can pay an exorbitant toll. On this lane, the privileged speed by, while the rest remain one lane over, stuck in the city's notorious bumper-to-bumper traffic -- or even worse, in notoriously underfunded and underdeveloped public transportation, where it may take half a day to get to and from work. There is no barrier separating this express lane from the others. However, a near-invisible closed surveillance system monitors every movement. If a vehicle without authorization shifts into the exclusive lane, it is instantly recorded by this surveillance system and a heavy fine is imposed on the driver, under threat of impoundment, while freeway police patrols are ubiquitous.Outside of the global green zones, warfare and police containment have become normalized and sanitized for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. "Militainment" -- portraying and even glamorizing war and violence as entertaining spectacles through Hollywood films and television police shows, computer games and corporate

"news" channels -- may be the epitome of sadistic capitalism. It desensitizes, bringing about complacency and indifference.

In between the green zones and outright warfare are prison industrial complexes, immigrant and refugee repression and control systems, the criminalization of outcast communities and capitalist schooling. The omnipresent media and cultural apparatuses of the corporate economy , in particular, aim to colonize the mind -- to undermine the ability to think critically and outside the dominant worldview. A neofascist culture emerges through

militarism , extreme masculinization, racism and racist mobilizations against scapegoats .

4) We are reaching limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism. Capitalism is like riding a bicycle: When you stop pedaling the bicycle, you fall over. If the capitalist system stops expanding outward, it enters crisis and faces collapse. In each earlier structural crisis, the system went through a new round of extensive expansion -- from waves of colonial conquest in earlier centuries, to the integration in the late 20th and early

21st centuries of the former socialist countries, China, India and other areas that had

been marginally outside the system. There are no longer any new territories to integrate into world capitalism.Meanwhile, the privatization of education, health care, utilities, basic services and public land are turning those spaces in global society that were outside of capital's control into "spaces of capital." Even poverty has been turned into a commodity. What is there left to commodify? Where can the system now expand? With the limits to expansion comes a turn toward militarized accumulation -- making wars of endless destruction and reconstruction and expanding the militarization of social and political institutions so as to continue to generate new opportunities for accumulation in the face of stagnation.

5) There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a "planet of slums," alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins and subject to these sophisticated systems of social control and destruction. Global capitalism has no direct use for surplus humanity. But indirectly, it holds wages down everywhere and makes new systems of 21st century slavery possible . These systems include prison labor , the forced recruitment of miners at gunpoint by warlords contracted by global corporations to dig up valuable minerals in the Congo, sweatshops and exploited immigrant communities (including the rising tide of immigrant female caregivers for affluent populations).

Furthermore, the global working class is experiencing accelerated "precariatization." The "new precariat" refers to the proletariat that faces capital under today’s unstable and precarious labor relations -- informalization, casualization, part-time, temp, immigrant and contract labor.As communities are uprooted everywhere, there is a rising reserve army of immigrant labor. The global working class is becoming divided into citizen and immigrant workers. The latter are particularly attractive to transnational capital, as the lack of citizenship rights makes them particularly vulnerable, and therefore, exploitable.The challenge for dominant groups is how to contain the real and potential rebellion of surplus humanity, the immigrant workforce and the precariat. How can they contain the explosive contradictions of this

system? The 21st century megacities become the battlegrounds between mass resistance movements and the new systems of mass repression. Some populations in these cities (and also in abandoned countryside) are at

risk of genocide , such as those in Gaza, zones in Somalia and Congo, and swaths of Iraq and Syria.

6) There is a disjuncture between a globalizing economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and do not wield enough power and authority to organize and stabilize the system, much less to impose regulations on runaway transnational capital. In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, for instance, the governments of the G-8 and G-20 were unable to impose transnational regulation on the global financial system, despite a series of emergency summits to discuss such regulation.Elites historically have attempted to resolve the problems of over-accumulation by state policies that can regulate the anarchy of the market. However, in recent decades, transnational capital has broken free from the constraints imposed by the nation-state. The more "enlightened" elite representatives of the transnational capitalist class are now clamoring for transnational mechanisms of regulation that would allow the global ruling class to reign in the anarchy of the system in the interests of saving global capitalism from itself and from radical challenges from below.At the same time, the division of the world into some 200 competing nation-states is not the most propitious of circumstances for the global working class. Victories in popular struggles from below in any one country or region can (and often do) become diverted and even undone by the structural power of transnational capital and the direct political and military domination that this structural power affords the dominant groups. In Greece, for instance, the leftist Syriza party came to power in 2015 on the heels of militant worker struggles and a mass uprising. But the party abandoned its radical program as a result of the enormous pressure exerted on it from the European Central Bank and private international creditors.The Systemic Critique of Global CapitalismA growing number of transnational elites themselves now recognize that any resolution to the global crisis must involve redistribution downward of income.However, in the viewpoint of those from below, a neo-Keynesian redistribution within the prevailing corporate power structure is not enough. What is required is a redistribution of power downward and transformation toward a system in which social need trumps private profit.

A global rebellion against the transnational capitalist class has spread since the financial collapse of 20 08 . Wherever one looks, there is popular, grassroots and leftist struggle, and the rise of new cultures of resistance: the Arab Spring ; the resurgence of leftist politics in Greece, Spain and elsewhere in Europe ; the tenacious resistance of Mexican social movements following the Ayotzinapa massacre of

2014; the favela uprising in Brazil against the government's World Cup and Olympic

expulsion policies; the student strikes in Chile ; the remarkable surge in the Chinese workers’ movement; the shack dwellers and other poor people's campaigns in South Africa; Occupy Wall Street, the immigrant rights movement, B lack L ives M atter, fast food workers' struggle and the mobilization around the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in the United States.This global revolt is spread unevenly and faces many challenges. A number of these struggles, moreover, have suffered setbacks, such as the Greek working-class movement and, tragically, the Arab Spring. What type of a transformation is viable, and how do we achieve it? How we interpret the global crisis is itself a matter of vital importance as politics polarize worldwide between a neofascist and a popular response. The systemic critique of global capitalism must strive to influence , from this vantage

point, the discourse and practice of movements for a more just distribution of wealth and power . Our survival may depend on it .

Only challenging the apparatus of schooling challenges the institutional architecture that makes every impact inevitable. The traditional educational model produces subjects that have only one goal - consumption. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

Man has developed the frustrating power to demand anything because he cannot visualize anything which an institution cannot do for him. Surrounded by all-powerful tools, man is reduced to a tool of his tools. Each of the institutions meant to exorcise one of the primeval evils has become a fail-safe, self-sealing coffin for man. Man is trapped in the boxes he makes to contain the ills Pandora allowed to escape. The blackout of reality in the smog produced by our tools has enveloped us. Quite suddenly we find ourselves in the darkness of our own trap.

Reality itself has become dependent on human decision. The same President who ordered the ineffective invasion of Cambodia could equally well order the effective use of the atom. The "Hiroshima switch" now can cut the navel of the Earth. Man has acquired the power to make Chaos overwhelm both Eros and Gaia. This new power of man to cut the navel of the Earth is a constant reminder that our institutions not only

create their own ends, but also have the power to put an end to themselves and to us. The absurdity of modern institutions is evident in the case of the military. Modern weapons can defend freedom, civilization, and life only by annihilating them. Security in military language means the ability to do away with the Earth.

The absurdity that underlies nonmilitary institutions is no less manifest. There is no switch in them to activate their destructive power, but neither do they need a switch. Their grip is already fastened to the lid of the world. They create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the Earth. This is true for agriculture and manufacturing, and no less for medicine and education. Modern agriculture poisons and exhausts the soil. The "green revolution" can, by means of new seeds, triple the output of an acre--but only with an even greater proportional increase of fertilizers, insecticides, water, and power. Manufacturing of these, as of all other goods, pollutes the oceans and the atmosphere and degrades irreplaceable resources. If combustion continues to increase at present rates, we will soon consume the oxygen of the atmosphere faster than it can be replaced. We have no reason to believe that fission or fusion can replace combustion without equal or higher hazards. Medicine men replace midwives and promise to make man into something else: genetically planned, pharmacologically sweetened, and capable of more protracted sickness. The contemporary ideal is a pan-hygienic world: a world in which all contacts between men, and

between men and their world, are the result of foresight and manipulation. School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man’s trap . It is supposed to shape each man to an adequate level for playing a part in this world game. Inexorably we cultivate, treat, produce, and school the world out of existence . The military institution is evidently absurd. The absurdity of nonmilitary institutions is more difficult to face. It is even more frightening, precisely because it operates inexorably. We know which switch must stay open to avoid an atomic holocaust. No switch detains an ecological Armageddon.In classical antiquity, man had discovered that the world could be made according to man's plans, and with this insight he perceived that it was inherently precarious, dramatic and comical. Democratic institutions evolved and man was presumed worthy of trust within their framework. Expectations from due process and confidence in human nature kept each other in balance. The traditional professions developed and with them the institutions needed for their exercise.

Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will . The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man's

planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it, is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners .We see this logic at work in ourselves and in others. I know a Mexican village through which not more than a dozen cars drive each day. A Mexican was playing dominoes on the new hard-surface road in front of his house--where he had probably played and sat since his youth. A car sped through and killed him. The tourist who reported the event to me was deeply upset, and yet he said: "The man had it coming to him."At first sight, the tourist's remark is no different from the statement of some primitive bushman reporting the death of a fellow who had collided with a taboo and had therefore died. But the two statements carry opposite meanings. The primitive can blame some tremendous and dumb transcendence, while the tourist is in awe of the inexorable logic of the machine. The primitive does not sense responsibility; the tourist senses it, but denies it. In both the primitive and the tourist the classical mode of drama, the style of tragedy, the logic of personal endeavor and rebellion is absent. The primitive man has not become conscious of it, and the tourist has lost it. The myth of the Bushman and the myth of the American are made of inert, inhuman forces. Neither experiences tragic rebellion. For the Bushman, the event follows the laws of magic; for the American, it follows the laws of science. The event puts him under the spell of the laws of mechanics, which for him govern physical, social, and psychological events.

The mood of 1971 is propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future. Institutional goals continuously contradict institutional products . The poverty program produces more poor, the war in Asia more Vietcong, technical assistance more underdevelopment. Birth control clinics increase

survival rates and boost the population; schools produce more dropouts; and the curb on one kind of pollution usually increases another.

Consumers are faced with the realization that the more they can buy, the more deceptions they must swallow. Until recently it seemed logical that the blame for this pandemic inflation of dysfunctions could be laid either on the limping of scientific discovery behind the technological demands or on the perversity of ethnic, ideological, or class enemies. Both the expectations of a scientific millennium and of a war to end all wars have declined.For the experienced consumer, there is no way back to a naive reliance on magical technologies. Too many people have had bad experiences with neurotic computers, hospital-bred infections, and jams wherever there is traffic on the road, in the air, or on the phone. Only ten years ago conventional wisdom anticipated a better life based on an increase in scientific discovery. Now scientists frighten children. The moon shots provide a fascinating demonstration that human failure can be almost eliminated among the operators of complex systems-yet this does not allay our fears that the human failure to consume according to instruction might spread out of control.For the social reformer there is no way back, either, to the assumptions of the forties. The hope has vanished that the problem of justly distributing goods can be sidetracked by creating an abundance of them. The cost of the minimum package capable of satisfying modern tastes has skyrocketed, and what makes tastes modern is their obsolescence prior even to satisfaction.

The limits of the Earth's resources have become evident. No breakthrough in science or technology could provide every man in the world with the commodities and services which are now available to the poor of rich countries. For instance, it would take the extraction of one hundred times the present amounts of iron, tin, copper, and lead to achieve such a goal, with even the "lightest" alternative technology.Finally, teachers, doctors, and social workers realize that their distinct professional ministrations have one aspect-at least-in common. They create further demands for the institutional treatments they provide, faster than they can provide service institutions.

Not just some part, but the very logic, of conventional wisdom is becoming suspect. Even the laws of economy seem unconvincing outside the narrow parameters which apply to the social, geographic area

where most of the money is concentrated. Money is, indeed, the cheapest currency, but only in an economy geared to efficiency measured in monetary terms. Both capitalist and Communist countries in their various forms are committed to measuring efficiency in cost-benefit ratios expressed in dollars. Capitalism flaunts a higher standard of living as its claim to superiority. Communism boasts of a higher growth rate as an index of its

ultimate triumph. But under either ideology the total cost of increasing efficiency increases geometrically. The largest institutions compete most fiercely for resources which are not listed in any inventory: the air, the ocean, silence, sunlight, and health. They bring the scarcity of these resources to public attention only when they are almost irremediably degraded. Everywhere nature becomes poisonous, society inhumane , and the inner life is invaded and personal vocation smothered.A society committed to the institutionalization of values identifies the production of goods and services with the demand for such. Education which makes you need the product is included in the price of the product. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. In such a society marginal value has become constantly self- transcendent. It forces the few largest consumers to compete for the power to deplete the earth , to fill their own swelling bellies, to discipline smaller consumers, and to deactivate those who still find satisfaction in making do with what they have. The ethos of nonsatiety is thus at the root of physical depredation , social polarization , and psychological passivity . When values have been institutionalized in planned and engineered processes, members of modern society believe that the good life consists in having institutions which define the values that both they and their society believe they need. Institutional value can be defined as the level of output of an institution . The corresponding value of man is measured by his ability to consume and degrade these institutional outputs, and thus create a new-even higher-demand . The value of institutionalized man depends on his capacity as an incinerator .

To use an image--he has become the idol of his handiworks. Man now defines himself as the furnace which burns up the values produced by his tools. And there is no limit to his capacity . His is the act of Prometheus carried to an extreme.

The exhaustion and pollution of the earth's resources is , above all, the result of a corruption in man's self-image , of a regression in his consciousness. Some would like to speak about a mutation of collective consciousness which leads to a conception of man as an organism dependent not on nature and individuals, but rather on institutions. This institutionalization of substantive values, this belief that a planned process of treatment

ultimately gives results desired by the recipient, this consumer ethos , is at the heart of the Promethean fallacy.Efforts to find a new balance in the global milieu depend on the deinstitutionalization of values .

The regulation of primary and secondary schools should deinstitutionalize education to deschool society. This is crucial to formulate sustainability learning and critical, border pedagogy to unbind educational policy and thought from neoliberal perspectives. Blewitt 10 – John Blewitt, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Communication at Aston Business School, Former Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield, Former Professor a the University of Exeter, Distinguished Schumacher Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ph.D. from the University of Wales, MEd from Huddersfield University, 2010 (“Deschooling Society? A Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies,” November 12th, Sustainability, Volume 2, Issue 11, pg. 3465-3478, Available Online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/11/3465/htm, Accessed 5-29-17) 3. A Creative RuptureFor many decades the curriculum trajectory of formal education institutions at all levels in the ‘developed world’ has increased the salience of vocation and professional learning through the structuring learning that directly serves the needs of the economy and , in turn, promotes excessive material consumption. As Illich wrote ([12], p. 46), “in a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index”. This, together with his stress on deinstitutionalisation and deprofessionalisation of learning resonates with the need for a sustainability learning to politically abrade the cultural authority of neoliberal perspectives on education and learning . The capitalisation metaphor—human capital, financial capital, social capital economic capital, cultural capital, natural capital—dominates many discourses including those that shape with operations of formal education and the public pedagogy of a number of sustainability organisations, such as Forum for the Future, and although arguably the capital metaphor may in some instances be a useful heuristic device, Darlene Clover [14] and Chet Bowers [15,16,17] remind us that metaphors, particularly root metaphors, shape not only how we perceive and live but also the ways in which we may critique and penetrate the political implications and educational infractions of this conceptual framework. A shopping mall is both a constellation of capitals, good or bad, and a pedagogical opportunity that could conceivably nurture a transformation of meaning schemes and perspectives if set within learning processes and spaces of creative re-imagination, resistance and rupture. Similarly, in the sphere of training and vocational education the terms ‘ work ready’ ‘employable’ , ‘ employer led’ and ‘ relevan t’ too easily trip off the tongue because mainstream policy makers and educators have internalised the complacent rhetoric of the end of history with “the only show in town” being private enterprise and economic growth . There is an alternative . There has to be one.

Given this, it is important that sustainability educators and practitioners recognise that formal education has historically been not so much a transformative experience but a socially reproductive one that rarely transforms base metal into gold doing little to turn an unsustainable into a sustainable world. Educators need to confront the routine behaviours, expectations, thinking and metaphors that has conceivably made our era an age of stupid . In this context, Franny Armstrong’s apocalyptic docudrama, The Age of Stupid (UK, 2009), is an important pedagogic space inviting a meditation on human nature and its financial, production and social relations. It is also an object lesson and potentially prefiguring an engaged and active political, media based, public pedagogy challenging fatalistic passivity and the infantisation of opinion. As Felix Guattari writes ([18], pp. 41-42).The increasing deterioration of human relations with the socius, the psyche and ‘nature’, is due not only to environmental and objective pollution but is also the result of a certain incomprehension and fatalistic passivity towards these issues as a whole, among both individuals and governments. (...) It is quite wrong to make a distinction between action on the psyche, the socius and the environment. Refusal to face up to the erosion of these three areas, as the media would have us do, verges on the strategic infantilization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy. We need to ‘kick the habit’ of seductive discourse, particularly the ‘fix’ of television, in order to be able apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses or points of view of the three ecologies.With a move towards deinstitutionalising formal learning and the rearticulation of public pedagogies through the cultural spaces and opportunities of co-operation, co-production, social and eco-entrepreneurship, lifelong learning practices need not be exclusively tied to the dictates of global capitalism that otherwise infuse our everyday lives and lifeworlds. There are new, clear and evident conditions of an alternative possibility for the experience of contemporary cultural capitalism is itself contradictory. Large multinational conglomerates and retail chains present themselves as ecologically responsible inviting consumers to buy into fundamental iniquities through the false promise that our purchases will benefit those who suffer as a result of those very relations of production that have made the commodity possible. Five pence of every purchase goes to save a rainforest, feed a starving child, help a peasant farmer or save a tiger ... A consequence, Zizek writes ([19], p. 98) is that seemingly:

One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and Excluded.

Hardt and Negri [20] suggests, in their analysis of the new Empire, the current world order is one where compromise and accommodation falls far short of the radical, structural and philosophic requirement to

resist its cultural seductiveness. Resistance requires an imagination and a will to be against . A tall order maybe, but Empire’s

considerable impact suggests there is an intellectual appetite for political change that sustainability educators and practitioners and educators need to address. Again, with Mike Hulme’s [21] approach to understanding the nature of climate change as so brilliantly laid out in Why We Disagree About Climate Change, sustainability practitioners and educators have prime opportunities to square the circle, to reconcile sustainability with development , to both unbind politics and become a subject of and for politics. As the philosopher Alain Badiou ([22], p. 24) writes:

The essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists. Climate change is not a problem waiting for a solution . The environment is not just waiting for a new and more appropriate form of fungible capitalisation but learners are waiting for possibilities of a new learning that only broad based and grounded sustainability networks can provide . These networks must be “readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching” ([12], p. 79) . To

effect this, a radical departure in current educational thinking and practice needs to be intimately and reflexively connected in a recursive succession of moments that bring forth a triadic process of reflective intuition encompassing mind, matter and mediation [23,24]. For Bergson, the moment of creativity emerges from a process of rupture , of discontinuity that transcends the quantitative discontinuities produced by dividing the world into separate and discrete segments, disciplines and professions but which are nonetheless infused with a plurality of continuities and rhythmic durations. These ruptures will gain strength from a rearticulation and re-apprehension of metaphor based on intuitive reflections of lived experience that imbue action with meaning and meaning with action. For Badiou [22], in our world where dialogue is reduced to a plurality of opinions and where democratic individuals seem largely indifferent to injustice and vast material inequalities, only through an “event”, a radical break or rupture with the status quo, can individuals regain their subjectivity and fashion a praxis that offers a genuine alternative. Networks of learning that can engage a multiplicity of participants , individuals, groups, organisations and sectors that may, or may not at first glance, share a great deal of common ground are nonetheless constitutive parts of a world of social learning enabling processes, spaces and practices of lifelong learning for sustainability to emerge. Thus instead of resembling sites of social and cultural reproduction ,

such a lifelong learning, and its constituent networks , must become an ecotone which is understood and lived both metaphorically and literally. To put it another way, a lifelong learning perceived and practiced as an ecotone is a transition area where different communities of practice , and interest, may come together thereby generating a richness in thought, action, knowledge, skills, understanding, creativity and philosophy not found within any one section, group, institution or community or in the wider educational environment . This transitional space offers the potentiality and possibility of rupture and a new ground for sustainability learning that is in essence politically democratic and just. It is the cultural space for a critical, border pedagogy . For Illich ([12], p. 78) learning is a human activity which least needs manipulation by others. The most important learning is immeasurable re-creation and a good education system therefore should have three main purposes, ...it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.This new form of education and learning, he writes ([12], p. 80), should not start with the question “‘What should someone learn?’ but with the question, What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?” He outlines his proposal for a qualitative and quantitive transformation—a deschooling of society that challenges the hegemony of professional education and the ideology of credentialism tied completely to the economistic worldview . He prefers the term “opportunity web” to “network” for the latter is too often enlisted “to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment” ([12], p. 79). He explains further ([12], p. 80),Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others’ consent. Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question, companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking, challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among peers and to the deficiency of the answers they arrive at. Most of these resources are plentiful. But they are neither conventionally perceived as educational resources, nor is access to them for learning purposes easy, especially for the

poor. We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education . Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.

Sustainability learning networks are crucial to create a more ecological society and establish environmental and social justice for a more sustainable future – open webs of knowledge-exchange and non-restrictive learning are key. Blewitt 10 – John Blewitt, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Communication at Aston Business School, Former Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield, Distinguished Schumacher Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ph.d. from the University of Wales, MEd from Huddersfield University, 2010 (“Deschooling Society? A Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies,” November 12th, Sustainability, Volume 2, Issue 11, pg. 3465-3478, Available Online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/11/3465/htm, Accessed 5-29-17) This era of post ecological politics has followed closely on the heels of the post industrial society, post modern culture and a post feminist age emerged when gender inequality has only just about been dented and Chevron brandish their green credentials on global media networks while continuing to fund climate change deniers [7]. We are all green now and it is incumbent on all of us as learners to interrogate and make sense of this absurdity. To do this, learning must be rooted in the experience of living, of navigating the multifaceted and often frightening array of consumer attractions and the dangers of apprehending the real as being simply what you want it to be. There is a need for more analysis and more contemplation in, of and about everyday life, everyday working relationships and the global politico-economic environment enveloping us. Reflective diaries and logs, often a mainstay of many courses, reproduce learning theories that have been reduced to a few slogans—reflect in or on learning, learning is double or single looped or ripples to appear. But reflection is not the same as contemplation or meditation, of staying with or dwelling on. For Heidegger ([8], p. 147).

To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. This word bauen also means to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine…

Reflection and meditation in learning needs to take on a political aspect that facilitates the contestation of an educational apparatus dominated by capital and its associated logics. Knowledge is also increasingly being created politically , collaboratively and collectively in a world where the experts , the high priests of intellectual culture, take a place alongside the buff, the enthusiast, the loosely knit social network where we- think is clearly more generative than academic group-think and where [9,10] cultural and academic gatekeepers still delineate what constitutes knowledge and what methods may produce

valid and reliable knowledge. The wiki world is the fast show of contemporary intellectual and popular culture and has profound implications for understanding the future for sustainability in learning and development. The world of what I know is, the world of wiki economics, wiki design and wikipedia is allied to the world of carbon accounting, biosynthesis and cloud computing. There are further risks and uncertainties in this world of shifting and multiple references and disappearing reference points and a further antagonism in securing a cultural space for meaningful, critical, contemplation in a world where the futures market operates to the beat of the nanosecond. This world, full of disruptive technologies and opportunities for the space of flows that encompass economic, social and human capital together environmental contamination, crime and tentative attempts at global citizenship, is lived through the everyday life practices of urban neighbourhoods and diasporic communities, of the phenomenological experience of glocal communication media and the connected lifeworlds of extended family networks that traverse time, space and culture [11]. Many professionals and para-professionals also tend to inhabit intellectual communities of interstitial spaces where transdisciplinarity, inter professional working and multi agency activity is an ideological given but where lifelong learning and education for sustainable development still needs to secure a greater purchase.As the libertarian thinker Ivan Illich remarked forty years ago learning may take place more effectively and more democratically without the hierarchical power structures and restrictive practices that currently dominate formal education. Illich ([12], p. 86) writes of lifelong, lifewide

and city wide learning where the market for educational opportunity would be far more various if only “the goals of learning were no longer dominated by schools and schoolteachers”. Indeed, this is quickly happening as new digital media redefines the ecologies of lifelong learning . That the cyber environment could be a liberating force is not a new idea and neither is it one that has yet been realised as the current cultural/digital revolution is likely to be forever in the process of becoming. But what the present moment suggests is that change and continuity are never just two sides of the same coin for one technology simply does not replace another just as neoliberal economics necessarily relies on a strong state and the economy as a whole relies on healthy environmental and eco system services. The human social world may be viewed as a set of interlocking or nested systems but this is does not deny the crucial significance of human agency. Nothing will come of nothing so the emergence of sustainable communities , urban

regeneration and design, the development and application of low carbon environmental technologies can only arise from a network of learning webs , political and economic relations and structures, that draw on the resources, intelligences, skills and capabilities of institutions and organisations, groups and individuals that offer due recognition to being part of , rather than separate from nature . These webs need to be facilitative open spaces where knowledge exchange , collaboration and co-operation generates innovation, creativity, leadership and pragmatic sense of the possible . The present moment is consequently both an end in-itself and a means to a better tomorrow in which leadership is distributed, networked and fluid. The keys to a sustainable future depend on nurturing capabilities , social and environmental justice rather than the accumulation of skills [13]. To effect this, sustainability educators, learners and other practitioners must perceive themselves as cultural workers crossing borders and continually remembering that “intellectual leadership (...) depend[s] on superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others in their exercise” ([12], p. 101).

The role of the ballot is to determine the best pedagogical strategy. View the plan as a unique method of instruction and the judge should determine the best educational model. Focusing on the instrumental enactment and implementation of educational policy replicates the ignorance of policymakers and causes pedagogical underdevelopment and inconsistency. Cohen and Barnes 93 – David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, Visiting Professor of Education at Harvard University, Ph.D from the University of Rochester, Carol A. Barnes, Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology and Neuroscience, Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging, Director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, Director of the ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory & Aging, and Associate Director of the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona, M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, 1993 “Pedagogy and Policy,” Teaching for Understanding: Challenges for Policy and Practice, Published by Jossey-Bass, ISBN: 978-1-55542-515-9, Available Online at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dkcohen/downloads/CohenBarnesPedagogyPolicy.pdf, Accessed 6-12-17, p. 207-213) Much has been written about educational policy , but little has been written about how policy educates . That is curious, for nearly any policy must be educative for those who enact it.

Policymakers may not intend such education, and in fact often are blissfully ignorant of the learning that their creations entail for enactors . But policies and programs regularly propose novel purposes. If they did not, they would be completely

redundant. Some learning is required to achieve any new purpose, and that would be impossible without some education, even if it is only hasty self-education on the job. These points hold for policies of all sorts, It is relatively easy to see that the very innovative policies would require considerable education for enactors. For example, recent efforts to transform mathematics instruction from rote memorization to deep understanding would require extraordinary learning for most elementary school teachers. After all, they know only a little mathematics and seem to understand less. More important, the math that these teachers know usually is routine and algorithmic rather than deeply understood. The recent policies seek to remedy the consequences for children of teachers’ weak knowledge. But teachers could hardly help children to cultivate a much deeper and more complex understanding of mathematics unless they learned a different version of math themselves. And few could learn something so different without considerable education. Even much more prosaic policies require learning. When states reduced the speed limit to 55 miles per hour, motorists who had been in the habit of driving much faster had to learn to keep their speed down. Such learning was required even though drivers already knew, as a technical matter, how to slow a car down. Theirs may not have been very complex learning. Perhaps they had only to teach themselves to monitor the speedometer more carefully, or to begin their trips earlier. Simple though such things may be, each entails a bit of learning. And as many ticketed speeders can attest, such simple learning can be quite difficult. States and localities increasingly have organized driver reeducation programs to encourage the requisite learning. Hence learning for enactors is essential, whether or not policies and programs recognize the need for it. Most policies and programs at least tacitly recognize an educational need, as they offer regulations, guidelines, and the like. We might regard these as the most rudimentary curricula of policy. They sometimes include step-by-step manuals for learning: they typically explicate the meaning of key terms; and they often define acceptable interpretations. In some cases the need for instruction is quite explicitly recognized, as when policymakers offer enactors formal “training” or “technical assistance.” But that sort of education may be only a beginning. The ambitious changes in mathematics instruction mentioned above would require much more extensive teacher learning. In contrast, many other policies are thought to have no educational requirements because they demand only “compliance.” Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act required that federal funds be cut off if public agencies practiced discrimination, a provision that proved to be a potent tool in southern school desegregation. Regulations, guidelines, and other technical guides to learning plated a key role in enacting this policy. But as it happened, legal and administrative compliance required considerable learning of rather different sorts, and often quite extraordinary education as well. For example, federal officials had to learn how to use Title VI to produce desegregation rather than die-hard resistance, damaging political explosions, and enforcement failures. Many local officials also had to learn their own version of these things if they wished to defuse local political dynamite. In those troubled years, when few white Americans had any experience with the enforcement of constitutional guarantees for African-Americans, such learning was no simple matter. Compliance with the Title VI also required that many students of both races learn to go to school together, for if schools collapsed in race riots compliance would be impossible. Many local educators also had to learn how to tolerate biracial schooling, and even how to encourage and support it. At a time when few Americans had any experience with equal-status contact between the races, such learning was an extraordinary task for Americans of all sorts. Yet it was essential for the enactment of a policy that seemed only to seek legal compliance. Our examples suggest that if the education of enactors is nearly always an element in policy, it can be a more or less important element. It has been increasingly important in education since the end of World War II, for policies and programs have made progressively greater demands for educators’ learning. The 1950s curriculum reforms sought to improve teaching, as did Head Start and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and the “back to basics” movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Each required that teachers learn a good deal in order to make the improvements that policymakers proposed, though these requirements seemed to go unnoticed by policymakers. The postwar policies and programs were educative in the general sense that is common to any policy. But they also were educative in a very specific sense: they sought to promote new pedagogies for pedagogues. That point holds with a vengeance for recent efforts to promote “higher-order thinking,” “teaching for understanding,” and much deeper knowledge of academic subjects.

To say that most policies and programs entail learning and thus some education is only to make a logical or psychological claim. It tells us nothing about the education that actually was provided . That is our subject here: what kind of education has educational policy offered

to enactors? What has been the pedagogy of policy? To answer these questions we must inquire about how policymakers actually tried to teach teachers to teach differently, and to do that we must consider policy as a sort of instruction . Such a reading of policy is of course more suitable in some cases than others, but it seems marvelously suitable for post-World War II education. In considering the pedagogy of policy, we employ a scheme that is familiar to students of instruction. We begin with purposes: what pedagogical aims have state and federal policymakers pressed on teachers? Then we turn to methods: what educational approaches have policymakers used as they have sought to teach teachers to teach differently? We also inquire about

consistency: how do the pedagogies that policies enact compare with those that they press teachers to adopt?

One thread in our answers to those question is paradoxical.

Though policymakers have developed extraordinarily rich ambitions for schools, educational policies and programs have not been richly educative for enactors, The pedagogy of educational policy generally has been didactic, much as teaching often is didactic. Policymakers are practiced at telling teachers what to do, but they rarely have done much more than lecture. Like many teachers they focus more on broadcasting their message and covering the material than on figuring out what learners make of it and framing instruction accordingly. Cases in which policymakers or program managers engaged educators in extended instructional conversations that were designed to encourage the desired learning are even more scarce than cases in which teachers engage students in such conversations. More troubling, policymakers seem to have learned little from experience . The pedagogy of policy remains quite undeveloped even though policymakers’ ambitions for classroom pedagogy have developed quite dramatically . In the last five

or six years policymakers have advanced new and much more ambitious agenda for improving pedagogy, as they press schools to offer “higher-order thinking,” “teaching for understanding,” and

the like. Yet for the most part these policies break little new ground in efforts to educate enactors. Though policymakers now seek dramatic revisions in classroom instruction, they make those instructional changes. Even that disjunction is only dimly and occasionally noticed by those who make policies and manage programs. Hence, we conclude by probing another issue: why has the pedagogy of education policy been so weakly educative? Policy and Pedagogy What educational aims have policymakers embraced as they have tried to teach teachers to improve their teaching? The answers vary, depending on the policies in question. We consider three of the great episodes in post-World War II education policy. The 1950s curriculum reforms sought intellectually ambitious instruction for America. Students were to become little scientists and mathematicians, “doing” mathematics and “messing about” with science. These were heady plans, especially in view of American educators’ previous efforts to do just the opposite. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, most educators and reformers had tried to concoct a “practical” education for most students on the grounds that few young Americans either wanted or needed anything more intellectually ambitious and that only a

few could manage it in any event. If we view the fifties curriculum reforms against the background of such sad ambitions, it is probably unavoidable that they should seem elitist. Whether or not reformers intended improvements only for an elite, they did embrace a sort of academic seriousness that self-styled democratic reformers had been denouncing as elitist since 1900. Head Start and Title I of the 1965 ESEA were the leading programs in the second great postwar policy episode, and they were hardly elitist: both proposed to improve education for the poor. Their approach was quite plain in one sense—to provide more resources for schools, teachers, and families. But in another sense the approach was quite unclear, for initially both programs were agnostic about instructional content and pedagogy. How the resources were to be used was not an issue at the outset. For example, the Head Start and Follow Through Planned Variation experiments in the late 1960s and early 1970s included everything from open education on one end to highly structured behavior modification programs on the other. The “back to basics” movement of the 1970s and 1980s was the third postwar policy episode that we consider, and these reformers were not at all agnostic about curriculum and instruction. They believed that education had badly deteriorated for most students, including those from disadvantaged circumstances. They argued that students should at least be required to master the rudiments of knowledge, and pressed a largely traditional concept of the basics. Though some interpreted the basics as a traditional academic curriculum, most reformers adopted quite a different and much more narrow view of the ends of education, one that was light-years from the earlier curriculum reforms. Indeed, this movement was notable for didactic concepts of teaching and formulaic approaches to improvement. Reform and research abounded with lists and other tidy formulae, including the elements of “effective” schools and the steps in teaching with Madeline Hunter’s ITIP. A fourth great episode may be in the making, though it is too soon to tell. In the last five or six years another group of reformers has taken off in yet another direction. They demand more thoughtful and intellectually ambitious instruction. They argue that students must become independent thinkers and enterprising problem solvers, and that schools should offer intellectually challenging instruction that is deeply rooted in the academic disciplines. These reformers envision instruction that is in some respects reminiscent of the Sputnik era. It certainly is much more thoughtful, adventurous, and demanding than was proposed by most advocated of back to basics. And it is a far cry from the rudimentary instruction that is found in most educational programs for the disadvantaged. In Just forty years, then, policymakers have embraced several different and sometimes divergent educational purposes . In fact, the aims of state and national education policy have changed so often since World War II that we can see no consistent vision of educational improvement in them. Yet these varied purposes have accumulated in schools and school systems. The ambitions for learning that policymakers pressed on teachers in the 1950s were only partly displaced by the new lessons that policymakers sought to teach in the 1960s. For instance, the innovative texts born in the 1950s continued in the use in many high schools—especially in the top tracks—throughout subsequent decades. And the 1960s lessons were only partly displaced by the newer purposes

that policymakers pressed in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter I and Head Start still thrive, and back to basics is alive and well in U.S. classrooms today, despite previous reforms and the subsequent turn toward teaching for understanding. Education policy has been an inconsistent teacher . Americans have tried to solve many different problems with formal schooling, but we have been divided about what education is good, what it is good for, and how best to educate . We also have been politically fickle, giving only brief attention to one great problem before turning to another. Policymakers have tried to teach teachers several different and sometimes divergent lessons in quick succession. What have teachers learned from this? They often say that whatever policy tells them today, it will tell them something different tomorrow . Upon hearing of a new policy or program, teachers often remind reformers and observers that they have been through something like this before. Though such evidence is important, it is only a beginning. To learn more about the educative character and effects of education policy, one also must investigate the specific

instructional approaches that were employed and how they turned out. Those approaches varied, depending on how policy problems were framed and what policy instruments were used.

1NC — TopicalityFirst off is Topicality.

Our interpretation is that the resolution should define the division of affirmative and negative ground. It was negotiated and announced in advance, providing both sides with a reasonable opportunity to prepare to engage one another’s arguments.

This does not require the use of any particular style, type of evidence, or assumption about the role of the judge — only that the topic should determine the debate’s subject matter.

The affirmative violates this interpretation because they do not advocate that the United States federal government substantially increase its funding and/or regulation of elementary and/or secondary education in the United States.

The “United States federal government” means the three branches of the central government. The affirmative does not advocate action by the USFG. OECD 87 — Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Council, 1987 (“United States,” The Control and Management of Government Expenditure, p. 179)1. Political and organisational structure of governmentThe U nited S tates of America is a federal republic consisting of 50 states. States have their own constitutions and within each State there are at least two additional levels of government, generally designated as counties and cities, towns or villages. The relationships between different levels of government are complex and varied (see Section B for more information).The Federal Government is composed of three branches : the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch . Budgetary decisionmaking is shared primarily by the legislative and executive branches. The general structure of these two branches relative to budget formulation and execution is as follows.

“Its” implies ownership. The plan does not propose an increase in funding and/or regulation by the USFG. Gaertner-Johnston 6 — Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, founder of Syntax Training—a company that provides business writing training and consulting, holds a Master’s Degree in Communication from the University of Notre Dame, 2006 (“Its? It's? Or Its'?,” Business Writing—a blog, May 30th, Available Online at http://www.businesswritingblog.com/business_writing/2006/05/its_its_or_its_.html, Accessed 07-04-2014)

A friend of mine asked me to write about how to choose the correct form of its, and I am happy to comply. Those three little letters cause a lot of confusion, but once you master a couple of basic rules, the choice becomes simple. Here goes:Its' is never correct. Your grammar and spellchecker should flag it for you. Always change it to one of the forms below.It's is the contraction (abbreviated form) of "it is" and "it has." It's has no other meanings--only "it is" and "it has."Its is the form to use in all other instances when you want a form of i-t-s but you are not sure which one. Its is a possessive form; that is, it shows ownership the same way Javier's or Santosh's does.

Example: The radio station has lost its license .The tricky part of the its question is this: If we write "Javier's license" with an apostrophe, why do we write "its license" without an apostrophe?Here is the explanation: Its is like hers, his, ours, theirs, and yours . These are all pronouns. Possessive pronouns do not have apostrophes. That is because their spelling already indicates a possessive . For example, the possessive form of she is hers. The possessive form of we is ours. Because we change the spelling, there is no need to add an apostrophe to show possession. Its follows that pattern.

“Regulations” only refer to rules created by government. The plan is not topical because it does not propose USFG regulations. Roediger 4 – Thomas Roediger-Schluga, Senior Researcher at the. Austrian Research Centers, The Porter Hypothesis and the Economic Consequences of Environmental Regulation, p. 111.4 Key Terms and Basic ConceptsUntil now, several key terms and concepts have been used without explicitly clarifying what they mean in the context of this book. This section will therefore provide definitions for the main terms and concepts. The term regulation refers to 'policies where the government acts as a referee to oversee market activity and the behaviour of private actors in the economy' (OECD

1996, p. 4). Obviously, this definition is contingent on the institutional framework in which a regulation is implemented and operated .

Therefore, the term regulation carries a slightly different meaning on either sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, regulation is associated with the sustained and focused control of a public agency . In Europe, the term tends to be employed in a much wider sense referring to the whole realm of legislation, governance and social control (Majone 1992, pp. 1-2). This has to do with the fact that specialised, single-purpose regulatory agencies are much more common in the United States than in Europe, where regulatory functions have been assigned to traditional ministries or inter-ministerial committees. Since the empirical material used in this book is from Austria, the term 'regulation' is used in its broader, European meaning.

A predictable point of stasis is necessary for effective limits. Two impacts:

First, procedural fairness — allowing the aff to arbitrarily manipulate the debate’s content with self-serving interpretations creates a moral hazard. Vote neg because debate is a competitive game which loses meaning without substantive constraints.

Second, argument engagement — advocacy tied to the resolution incentivizes nuanced research and clash with a well-prepared opponent. They aff’s interpretation turns debate into a monologue. Their arguments should be treated as presumptively false until subjected to well-researched scrutiny.

2AC — Topicality1. The role of the ballot is to determine the best pedagogical strategy. Their interpretation focuses debate around the instrumental enactment of education policy which replicates the ignorance of policymakers and causes pedagogical underdevelopment and inconsistency. Absent an interrogation of the way we teach no change to education will ever be effective. - that’s Blewitt

2. No impact - Debate is a game, but preserving that game in its current form is useless - Debate should be beneficial for something beyond its own existence. Only our role of the ballot addresses argumentative agency and leads to real change. Giroux 12 — Henry Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, 2012 (“Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism,” Truth-out, June 19th, accessible online at http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9865-beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism, accessed on 10-12-14)Extreme power is now showcased through the mechanisms of ever-proliferating cultural/ educational apparatuses and the anti- public intellectuals who support them and are in turn rewarded by the elites who finance such apparatuses. The war at home is made visible in the show of force aimed at civilian populations, including students, workers, and others considered disposable or a threat to the new authoritarianism. Its most powerful allies appear to be the intellectuals, institutions, cultural apparatuses and new media technologies that constitute the sites of public pedagogy, which produce the formative culture necessary for authoritarianism to thrive.While a change in consciousness does not guarantee a change in either one's politics or society, it is a crucial precondition for connecting what it means to think otherwise to conditions that make it possible to act otherwise. The education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a political deficit, serving to make many oppressed individuals complicit with oppressive ideologies. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made clear, democracy requires "critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question.... while simultaneously creating the conditions for individual and social autonomy."(41) Nothing will change politically or economically until new and emerging social movements take seriously the need to develop a language of radical reform and create new public spheres that support the

knowledge, skills and critical thought that are necessary features of a democratic formative culture.Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical thought, civic engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than correcting distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods produced by politicians, media talking heads and anti-public intellectuals. It will also require addressing how new sites of pedagogy have become central to any viable notion of agency, politics and democracy itself. This is not a matter of elevating cultural politics over material relations of power as much as it is a rethinking of how power deploys culture and how culture as a mode of education positions power.James Baldwin, the legendary African-American writer and civil rights activist, argued that the big lie points to a crisis of American identity and politics and is symptomatic of "a backward society" that has descended into madness, "especially when one is forced to lie about one's aspect of anybody's history, [because you then] must lie about it all."(42) He goes on to argue

"that one of the paradoxes of education [is] that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person . "(43) What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility to trigger a critical

engagement with oneself, others and the larger society - education becomes in this instance more than a method or tool for domination but a politics, a fulcrum for democratic social change. Tragically, in our current climate "learning" merely contributes to a vast reserve of manipulation and self-inflicted ignorance. Our education deficit is neither reducible to the failure of particular types of teaching nor the decent into madness by the spokespersons for the new authoritarianism. Rather, it is about how matters

of knowledge, values and ideology can be struggled over as issues of power and politics. Surviving the current education deficit will depend on progressives using history, memory and knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals to the everyday needs of ordinary people, but also to jumpstart social movements by making education central to organized politics and the quest for a radical democracy.

3. We meet - the plan says we regulate primary and secondary education by implementing de-schooling

4. Counter-interpretation:

Education includes more than schooling Supreme Court of Maine 92 – “JOHN UNDERWOOD, et al. v. CITY OF PRESQUE ISLE, et al.”, 6-30, 1998 ME 166; 715 A.2d 148; 1998 Me. LEXIS 232, LexisAlthough not expressly permitted within suburban residential zones, "schools and other institutions of an educational nature" may be authorized by the Board's approval of an application for a special exception. The ordinance does not define the phrase "schools and other institutions of an educational nature." The ordinance does provide, however, that "except where specifically defined herein, all words used in this Code shall [***8] carry their customary meanings." PRESQUE ISLE, ME. LAND USE & DEVELOPMENT CODE, ch. I, § V (1993); see also Goodine v. State, 468 A.2d 1002, 1004 (Me. 1983) (the words of a statute which are not expressly defined "must be given their plain and natural meaning and should be construed according to their natural import in common and approved usage"). Common dictionary definitions of the words " school" and "educational institution" encompass a wide array of training environments designed to impart knowledge or skill . Black's Law Dictionary, for example, defines a "school" as "an institution or place for instruction or education." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 1206 (5th ed. 1979).

The word "education," in turn, is defined broadly as follows: "Comprehends not merely the instruction received at school or college, but the whole course of training; moral, religious, vocational, intellectual, and physical . . . . Acquisition of all knowledge tending to train and develop the individual ." 2 BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 461 (5th ed. 1979).

“Regulation” of education removes restrictions - the affirmative meets this because it removes restrictive Schooled society practices by de-schoolingOrbach 12 – Barak Orbach, Professor of Law at the University of Arizona College of Law, “What Is Regulation?”, Yale Journal on Regulation, http://yalejreg.com/what-is-regulation/The legal concept of “ regulation” is often perceived as control or constraint . For example, the definitive legal dictionary, Black’s Law Dictionary,

defines “regulation” as “the act or process of controlling by rule or restriction .” 11 Similarly, The Oxford English Dictionary defines “regulation” as “the action or fact of regulating,” and “to regulate” as “to control, govern, or direct.”12 To many people, “control” connotes “restrictions,” although control may have other meanings.

Regulation often imposes no restrictions , but enables, facilitates, or adjusts activities , with no restrictions . Examples of such regulations include the supply of roads, health and emergency services, public education and public libraries, welfare benefits, reliefs to victims of natural disasters and bailouts

to failed institutions. Such services directly influence (or “adjust”) conduct of individuals and firms. In the abstract, all government actions supposedly influence conduct of individuals and firms,

but not necessarily directly . For example, activities related to national defense and foreign policy tend to have only indirect influence on conduct of individuals and firms.13

The Counter-interpretation solves their impacts - the only affs we allow are ones that change schooling practices that broadly influence students.

5. No ground loss - the neg can always read any defenses of status quo schooling which links to our aff OR provide a different way to change schooling practices - neg ground is inevitable - debating outside the rez increases critical thinking which makes us better at advocating.

6. Counter-interpretation: affs should be about the topic without having to be topical

7. Schooled Society DA - “argument testing” about the resolution to generate more “productive debates” about education policy is pedagogy without purpose - only our affirmative’s interrogation of the school system in the first place breaks from neoliberal schooling’s biopolitical apparatus.

8. Institutionalized Knowledge DA - The vision of debate as a good-faith effort at argumentative engagement ignores that the institutionalization of schooling trains debaters to become Karl Rove. Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17) The institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured , including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself. But personal growth is not a measurable entity. It is growth in disciplined dissidence, which cannot be measured against any rod, or any curriculum, nor compared to someone else's achievement. In such learning one can emulate others only in imaginative endeavor, and follow in their footsteps rather than mimic their gait. The learning I prize is immeasurable re-creation.

School pretends to break learning up into subject "matters," to build into the pupil a curriculum made of these prefabricated blocks, and to gauge the result on an international scale. People who submit to the standard of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the same ruler to themselves . They no longer have to be put in their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots , squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and , in the very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until everybody and everything fits.

People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening . They do not have to be robbed of their creativity. Under instruction, they have unlearned to "do" their thing or " be" themselves , and value only what has been made or could be made. Once people have the idea schooled into them that values can be produced and measured, they tend to accept all kinds of rank' ings . There is a scale for the development of nations, another for the intelligence of babies, and even progress toward peace can be calculated according to body count. In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer's index.

9. Scripting DA - any interpretation that constrains the affirmative to a single form of education attempts to prescribe a form of learning for the debate curriculum - that form of social control is no different than the neoliberal prescription of a growth-based model of education - that also answers the Topical version that’s Illich

10. Normalization DA - capitalism is normalized by failing to take revolutionary actions - It’s try or die for the aff - consumption will cause extinction through environmental destruction and resource scarcity - only breaking with the status quo’s institutionalization of education can create momentum for social movements to - that’s Robinson

#2 — Right To Education CPs

Explanation/Setup1. Assume the 1AC, 1NC, and 2AC below.

2. Students should prepare a four-minute 2NC speech that extends one (and only one) of the counterplans. Students must kick the other counterplan. Assume that the 1NC also included the Spending DA and that it will be extended in the 1NR as a net-benefit to the counterplan that is extended.

3. Note: students can use this setup to prepare and deliver a second speech that extends the other counterplan.

1AC

1AC — Inequality AdvantageContention One: Inequality

First, there are massive opportunity gaps in the K-12 education system. Millions of students are denied access to an excellent education. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“Disrupting Education Federalism,” Washington University Law Review (92 Wash. U. L. Rev. 959), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)IntroductionThe United States continues to tolerate a longstanding educational opportunity gap. Today, it relegates at least ten million students in low-income neighborhoods and millions more minority students to poorly performing teachers, substandard facilities, and other inferior educational opportunities . n1 This occurs in part because the U nited States invests more money in high-income districts than in low-income districts, a sharp contrast to other developed nations. n2 Scholars and court decisions also have documented the sizeable intrastate disparities in educational opportunity. n3 In addition, interstate inequalities in educational opportunity represent the largest component of disparities in educational opportunity. n4 The harmful nature of interstate disparities falls hardest on disadvantaged schoolchildren who have the most educational needs, n5 and states do not [*962]

possess the resources and capacity to address the full scope of these disparities . n6 Furthermore, research confirms that as the gap in wealth has grown between low-income and high- income families, the achievement gap between children in low- income and high-income families also has widened . n7

Although equal educational opportunity remains a central goal of the U.S. education

system, it has never been realized . n8 Indeed, the United States relies heavily on schools to overcome the influence of a child's circumstances , such as family income and structure, on life opportunities despite evidence that schools are not effectively serving this function. n9 Fulfilling the goal of equal educational opportunity will become increasingly important to the nation's interests given research that reveals that the United States will need more highly skilled workers to fill jobs that meet the economy's demands. This research also indicates that the achievement gap

must be closed to ensure that students from rapidly growing minority communities possess the educational skills necessary to contribute to the economy. n10

Second, current education policies exacerbate racial and economic inequality because they rely on devolution and choice.Sundquist 17 — Christian B. Sundquist, Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Albany Law School, former Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2017 (“Positive Education Federalism: The Promise of Equality after the Every Student Succeeds Act,” Mercer Law Review (68 Mercer L. Rev. 351), Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)B. The Failings of Choice, Competition, and Market-Based Education ReformsIn this milieu, the original purpose of the ESEA and Brown (and of the appropriate federal role in education) has become lost. Rather than utilizing federal policy and funding to combat the true roots of educational disparity—poverty and racial discrimination—the federal role has shifted under the market model to conceal these roots . The belief has become that "effective teaching" and a business-model of public education is all [*377] that is needed to overcome generational poverty and persistent racial discrimination. n143 Yet, it has become abundantly clear that the market strivings of federal education policy have forsaken the original promise of social equality embodied by Brown and the ESEA.

Our history demonstrates that school choice policies tend to develop as a tool to undermine Brown desegregation efforts as part of a larger effort to maintain racial inequality. While often utilizing race-neutral language such as "parental choice" and "individual freedom," modern choice policy " has the potential to perpetuate racial hierarchies " as parents make private decisions to self-segregate their children. n144 The equity rationale of Brown and the original vision of the ESEA are simply incompatible with the market rationale of current education policy:

[It] is apparent that two distinctly different ideologies motivated the Brown decision and NCLB. For Brown a separate education could never be equal, and affirmative racial integration was necessary to provide every child with a quality education. Conversely, under NCLB the ideologies of high-stakes accountability and a market-driven approach [assume] that a separate education can be equal. n145

The modeling of education policy around principles of consumer choice, competition, and market-accountability have increased educational disparities along class and race lines. n146 Since

the adoption of NCLB and RTT, our public schools have become increasingly segregated by race . n147 There is little reason to believe that rates of school segregation will decrease because of the passage of the ESSA, especially in light of its continued

expansion of charter schools, deregulation, and parental choice. The choice provisions of the ESSA (and formerly of NCLB and RTT) are fueling the re-segregation of our public schools primarily because the current market-model of education policy incorrectly assumes parents (that [*378] is, namely consumers) to be rational actors. A core principle of the market-model is that choice will foster competition amongst public schools, which then will force individual schools to improve the quality of education provided to students. n148 However, it has become increasingly clear that parents tend to choose schools "with a racial profile matching their own." n149 Indeed, there is evidence that the current school-choice provisions have so upset the racial balance of certain public schools as to run afoul of Brown Court desegregation orders. n150Parents selecting a school for their children are also influenced by "non-racial" factors not adequately captured by the market model of competition — including geography, inadequate resources, lack of motivation, and inadequate information regarding other options. n151 The application of market principles to public education has failed not only due to an incorrect assumption of rational acting by consumers, but because of significant informational asymmetries between schools and parents. n152The allure of choice as a salve for racial and social inequality in education is understandable, yet misguided. Martha Minow has written extensively on the "seductive" nature of choice, noting that choice can "imply that freedom and equality exist even when they are absent." n153 Professor Minow observes "that by subordinating racial and other kinds of integration to school choice, contemporary schooling policies ... expressly elevate private preferences" which tend to "reinforce or even worsen racial separation in American schools ." n154 Professor John A. Powell summarizes the failings of school choice as follows: [*379]

The reality of choice is that it is a racialized system that reproduces the inequity it is supposed to address. Effective responses to persistent segregation and concentrated poverty cannot be furnished by purely individualistic solutions such as letting students choose their school one by one . The Supreme Court considered this approach after Brown and rejected it as inadequate. n155

The larger problem with the market-model of public education is that it serves to normalize continued educational inequality . The existing framework purports to provide students with an equal opportunity to pursue an education from competitive options. The occurrence of educational failures within such a "neutral" market of consumer preferences can then be interpreted as owing to poor choices or personal deficit under this perspective, thereby rationalizing the persistence of racial and social educational disparities. n156 Diane Ravitch concluded as follows:

The testing, accountability and choice strategies offer the illusion of change while changing nothing. They mask the

inequity and injustice that are now so apparent in our social order. They do nothing to alter the status quo. They preserve the status quo. They are the status quo. n157

School choice and accountability reforms, as noted, have had relatively little impact on student performance. n158 The primary determinants of student success, rather, have been racial bias, family background, and socioeconomic status. n159 The focus on

"neoliberal solutions like NCLB, [*380] with its emphasis on efficiency and individualism,

divert attention away from the social issues that need to be solved if we are to really improve education outcomes ." n160 As a

result, current education policy "both directly and indirectly exacerbates racial, ethnic and economic inequality in society." n161 Our current approach to public education has grossly departed from the ideals and principles of racial and class equality that shaped the federal education role during the post-Brown and ESEA era. The substantive dimension of education federalism has thus wrongly shifted from ensuring racial equality in a democratic society to ensuring consumer choice in a competitive marketplace.

The recent enactment of the ESSA creates the possibility of further exacerbating race and class-based educational inequalities. While retaining the core principles of NCLB, the ESSA diminishes federal oversight of school performance while further expanding both consumer choice and deregulated teacher preparation programs. As Marian Wright Edelman observes, such a "gutting [of] a strong federal role in [an] education policy designed to protect [African- American and Latino] children ... jeopardizes their opportunity for a fair and adequate education." n162 Civil rights groups, including

the Southern Poverty Law Center and the New York chapter of the NAACP, fear that decreased "federal oversight of education will be much too weak to ensure [equal] education for Black and Latino students" in many states. n163 The prominent education and urban planning researcher Gary Orfield further opines that with the ESSA "we're going to get something that's much worse [than NCLB] - a lot of federal money going out for almost no leverage for any national purpose." n164 Education advocate Kalmann Hettlemann similarly views the ESSA as "a massive retreat from our national interest and commitment to equal educational opportunity, especially for poor and minority children." n165

[*381] The education federalism forged by the original ESEA and Brown envisioned federal regulation of public education to the extent necessary to promote social equality and racial

integration. n166 Such robust federal oversight was necessary in light of the historical practice of states to undermine educational opportunity for poor and minority children. n167 The devolution of the federal role in public education following the ESSA - coupled with its continued emphasis on standardized testing, choice, and market competition - threatens to increase race-and class-based disparities in education .

Third, public school funding remains unfair and inequitable — the latest study proves. ELC 17 — Education Law Center, a non-profit organization in New Jersey that advocates for equal educational opportunity and education justice in the United States, 2017 (“School Funding Remains Unfair For Most Students Across The Nation,” Press Release Announcing Release of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, January 25th, Available Online at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxtYmwryVI00LWdhZjRXTTM5WUk/view, Accessed 06-14-2017)Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card (NRC), released by Education Law Center (ELC)

today, finds that public school funding in most states continues to be unfair and inequitable , depriving millions of U.S. students of the opportunity for success in school .

The sixth edition of the NRC uses data from the 2014 Census fiscal survey, the most recent available. The NRC goes beyond raw per-pupil calculations to evaluate whether states are making sufficient investments in public education and distributing funding relative to need, as measured by student poverty. To capture

the variation across states, the NRC uses four interrelated "fairness measures" – Funding Level, Funding Distribution, Effort and Coverage – that allow for state-by-state comparisons while controlling for regional cost differences.

The NRC released today shows almost no improvement since the end of the Great Recession in those states that do not provide additional funding to districts with high student poverty. There is also no change in the vast differences in levels of funding for K-12 education across the states , even after adjusting for cost. The states with the highest funding levels , New York and New Jersey,

spend more than two and one-half times that of the lowest , Utah and Idaho.Key findings include:* Funding levels show large disparities , ranging from a high of $18,165 per pupil in New York, to a low of $5,838 in Idaho.

* Many states with low funding levels, such as California, Idaho, Nevada, North

Carolina, and Texas, are also low “effort” states, that is, they invest a low percentage of their economic capacity to support their public education systems.

* Fourteen states, including Pennsylvania, North Dakota, New York, and Illinois, have “regressive” school funding. These states provide less funding to school districts with higher concentrations of need as measured by student poverty.

* Students in certain regions of the country face a “double disadvantage” because their states have low funding levels and do not increase funding for concentrated student poverty. These “flat” funding states include Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in the Southeast, and Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico in the Southwest.* Only a handful of states – Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Jersey – have “progressive” school funding. These states have sufficiently high funding levels and significantly boost funding in their high poverty districts.

* States with unfair school funding perform poorly on key indicators of resources essential for educational opportunity. In these states, access to early childhood education is limited; wages for teachers are not competitive with those of comparable professions; and teacher-to-pupil ratios in schools are unreasonably high.The sixth edition of the NRC released today underscores the persistence of unfair school funding as a major obstacle to improving quality and outcomes in the nation’s public schools. Most states finance public education purely on political considerations from year-to-year, and not on assessments of the actual cost of delivering rigorous academic standards to all students. Most states also continue to use outmoded methods of funding public education that fail to allocate additional funding to address concentrated poverty and other risk factors , including English language proficiency and disabilities. These antiquated methods are the cause of persistent funding disparities between low wealth, high poverty and high wealth, low poverty districts, even in states with high funding levels, such as Connecticut and New York.

“School finance reform is long overdue,” said Bruce Baker, the Rutgers University

Graduate School of Education Professor who developed the report's methodology. “States must develop, and then fund, school finance formulas that identify the costs of providing essential education resources to students, accounting for diverse student needs and taking into account local fiscal capacity.”

“Lawmakers in states with deeply regressive and flat funding, like

Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Arizona, urgently need to overhaul their finance systems to give students a meaningful opportunity to succeed in school,” said David Sciarra, ELC Executive Director. “Even states with higher funding levels, such as Ohio and Maine, need to do more to ensure fair funding for each and every student.”

“President Trump is flatly wrong when he says our schools are flush with cash,” Mr. Sciarra added. “In fact, for students in many states and

entire regions, their schools are woefully underfunded, depriving them of the qualified teachers, support staff, reasonable class sizes and other interventions they must have to succeed in school. It's time to put fair school funding at the top of the nation's education reform agenda."

Fourth, the current system makes it impossible to provide all students with an equal opportunity for an excellent education. Ogletree and Robinson 16 — Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“The K-12 Funding Crisis,” Education Week, May 17th, Available Online at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-funding-crisis.html?print=1, Accessed 06-07-2017)Current discussions about K-12 education often highlight the reforms that seek to improve the quality of schooling. Some of these measures—the common-core standards, teacher evaluation, and, most recently, the Every Student Succeeds Act—undoubtedly have the potential to improve educational opportunities for students. However, what is often missing from education reform conversations is how these reforms can create sustainable changes to the education system. We believe

the system's very foundations are broken, and school funding is one of the most pressing issues in need of repair.

Most states have failed to create school funding systems that provide the necessary foundation for all children to receive equal access to an excellent education. The nation's children deserve no less,

particularly in view of evidence that money spent wisely on education matters. In a 2012 review of studies that looked at the effect of funding on student outcomes, education scholar Bruce D. Baker found that ongoing improvements that enhance the amount and distribution of funding can increase student achievement.

School funding took a substantial blow after the Great Recession began in 2007, even as federal funding from the economic-stimulus package in 2009 softened the impact. Despite the improving U.S. economy, school funding has been slow to recover, and schools still feel the recession's effects nine years later. The Center on

Budget and Policy Priorities found in a recent report that although 35 of the

46 states surveyed increased their general state aid per student in 2016,

25 are still providing less general state funding than they were in 2008. And at least seven of those states have cut 10 percent or more from their general state funding per student since the recession.And as a result of the recent drop in oil, coal, and gas revenues, Alaska, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, among other states, have had to make deep cuts in their K-12 school budgets and must now find new funding streams.

Whether in tough or strong economic times, families and education funding advocates lack a way to insist on the equitable financing needed for excellent schools. This absence arises in part from the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 San Antonio Independent School

District v. Rodriguez decision , which affirmed that the U.S. Constitution neither explicitly

nor implicitly provided a remedy for closing the funding gaps across school districts. This decision closed the federal courthouse door to future decisions that could address K-12 spending gaps and, ultimately, the gaps in educational opportunities and resources among children across districts.

The decision thus remanded the design and implementation of more-effective school funding systems to the laboratory of the states. The Supreme Court's decision also noted the need for changes to school funding and expressed concern about the long and heavy reliance on local property taxes.Despite subsequent decades of state-level litigation on school finance, most changes to finance systems have failed to provide equal access to a high-quality education for all children. Most states continue to build education systems funded by property taxes that vary greatly depending on a child's ZIP code , rather than a child's needs and the desired educational outcomes.

Significant school finance reforms can , in fact, lead to improved educational and social outcomes for children .

A 2015 report from the N ational Bureau of Economic Research, which followed

children born between 1955 and 1985 through their adult lives in 2011, found that disadvantaged students completed an additional 0.46 years of schooling when districts had a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for the 12 years the children attended public school. In adulthood, their earnings increased by almost 10 percent, and their likelihood of living in poverty was reduced by roughly 6 percentage points, while children in districts without such spending increases did not experience similar benefits.

The study also found that increasing spending by 25 percent per student throughout the course of a K-12 education could erase the attainment gaps between students from low-income and nonpoor families.

Fifth, disparities in educational opportunity cement overall socioeconomic inequality. Robinson 13 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2013 (“The High Cost of Education Federalism,” Wake

Forest Law Review (48 Wake Forest L. Rev. 287), Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)Although the nation's current approach to education federalism

undoubtedly generates some benefits, it also tolerates substantial inequitable disparities in educational opportunity both within and between states. n7 The reality of local control of education for many communities means the ability to control inadequate resources that provide many students substandard educational opportunities. n8 The [*289] opportunity divide in American education continues to relegate far too many poor and minority schoolchildren to substandard educational opportunities . n9 These communities are left behind in the competition for educational excellence. n10 In addition, high-poverty schools , particularly those within urban school districts, regularly yield the worst academic outcomes. n11

[*290] These disparities in educational opportunity hinder schools from fulfilling some of their essential national and institutional goals. Schools serve indispensable public functions within a democratic society : they prepare students to engage in the nation's political system in an intelligent and effective manner and transmit the fundamental societal values that a democratic government requires. n12 The nation also relies on its public schools as the principal institutional guarantor of equal opportunity within American society by serving as a mechanism to ensure that children are not hindered in attaining their dreams by their life circumstances. n13 Americans depend on schools to address the societal challenges created by social and economic inequality rather than creating the extensive social welfare networks that many industrialized countries have implemented. n14 The disparities in educational opportunity that relegate many poor and minority students to substandard schooling have hindered the ability of schools to serve these functions. Indeed, rather than solve these challenges, low graduation rates and substandard schools cost the United States

billions of dollars each year in lost tax and income revenues, higher health care costs, food stamps, and welfare and housing assistance, to name a few of the costs. n15

Sixth, closing the opportunity gap in education is vital to reduce inequality. Johnson 16 — Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute

for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, 2016 (“Can Schools Level the Intergenerational Playing Field? Lessons from Equal Educational Opportunity Policies,” Economic Mobility: Research & Ideas on Strengthening Families, Communities & the Economy, Edited and Published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Available Online at https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/Community-Development/EconMobilityPapers/EconMobility_Book_508.pdf?la=en , Accessed 06-19-2017, p. 321)Summary Discussion and ConclusionsThe key contributions of this study are three-fold. First, the paper provides a more detailed descriptive portrait of intergenerational economic mobility in the U nited States.

Second, the paper attempts to explain why black-white mobility differences narrowed significantly for successive cohorts born between 19 55 and 19 79, with a focus on the role of three major equal educational opportunity policies pursued over this period: school desegregation, school finance reforms, and roll-out and expansions of Head Start, improving the understanding of the intergenerational mobility process in the United States and illuminating the central role schools play in the transmission of economic success from one generation to the next.

Third, the paper emphasizes differences in early education and school quality —in particular, Head Start and school spending — as important components of the persistence in income across generations.

Indeed, schools —and policies that influence their optimal functioning— are transformative agents that either provide or deprive children of the opportunity to reach their full potential. These equal educational opportunity policies were instrumental in the making of a growing black middle class . The evidence shows that the footprints of paths toward upward mobility are preceded by access to high quality schools beginning in early childhood through 12th grade. These school reforms expanded on-ramps to poor and minority children to get on that path.

Evidence on the long-term productivity of education spending demonstrates that equal education policy initiatives can play a pivotal role in reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

Seventh, racial and economic inequality is a form of structural violence that condemns entire populations to preventable suffering and death. Bezruchka 14 — Stephen Bezruchka, Senior Lecturer in Health Services and Global Health at the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, holds a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University and an M.D. from Stanford University, 2014 (“Inequality Kills,” Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, Edited by David Cay Johnston, Published by The New Press, ISBN 9781595589446, p. 194-195)

Differences in mortality rates are not just a statistical concern—they reflect suffering and pain for very real individuals and families. The higher mortality in the U nited States is an example of what Paul Farmer, the

noted physician and anthropologist, calls structural violence. The forty-seven infant deaths occur every day because of the way society in the United States is structured, resulting in our health status being that of a middle-income country, not a rich country. There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist

changing. Inequality is the central element , the upstream cause of the social disadvantage described in the IOM report. A political system that fosters inequality limits the attainment of health.

The claim that economic inequality is a major reason for our poor health requires that several standard criteria for claiming causality are satisfied: the results are confirmed by many different studies by different investigators over different time periods; there is a dose-response relationship , meaning more inequality leads to worse health; no other contending explanation is posited; and the relationship is biologically plausible , with likely mechanisms through which inequality works. The field of study called stress biology of social comparisons is one such way inequality acts.

Those studies confirm that all the criteria for linking inequality to poorer health are met , concluding that the extent of inequality in society reflects the range of caring and sharing, with more unequal populations sharing less. Those who are poorer struggle to be accepted in society and the rich also suffer its effects. A recent Harvard study estimated that about one death in three in this country results from our very high income inequality. Inequality kills through structural violence . There is no smoking gun with this form of violence, which simply produces a lethally large social and economic gap between rich and poor.

Finally, the structural violence of inequality outweighs other impacts. There is an ethical obligation to address it.Ansell 17 — David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (Chicago), holds an M.D. from the State University of New York Upstate Medical University College of Medicine, 2017 (“American Roulette,” The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, Published by the University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226428291, p. kindle 307-363)There are many different kinds of violence. Some are obvious : punches, attacks, gunshots, explosions. These are the kinds of interpersonal violence that we tend to hear about in the news . Other kinds of violence are intimate and emotional.

But the deadliest and most thoroughgoing kind of violence is woven into the fabric of American society. It exists when some

groups have more access to goods, resources, and opportunities than other groups , including health and life itself. This violence delivers specific blows against particular bodies in particular neighborhoods . This unequal advantage and violence is built into the very rules that govern our society. In the absence of this violence, large numbers of Americans would be able to live fuller and longer lives .

This kind of violence is called structural violence , because it is embedded in the very laws, policies, and rules that govern day-to-day life.8 It is the cumulative impact of laws and social and economic policies and practices that render some Americans less able to access resources and opportunities than others . This inequity of advantage is not a result of the individual’s personal abilities but is built into the systems that govern society. Often it is a product of racism , gender , and income inequality . The diseases and premature mortality that Windora and many of my patients experienced were, in the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, “biological reflections of social fault lines.”9 As a result of these fault lines, a disproportional burden of illness, suffering, and premature mortality falls on certain neighborhoods, like Windora’s. Structural violence can overwhelm an individual’s ability to live a free , unfettered, healthy life .As I ran to evaluate Windora, I knew that her stroke was caused in part by lifelong exposure to suffering, racism, and economic deprivation. Worse, the poverty of West Humboldt Park that contributed to her illness is directly and inextricably related to the massive concentration of wealth and power in other neighborhoods just miles away in Chicago’s Gold Coast and suburbs. That concentration of wealth could not have occurred without laws, policies, and practices that favored some at the expense of others. Those laws, policies, and practices could not have been passed or enforced if access to political and economic power had not been concentrated in the hands of a few. Yet these political and economic structures have become so firmly entrenched (in habits, social relations, economic arrangements, institutional practices, law, and policy) that they have become part of the matrix of American society. The rules that govern day-to-day life were written to benefit a small elite at the expense of people like Windora and her family. These rules and structures are powerful destructive forces. The same structures that render life predictable, secure, comfortable, and pleasant for many destroy the lives of others like Windora through suffering , poverty , ill health , and violence . These structures are neither natural nor neutral. The results of structural violence can be very specific. In Windora’s case, stroke precursors like chronic stress, poverty, and uncontrolled hypertension run rampant in neighborhoods like hers. Windora’s illness was caused by neither her cultural traits nor the failure of her will. Her stroke was caused in part by inequity. She is one of the lucky ones, though, because even while structural violence ravages her neighborhood, it also abets the concentration of expensive stroke- intervention services in certain wealthy teaching hospitals like mine. If I can get to her in time, we can still help her. Income Inequality and Life Inequality Of course, Windora is not the only person struggling on account of structural violence. Countless neighborhoods nationwide are suffering from it, and people are dying needlessly young as a result. The magnitude of this excess mortality is mind-boggling. In 2009 my friend Dr. Steve Whitman asked a simple question, “How many extra black people died in Chicago each year, just because they do not have the same health outcomes as white Chicagoans?” When the Chicago Sun-Times got wind of his results, it ran them on the front page in bold white letters on a black background: “HEALTH CARE GAP KILLS

3200 Black Chicagoans and the Gap is Growing.” The paper styled the headline to look like the declaration of war that it should have been. In fact, we did find ourselves at war not long ago, when almost 3,000 Americans were killed. That was September 11 , 2001. That tragedy propelled the country to war. Yet when it comes to the premature deaths of urban Americans, no disaster area has been declared . No federal troops have been called up. No acts of Congress have been passed. Yet this disaster is even worse : those

3,200 black people were in Chicago alone, in just one year. Nationwide each year, more than 60,000 black people die prematurely because of inequality.10

While blacks suffer the most from this, it is not just an issue of racism, though racism has been a unique and powerful transmitter of violence in America for over four hundred years.11 Beyond racism, poverty and income inequality perpetuated by exploitative market capitalism are singular agents of transmission of disease and early death. As a result, there is a new and alarming pattern of declining life expectancy among white Americans as well. Deaths from drug overdoses in young white Americans ages 25 to 34 have exploded to levels not seen since the AIDS epidemic. This generation is the first since the Vietnam War era to experience higher death rates than the prior generation.12 White Americans ages 45 to 54 have experienced skyrocketing premature death rates as well, something not seen in any other developed nation.13 White men in some Appalachian towns live on average twenty years less than white men a half-day’s drive away in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Men in McDowell County, West Virginia, can look forward to a life expectancy only slightly better than that of Haitians.14But those statistics reflect averages, and every death from structural violence is a person . When these illnesses and deaths are occurring one at a time in neighborhoods that society has decided not to care about —neighborhoods populated by poor, black, or brown people — they seem easy to overlook , especially if you are among the fortunate few who are doing incredibly well. The tide of prosperity in America has lifted some boats while others have swamped. Paul Farmer, the physician-anthropologist who founded Partners in Health, an international human rights agency, reflects on the juxtaposition of “unprecedented bounty and untold penury”: “It stands to reason that as beneficiaries of growing inequality , we do not like to be reminded of misery of squalor and failure. Our popular culture provides us with no shortage of anesthesia.”15

That people suffer and die prematurely because of inequality is wrong . It is wrong from an ethical perspective . It is wrong from a fairness perspective . And it is wrong because we have the means to fix it.

1AC — PlanThe United States federal government should establish and enforce a constitutional right to education guaranteeing that all children in the United States receive equal access to an excellent elementary and secondary public education and should increase funding to a level necessary to accomplish this goal.

1AC — SolvencyContention Two: Solvency

First, requiring equal access to an excellent education is vital to close opportunity and achievement gapsRobinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 205-206) I contend that the United States should strategically restructure and strengthen the federal role in education to establish the necessary foundation for a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education . This restructuring and strengthening of the federal role in education would require shifting some power away from the state and local governments and toward the federal government. The U nited States would then need to adopt a new understanding of education federalism that embrace s the federal government as the guarantor of equal opportunity , because it is the only government with the capacity and sufficient incentive to lead a national effort to achieve this widely supported, yet persistently elusive, goal. Although this would not require federalizing the nation's education system as at least one scholar has recommended, it would require acceptance of a larger federal role in education to hold the states accountable for ensuring that all students receive equal access to an excellent education.7

I define equal access to an excellent education as the opportunity for all students to attend a high-quality school that enables them to effectively pursue their life goals, to become engaged citizens, and to develop their abilities to their full potential.8 Equal access to an excellent education enables all students to receive “a real and meaningful opportunity to achieve rigorous college- and career-ready standards.” 9 If the United States pursues equal access to an excellent education as the primary goal for its education system, it will break the traditional link between low-income and minority status and inferior educational opportunities . This goal recognizes that educational opportunities should be tailored to meet the individual needs of students that may vary dramatically

depending on a variety of factors, including family structure and stability, students' health and nutrition, and neighborhood climate. This goal also embraces closing the opportunity gap as an essential prerequisite for closing the achievement gap. Furthermore, embracing racially and economically diverse schools is essential for achieving this goal given compelling research regarding the harms of racial and class isolation, the benefits of diversity, and evidence of diverse schools providing important educational benefits that cannot be duplicated by alternative reforms. 10 An excellent education for all schoolchildren should be the nation's ultimate [end page 205]

education goal , because all families ultimately want a first-rate education for their children and because the United States would benefit economically, socially, and politically from providing such an education.

Second, comprehensive federal action is needed for successful reform. Robinson 16 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“Fisher’s Cautionary Tale and the Urgent Need for Equal Access to an Excellent Education,” Harvard Law Review (130 Harv. L. Rev. 185), November, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)B. Overturning RodriguezTo be most effective, a comprehensive federal agenda requires the assistance of all three branches of government . The executive branch enjoys the fewest obstacles to reform because it could use its existing authority to accomplish incremental shifts to education federalism through modest reforms that employ its existing authority and resources. n295 Nevertheless, given the full scope of the shift to education

federalism that I recommend, reforms instituted without any significant involvement of Congress or the Court would lack the comprehensive nature that ensuring equal access to an excellent education for all schoolchildren will ultimately demand. Legislation consistent with this agenda would send a n even more powerful message that the agenda represents the will of the people and thus may encourage greater state and local buy-in . n296 However, the eight-year delay in reenacting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which eventually led to the reduction of the federal role in education in the Every Student Succeeds Act, n297 and the great difficulties that Congress is experiencing in passing legislation n298 suggest that legislative reform consistent with my proposal is unlikely in the near term. [*231] Fortunately, the Court possesses the authority to unleash a powerful tool that could help to reduce the opportunity and achievement gaps that lead

universities and colleges to rely on affirmative action in admissions. It could overturn

Rodriguez , which held that the Constitution does not protect education as a fundamental right. n299

For over forty years, Rodriguez has served as a roadblock to access to federal courts for those who hope to address the entrenched disparities in funding and resources that relegate many disadvantaged and minority students to inferior educational opportunities in the United States. n300 Because the Court held that education was not a fundamental right, Rodriguez applied rational basis review to the funding gaps between districts within Texas. n301 The Court determined that Texas easily met this standard because its funding approach advanced local control of education, the Court lacked the expertise to second-guess the Texas system, and a ruling for the plaintiffs would greatly upset the balance of federalism. n302 The Court nonetheless noted the need for reform of school funding and challenged the states to undertake this reform. n303 Although many states have implemented funding reform since Rodriguez and state litigation has resulted in some important victories, these state efforts have fallen far short of the reforms required to provide all children equal access to an excellent education. n304 In light of the continuing disparities in educational opportunity, numerous scholars, myself included, have argued that Rodriguez was wrongly decided and should be overturned to provide a consistent and powerful federal remedy to address these disparities . n305 [*232] However, disagreement exists over the scope of the right that the Court should recognize. The Court left the existence of a fundamental right to some minimum education an open question in Rodriguez n306 and subsequently acknowledged that the question remains open. n307 If Rodriguez is overturned, some scholars envision the Court addressing only extreme forms of educational inequality by providing a federal right to a minimally adequate education. n308 Leading education scholar Professor Derek Black, on the other hand, has argued that such an education today would require that students receive the state-defined minimum of education and that this definition does not have to equal "a minimalist education." n309Given the likelihood that the Court will insist that affirmative action eventually end, the Court should take some responsibility for addressing the conditions that lead institutions to rely on affirmative action by overturning the decision that insulated opportunity gaps from federal accountability. The Court could choose from a variety of constitutional provisions to recognize a right to education. n310 For [*233] instance, the Court could hold that the Fourteenth Amendment 's requirement that states not deny equal protection of the laws n311 serves as a prohibition of the inequitable state disparities in educational opportunity or guarantees students an education that enables them to effectively employ their First Amendment rights and to be competent voters. n312 Recognizing and enforcing a federal right to education would provide greater authority and consistent impact than the state education clauses that vary widely in their protection — or lack thereof — of the right to education. n313

The federal courts have been and will remain an important and powerful avenue for enforcing education rights for all students throughout the United States in ways that do not make the content of a right dependent on the happenstance of geography or state law. n314 A federal constitutional right also

would enable the federal courts to address the substantial interstate disparities in funding that currently account for seventy-eight percent of per-pupil spending gaps . n315 This tremendous interstate disparity , which has reached a [*234]

"historic high" for spending differences, n316 reveals the failure of state courts to close spending gaps on their own. n317

If the Court chooses to overturn Rodriguez in a manner that would help to

close opportunity gaps, it should incorporate four essential principles into a constitutional right to education. First, the Court must embrace a robust fundamental right to education that moves beyond guaranteeing a rudimentary floor of educational opportunity. A minimal right would not make a meaningful impact on opportunity or achievement gaps. Instead, the Court should consider recognizing a right to education that requires states to provide an education-based justification for the quality of education provided and any disparities in educational opportunity . Such a standard would enable states to offer disparate opportunities to students with disabilities, English-language learners, and low-income children, but would force states to end the superior opportunities that are provided to wealthier children absent an educational justification for such disparities. Defining a fundamental right to education in this way would help to level the playing field within public schools and insist that states design education systems based on research and students' needs rather than power, politics, and privilege.

Second, the Court should include safeguards that reduce the likelihood that states level down their educational opportunities

n318 or seek to avoid the Court's requirements . n319 One safeguard could be an instruction to states that guaranteeing a federal right to education should avoid reducing the quality and nature of existing educational opportunities and instead should seek ways to expand the delivery of a high-quality education to those who are currently denied it. The Court also can reduce the likelihood of decreasing the quality of educational opportunities within a state by providing clear requirements on the nature of the education right. In this regard, the Court can learn from decades of school finance litigation that has worked to give meaning to the right to education embodied in state constitutions, n320 while recognizing [*235] that this litigation has had significant shortcomings and has not ultimately resulted in equal access to an excellent education for all children. n321Third, the Court must acknowledge that a constitutional right to education would shift education federalism in ways that would increase federal influence over education and reduce some aspects of state control over education. The Court must wrestle with its own prior pronouncements heralding the importance of local control of education. n322 Such a shift in an

area of traditional state control must be justified with an explanation for why this shift is both appropriate and warranted. n323When the Court provides this explanation, it should remind the states that Rodriguez urged state reform of school finance systems in light of the persistent and heavy reliance on property taxes and the disparities in educational opportunity. n324 The limited nature and impact of subsequent reforms remains apparent in light of the Equity and Excellence Commission's finding in 2013 that "students, families and communities are burdened by the broken system of education funding in America." n325 The Commission further noted that over forty years of reforms "have not addressed the fundamental sources of inequities and so have not generated the educational gains desired." n326 Scholars also have recognized the limited success of decades of funding litigation to remedy longstanding inequitable disparities in educational opportunity. n327 School funding data and research also confirm a host of shortcomings in state funding systems despite the Court's invitation to reform funding in ways that increase equal educational opportunities. n328In addition to the shortcomings noted above, most states have not designed their funding systems to accomplish their education goals. n329 Instead,

politics oftentimes drives the distribution of funding as state [*236]

politicians assess how much funding is available for a given school year and then bargain over how that amount should be divided among the students in the state. n330 When the Court acknowledges

that its decision will result in a shift in education federalism, it also should acknowledge that the laboratory of the states has failed to develop the reforms needed to ensure an equitable and excellent education for every child.Fourth, the Court must acknowledge that recognizing a constitutional right to education would only begin the process of closing opportunity and achievement gaps. The reform of funding systems and the redistribution of educational opportunity will take a significant amount of time. The Court will need to encourage lower courts to retain jurisdiction over cases enforcing this right, just as state courts typically retain jurisdiction over cases enforcing a state right to education. n331In this regard, the Court must avoid the errors of its desegregation cases, which initially insisted on effective desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, n332 but then eventually emphasized the return to local control of schools rather than the effectiveness of desegregation orders. For example, in Milliken v. Bradley, n333 the Court overturned an interdistrict desegregation plan for the metropolitan Detroit area in part because the plan's inclusion of districts surrounding Detroit would cause a reduction in local control. n334 The Court took this action in spite of the Sixth Circuit's finding that crossing district boundaries was particularly appropriate given the state's discrimination that maintained racial segregation across school district boundaries and that failing to include the surrounding districts would "nullify" Brown v. Board of Education. n335 As I have explored in prior work, the Court's desegregation decisions in Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, n336 Freeman v. Pitts, n337 and Missouri v. Jenkins n338 [*237] also reified local control of the schools by focusing on releasing districts from court supervision rather than on effective and lasting school desegregation. n339 Scholars have documented how these cases signaled that the Court had determined that desegregation had gone on long enough and it was time for school boards to regain control even if desegregation was never ultimately accomplished. n340If a federal right to education is going to serve as a mechanism to close educational opportunity gaps and to reduce the need for selective institutions to rely on consideration of an applicant's race to achieve diversity's benefits, the Court must learn from how its desegregation decisions undeniably contributed to the racial isolation that pervades so many school districts today. n341 The Court's impatience with the slow nature of desegregation reveals a shallow understanding of the depth of the social ill that the Court declared unconstitutional in Brown and an unwillingness to insist upon ongoing federal court investment in the effective dismantling of segregation. Overturning Rodriguez will require the Court to confront longstanding and deeply entrenched inequalities within public education. The federal courts will be called upon to oversee reforms that topple the settled expectations of more privileged sectors of society, just as the Court confronted the expectations of racism and white privilege that supported racial segregation. Thus, the reforms required by the Court cannot give a wink and a nod to those who benefit from the status quo while simultaneously claiming to demand reform.The Court must eschew any approval of unwarranted delay, as

occurred in Brown II's command to desegregate with "all deliberate speed," n342 or any invitation to incomplete or ineffective results, as the Court sanctioned in

Dowell, Freeman, and Jenkins. n343 Instead, the Court must insist that states implement the reforms that will ensure [*238] equal access to an

excellent education. It must make clear that states will not be released from court oversight until they have done so. Consistent Supreme Court insistence on an excellent and equitable education for all children will provide lower federal courts the support that they will need both to confront state legislatures that resist changing the status quo and to prevent evasive actions similar to those invited by the Court's ambiguous pronouncements in Brown II. n344

In sum, a federal right to education that embraces these principles provides the most promising path toward closing opportunity and achievement gaps such that selective postsecondary institutions may not be required to

consider race to achieve diversity's benefits. n345 Unless the Court overturns Rodriguez, the Court will remain complicit with the deeply entrenched educational opportunity gaps and should not blame postsecondary institutions that must build diverse institutions despite those gaps.Foonote n345: Additionally, Congress could take a variety of actions to support the Court's recognition of a constitutional right to education. Congress could embrace the Court's requirements as conditions on funding in the E lementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 or on any education funding, authorize grants to support reform, extend funding for the DOE to enforce new conditions, and monitor DOE enforcement of the conditions . See Robinson, supra note 141, (manuscript at 34-49) (proposing congressional mechanisms that could lead states to offer equal access to an excellent education); Robinson, supra note 18, at 1006-12 (describing how Congress can still expand the federal role in education despite the limits NFIB v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566 (2012), placed on congressional spending). The executive branch could issue an executive order on the importance of compliance with the Court's decision recognizing a federal right to education, establish a commission to study and recommend effective responses, enforce any statutory conditions on education funding , and modify education regulations and guidance consistent with the Court 's pronouncements. These efforts would provide critical support for the Court's decision to recognize a constitutional right to education by overturning Rodriguez. See San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 35 (1973).

Third, restoring the positive federal role in education is necessary to rectify racial and class oppression and promote integration. Only federal action can achieve educational equality. Sundquist 17 — Christian B. Sundquist, Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Albany Law School, former Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2017 (“Positive Education Federalism: The Promise of Equality after the Every Student Succeeds Act,” Mercer Law Review (68 Mercer L. Rev. 351), Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)B. A Positively Federalist View for Future Reauthorizations of the ESEA

A positive conception of federalism is particularly justified when attempting to divine the appropriate federal role in public education. As discussed previously, the primary constitutional basis for federal involvement in public education is premised on the government's responsibility to take positive action to remedy racial and class inequalities. n186 The Brown constitutional doctrine and the "War on Poverty" driven by the ESEA forged an understanding of education federalism rooted in positive social justice . It is particularly appropriate today that we restore this fundamental understanding of education federalism, given evidence of increasing racial disparities in public education and the noted failures of modern education federalism policy.

The federal guarantee of equal public education is critical ly important to the functioning of our democracy . As a public good, education helps our society develop those "fundamental values necessary to the transmission of our democratic society." n187 The provision of an equitable public education , devoid of identity- based disparities , is critical to provide children with " the knowledge needed to understand and participate effectively in the democratic process and to cultivate among children respect for and the ability to interact with others as beings of inherently equal moral worth ." n188 Indeed, both classic and contemporary constitutional scholars

argue that equal public education should be regarded as " a fundamental duty , or positive fundamental right because education is a basic human need and a constituent part of all democratic rights ." n189 The need, then, for a robust application of positive education federalism principles in this context cannot be stronger. [*385] The purpose of this Article is not to provide specific curricular recommendations to guide the future of public education. n190 Rather, this Article has attempted to define a new vision of positive education federalism - one that is rooted in a historical understanding of the constitutional obligation of the federal government to shape education policy goals in a manner that responds to unrelenting racial and class disparities. A few core principles regarding the substantive dimension of positive education federalism can be gleaned from this discussion:1. First Principle: Providing an equal public education is a federal responsibility that cannot be transferred to or assumed by private market forces.

The overarching conclusion of this Article is that ESSA, NCLB, and RTT unconstitutionally transfer federal responsibility for positively eliminating racial and class inequality in public education to private market forces under the auspices of competitive federalism. n191 This reading of the federal role in public education is ahistorical and undermines the core principles of equality informing Brown-era education federalism . n192

2. Second Principle: Positive federal action is justifiable in public education when necessary to rectify historical patterns of racial and class oppression.

It follows from the first principle that positive federal intervention in public education is justified when employed to directly respond to our unbroken history of racial and class disparities in educational outcomes. The original vision of the ESEA and Brown anticipated future positive efforts by the federal government to wield its block grant powers to actively dismantle old systems of oppression. n193 The current statutory framework has abandoned this vision of equality in its misguided pursuit to harness the market forces of consumer choice, accountability, and competition to limit the federal role in education . n194 [*386] 3. Third Principle: Our education federalism must acknowledge that racial discrimination and class oppression are the true roots of current educational disparities .Third, it is of the utmost importance that our education federalism fully acknowledge the historical and continuing causes of education disparities: racial discrimination and poverty. n195 The race and class-based roots of educational inequality are well-known and well-documented, and our education federalism can no longer hide behind the veil of ignorance provided by ESSA, NCLB, and RTT. n196 Far from acknowledging the reality of educational disparities, our current competitive federalist framework for education actively attempts to conceal these roots, with the specious promise that the free market principles of choice, accountability, and competition will eventually equalize education. n197 Modeling our education federalism around such race and class "neutral" market principles have led to a deepening of the crisis while allowing society to ignore the ways in which privilege shapes outcomes. n198

4. Fourth Principle: Our education federalism must strive to promote racial and class integration.

Finally, any equality-based vision of education federalism must promote the social integration of our public schools. The current competitive conception of education policy has failed those "faces at the bottom of [the] well" n199 and led to a rampant racial re-segregation of our schools . n200 This failure evinces a lack of faith and duty in fulfilling the original integrationist goals of Brown and the ESEA. Therefore, a positive theory of education federalism must promote federal efforts to integrate our public schools.

These core principles, on a theory of positive education federalism, can be used to inform future reauthorizations of the ESEA. While this Article does not attempt to advance specific changes in statutory law, it has attempted to redefine the substantive dimension of our education federalism in a manner that restores our faith in Brown, the ESEA, and the promise of racial and class equality. [*387] ConclusionThe neoliberal vision of education federalism embodied by ESSA, NCLB, and RTT has improperly shifted the federal government's role in public education from one of promoting desegregation and social equality to one of promoting market efficiency through the artifices of competition, choice, and accountability. This deflection of moral responsibility for class and racial inequality is tied to a larger process of post-racialism and "post-oppression," whereby seemingly "neutral" market solutions are seen as sufficient to promote equality in a liberal democracy. There is, after all, a comforting allure to believing that social inequality is non-systemic, and thus avoiding the cognitive dissonance (and structural upheaval) that comes from confronting our continuing legacy of racial and class privilege.

Allowing the "invisible hand" of the market to sort educational outcomes under the guise of "competition," "choice," and "accountability," however, has led to a deepening of the crisis confronting our public schools . The federal role in public education has been reduced to incentivizing reform centered around market principles, rather than promoting desegregation and the equality envisioned by Brown and the original ESEA. "Our

federalism" demands more than this. The substantive dimension of education federalism , as constitutionalized by Brown and framed by the original ESEA, must be restored in our public education policy. The adoption of a positive conception of the federal role in public education to frame future policy discussions can put us once again on the path towards achieving equality of educational outcome for all students.

Fourth, increased funding is vital to improve schools — the best research confirms. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 1-2)Executive Summary

This second edition policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education . It includes research released since the original brief in 2012 and

covers a handful of additional topics. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn’t make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to

education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality.In the following brief, I discuss major studies on three specific topics: (a) whether how much money schools spend matters; (b) whether specific schooling resources that cost money matter; and (c) whether substantive and sustained state school finance reforms matter. Regarding these three questions, I conclude:Does Money Matter?Yes . On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes . The size of this effect is larger in some studies than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that may moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. In other words, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Do Schooling Resources That Cost Money Matter?Yes . Schooling resources that cost money , including smaller class sizes, additional supports, early childhood programs and more competitive teacher compensation (permitting schools and districts to recruit and retain a higher-quality teacher workforce), are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, in some cases, those effects are larger

than in others, and there is also variation by student population and other contextual variables. On the whole, however, the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Do State School Finance Reforms Matter?Yes . Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes . While money alone may not be the answer, more equitable and adequate allocation of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the equity and adequacy of outcomes. The available evidence suggests that appropriate combinations of more adequate funding with more accountability for its use may be most promising. [end page 1]While there may in fact be better and more efficient ways to leverage the education dollar toward improved student outcomes, we do know the following:• Many of the ways in which schools currently spend money do improve student outcomes.

• When schools have more money, they have greater opportunity to spend productively. When they don’t, they can’t.

• Arguments that across-the-board budget cuts will not hurt outcomes are completely unfounded .

In short, money matters , resources that cost money matter , and a more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes . Policymakers would be well-advised to rely on high-quality research to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance .

Finally, claims that “money doesn’t matter” are unethical and wrong. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 15-19)Summing Up The EvidenceThis brings me to a summary of the evidence on whether money matters in education. Despite the relative consistency of empirical findings over time regarding (a) whether per-pupil spending itself is related to student outcomes; (b) whether spending-related resources, such as teacher wages and class sizes, are related to student outcomes; and (c) whether improving the adequacy and equity of school funding can have positive effects on student outcomes, a persistent cloud of doubt hangs over political deliberations on school funding. Here, I review briefly the sources of that doubt, relative to what we do know with some confidence as well as what we still have yet to figure out about money and student outcomes.Main sources of doubtThe primary source of doubt to this day remains the above-mentioned Eric

Hanushek finding in 1986 that “there appears to be no strong or systematic relationship between school expenditures and student performance.”117 This single quote, now divorced entirely from the soundly refuted analyses on which it was based, remains a mantra for those wishing to deny that increased funding for schools is a viable option for improving school quality. Add to this statement the occasional uninformative and inflammatory anecdote regarding urban district spending and student outcomes in places

like Kansas City or New Jersey, or the frequently re-created graphs showing spending and achievement over the past few decades, and one has a rhetorical war against an otherwise overwhelming body of empirical evidence.118

While research evidence regarding the importance of funding and specific schooling resources for improving student outcomes has become clearer with time, Hanushek and a [end page 15] handful of peers have become even more entrenched in their views , as reflected in recent public testimony. Rhetoric among detractors has continued to drift from the cloud of

doubt to a rock of certainty. That is, certainty that money has little or no role in improving school quality, and that school finance reforms that infuse additional funds only lead to greater inefficiency, having little or no effect on either equity or adequacy of schooling. Notably, Hanushek asserts (now and then) that it’s not that money doesn’t matter at all, but rather that additional money doesn’t matter on top of the already high levels of spending that currently exist across all U.S. schools.To summarize, the current dogma of Hanushek includes the following core tenets:1. Because schools already spend so much and do so with such great inefficiency, additional funding is unlikely to lead to improved student outcomes.2. How money is used matters much more than how much money is spent.3. Differences in the amount of money some schools have than others are inconsequential, since those with less may simply make smarter spending decisions.According the recent rhetoric of Hanushek, these principles are ironclad. In his own words, they are “conventional wisdom” on which “virtually all analysts” agree. They are “commonly believed,” “overall truth” and backed by an “enormous amount of scientific analysis,” “substantial econometric evidence” and “considerable prior research.” For example, in the winter of 2015, in the context of school funding litigation in New York state, Hanushek opined:

“An enormous amount of scientific analysis has focused on how spending and resources of schools relates to student outcomes. It is now commonly believed that spending on schools is not systematically related to student outcomes.”119

Yet, the enormous amount of scientific analysis to which Hanushek referred in his expert testimony was primarily referenced to a 2003 summary of much of his prior work from the 1980s , work which has been discredited on numerous occasions , 120 including by research produced in the last 12 years. Similarly, in the same context (Maisto v. State of New York), Hanushek proclaims:

“There has been substantial econometric evidence that supports this lack of relationship.”Hanushek again backs his claims with the same short list of dated self-citation.121 In an even more recent attempt to rebut a new, major study finding positive effects of school finance reforms,122 Hanushek (2015) makes the following version of the same claim:

“Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom.”123

This time, he anchored that claim only to his 2003 piece (by hyperlink to the “prior research” phrase) on the failure of input-based schooling policies, 124 choosing to ignore entirely the considerably larger body of more rigorous work I summarize in my 2012 review on the topic.The extension of these claims that nearly everyone agrees there’s no clear relationship between spending and student performance is the assertion that there is broad agreement that how money is spent matters far more than how much money is available. As phrased by Hanushek in the context of New York state school finance litigation:

“Virtually all analysts now realize that how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent.”125As with the prior declarations, this one is made with the exceedingly bold assertion that virtually all analysts agree on this point—without reference to any empirical evidence to that point (a seemingly gaping omission for a decidedly empirical claim about a supposedly empirical truth). Further, “how money is spent” is constrained by whether sufficient money is there to begin with. While common sense dictates that how money is spent clearly matters, thus making this part of the statement widely agreeable, this does not preclude the relevance of how much money is available to spend.Perhaps most disconcerting is that Hanushek has recently extended this argument to declare that equity gaps in funding, or measures of them, aren’t an important policy concern either. Specifically, Hanushek proclaims:

“It also underscores how calculations of equity gaps in spending, of costs needed to achieve equity, or of costs needed to obtain some level of student performance are vacuous, lacking any scientific basis” (p. 4).126

Put differently, what Hanushek is opining by declaring calculations of equity gaps to be

vacuous and lacking scientific basis is that it matters not whether one school or district has more resources than another. Regardless of any spending differences, schools and districts can provide equitable education—toward equitable outcome goals. Those with substantively fewer resources simply need to be more efficient. Since all public schools and districts are presently so inefficient, achieving these efficiency gains through more creative personnel policies, such as performance-based pay and dismissal of “bad teachers,” is easily attainable.Of course, even if we assume that creative personnel policies yield marginal improvements to efficiency, if schools with varied levels of resources pursued these strategies [end page 16] with comparable

efficiency gains, inequities would remain constant. Requiring those with less to simply be more efficient with what they have is an inequitable requirement. This argument is often linked in

popular media and the blogosphere with the popular book and film Moneyball, which asserts that clever statistical analysis for selecting high-productivity, undervalued players was the basis for the (short-lived) success in 2002 and 2003 of the low-payroll Oakland Athletics baseball team. The flaws of this analogy are too many to explore thoroughly herein, but the biggest flaw is illustrated by the oft-ignored subtitle of the book: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game . That is, gaining a leg up through clever player selection is necessary in baseball because vast wealth and payroll differences across teams make baseball an unfair game. The public’s interest in providing equitable and adequate funding for education is likely greater than ensuring equitable and adequate baseball payrolls. Put more bluntly,

the education of present and future generations should not be an unfair game.

From judges to scholars , critics of Hanushek have characterized his evidence as “ facile ,” based on “ fuzzy logic ,” 127 and “ weak and factually tenuous .” 128 Two recurring examples used by Hanushek to illustrate the unimportance of funding increases for improving outcomes are the “long-term trend” or “time trend” argument and anecdotal claims of the failures of input-based reforms in New Jersey. Baker and Welner (2011) tackle in depth the fallacies of Hanushek’s New Jersey claims.129 Here, I point to Hanushek’s own, albeit facile, unacknowledged self-debunking of his New Jersey claims. But first, I address the long-term trend claim.Again, from recent testimony in New York state, Hanushek provides the following exposition of the long-term trend assertion:

“The overall truth of this disconnect of spending and outcomes is easiest to see by looking at the aggregate data for the United States over the past half century. Since 1960, pupil-teacher ratios fell by one-third, teachers with master’s degrees over doubled, and median teacher experience grew significantly (Chart 1).4 Since these three factors are the most important determinants of spending per pupil, it leads to the quadrupling of spending between 1960 and 2009 (after adjusting for inflation). At the same time, plotting scores for math and reading performance of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows virtually no change since 1970 (Charts 2 and 3).5”130

This claim, like many of Hanushek’s, is made with language of astounding certainty—the “overall truth” as it exists in the mind of Hanushek. This claim is commonly accompanied by graphs showing per-pupil spending going up over time, pupil-to-teacher ratios going down and national assessment scores appearing relatively flat, much of which is achieved via the smoke and mirrors of representing spending and outcome data on completely different scales, and via the failure to adjust appropriately for the changing costs and related obligations of the public education system and for the changing demography of the tested population.131 Oversimplified visuals are used to make the proclamation that student achievement shows “virtually no change,” a statement discredited on closer inspection.132 Jackson, Johnson and Persico (2015) provide additional examples of how such facile analyses lead to fallacious conclusions.133As explained by Baker and Welner (2011),134 Hanushek for years has cited the failures of New Jersey’s school finance reforms as the basis for why other states should not increase funding to high-poverty schools. In litigation in Kansas in 2011, Hanushek proclaimed:

“The dramatic spending increases called for by the courts (exhibit 34) have had little to no impacts on achievement. Compared to the rest of the nation, performance in New Jersey has not increased across most grades and racial groups (exhibits 35-40). These results suggest caution in considering the ability of courts to improve educational outcomes.”135

Hanushek reiterated these claims in the context of a even more recent New York school funding challenge.136 This is a surprising claim to preserve when one’s own recent (2012), marginally more rigorous analyses of state achievement growth rates on national assessments (from 1992 to 2011)137 find the following:

“The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.”138

Further, the same report reveals that New Jersey has seen particularly strong growth in reducing the number of the lowest-performing students (those scoring at the “below basic” level), especially for eighth-grade math. To be sure, there are others in academe and policy research that raise questions about the most effective ways to leverage school funding to achieve desired outcomes, and do so via more

rigorous, thoughtful analyses. The most recent rigorous and relevant academic research is addressed in the remainder of this brief. There are others who opine in the public square139 and courtroom140 that school finance reform—specifically infusing additional funding to districts serving high-need student populations—is neither the most effective nor the most efficient path toward improving schooling equity or adequacy. But empirical evidence to support claims of more efficient alternatives remains elusive.No rigorous empirical study of which I am aware validates that increased funding for schools in general, or targeted to [end page 17] specific populations, has led to any substantive, measured reduction in student outcomes or other “harm.” Arguably, if this were the case, it would open new doors to school finance litigation against states that choose to increase funding to schools. Twenty years ago, economist Richard Murnane summarized the issue exceptionally well when he stated:

“In my view, it is simply indefensible to use the results of quantitative studies of the relationship between school resources and student achievement as a basis for concluding that additional funds cannot help public school districts. Equally disturbing is the claim that the removal of funds … typically does no harm” (p. 457).141

Murnane’s quote is as relevant today as it was then. The sources of doubt on the “Does money matter?” question are not credible .While there remains much to debate, discuss and empirically evaluate regarding the returns to each additional dollar spent in schools—and the strategies for improving educational efficiency, equity and adequacy—we must finally be willing to cast aside the most inane arguments and sources of evidence on either side of the debate. Specifically, the following five contentions no longer have a legitimate place in the debate over state school finance policy and whether and how money matters in K-12 education:1. Vote counts of correlational studies between spending and outcomes, without regard for rigor of the analyses and quality of the data on which they depend; 2. The long-term trend argument and supporting graphs that show long-term spending going up and NAEP scores staying flat ; 3. International comparisons asserting , and perhaps illustrating via scatterplot,

that the United States spends more than other developed countries but achieves less on international assessments; 4. Anecdotal assertions that states such as New Jersey and cities such as Kansas City provide proof positive that massive infusions of funding have proven ineffective at improving student outcomes; and5. The assertion that how money is spent is much more important than how much is available .

Vote count tallies without regard for study quality and rigor are of relative little use for understanding whether money matters in schooling and are of no use for discerning how. The long-term trend argument is perhaps the most reiterated of all arguments that money doesn’t matter,

but it is built largely on deceptive, oversimplified and largely wrong characterizations (accompanied by distorted visuals) of the long- term trends in student outcomes and school spending. Facile international comparisons are equally deceitful , in that they (a)

fail to account for differences in student populations served and

the related scope of educational and related services provided; and (b) fail to appropriately equate educational spending across nations, including the failure to account for the range of services and operating costs covered under “educational expense” in the United States versus other countries (for example, public employee health and pension benefits). And anecdotal assertions of failures resulting from massive infusions of funding are rebutted herein and elsewhere.142Finally, while the assertion that “how money is spent is important” is certainly valid, one cannot reasonably make the leap to assert that how money is spent is necessarily more important than how much money is available. Yes, how money is spent matters, but if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it. It is unhelpful at best for public policy, and harmful to the children subjected to those policies, to pretend without any compelling evidence that somewhere out there exists a far cheaper way to achieve the same or better outcomes (and thus we can cut our way down that more efficient path). As so eloquently noted by a three-judge panel in Kansas when faced with this question:

“Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes , then for most, it is most likely gone . We all know that the struggle for an income very often—too often— overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

“If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.”143

What do we know?Based on the studies reviewed in this brief, there are a few things we can say with confidence about the relationship between funding, resources and student outcomes.First, on average, even in large-scale studies across multiple contexts, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved and/or higher student outcomes. In some studies, the size of this effect is larger than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters . [end page 18] Second, schooling resources that cost money, including class size reductions and

increased teacher compensation, are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, these effects are larger in some cases and for some populations. On balance, though, there are ways to spend money that have a solid track record of success. Further, while there may exist alternative uses of financial resources that yield comparable or better returns in student outcomes, no clear evidence identifies what these alternatives might be.Third, sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes . While money alone may not be the answer, adequate and

equitable distributions of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the adequacy and equity of outcomes. That is, if the money isn’t there, schools and districts simply don’t have a “leverage option” that can support strategies that might improve student outcomes. If the money is there, they can use it productively; if it’s not, they can’t. But, even if they have the money, there’s no guarantee that they will use it productively. Evidence from Massachusetts, in particular, suggests that appropriate combinations of more funding with more accountability may be most promising.

1NC

1NC — Ban Private Schools CPFirst off is the Ban Private Schools Counterplan.

The United States federal government should abolish private and parochial K-12 schools and require compulsory attendance in public K-12 schools in the United States.

Only the counterplan can remedy educational inequalities — it’s impossible as long as private schools exist. Chemerinsky 15 — Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law at the University of California-Irvine School of Law, former Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, former Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science and Director of the Center for Communications Law and Policy at the University of Southern California Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.S. from Northwestern University where he is a member of the Debate Society Hall of Achievement, 2015 (“Remedying Separate and Unequal: Is It Possible to Create Equal Educational Opportunity?,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 249-250)On May 17, 2014, the nation celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.1 The simple and tragic reality is that American public education is separate and unequal.2 Schools today are more segregated than they have been for decades, and segregation is rapidly increasing. Wide disparities exist in funding for schools. In Brown, Chief Justice Earl Warren spoke eloquently of the importance of education and how separate can never be equal.3 More than a half century later, in an even more technologically complex society, education is even more essential.The causes for this tragedy are easy to recite. There never has been the political will to pursue equal educational opportunity. No president since the

1960s has devoted any attention to decreasing segregation or to equalizing school funding. The Supreme Court refused to allow the needed steps to deal with the problem in its holding that metropolitan school districts can be created as a remedy only in very limited circumstances and that disparities in school funding do not violate the Constitution.4 Moreover, Supreme Court [end page 249] decisions in the 1990s have required the lifting of even successful desegregation orders, causing the resegregation of schools.5 The Court’s most recent decision about school desegregation, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, greatly limited the ability of school boards to pursue voluntary desegregation plans, such as by considering race as one factor in assigning students so as to enhance diversity.6In this essay, I look behind these explanations and argue that the central problem in achieving equal educational opportunity has been the lack of a unitary system of education. Desegregation will not occur in most cities so long as parents can move their children to suburban or private schools . Adequate, let alone equal , funding for schools will not occur so long as wealthy parents can send their children to private or suburban schools , where far more is spent on education than in inner cities. A crucial aspect of Brown’s wisdom was the importance of a unitary system of education. Minority children are far more likely to receive quality education when their schooling is tied to that of wealthy

white children. The failure to create truly unitary systems is the core explanation for the inequalities in American schools today.

Consider a simple analogy: the dual system of medical care. If wealthy people had to receive their medical treatment in public hospitals, is there any doubt that the quality of those hospitals would be dramatically different? But so long as the public hospital system is just for poor people, and often predominately racial minorities at that, they never will be of the same quality as top private hospitals. The same is true of schools .

Therefore, I propose a radical solution: the abolition of private and parochial schools in the U nited States and the creation of large metropolitan school districts. Under this proposal, every child will be required to attend these public schools . In this way, there truly would be a unitary system of education and , as a result, equality of school funding and meaningful desegregation. Desegregation and equalization of funding can be achieved through this approach, but probably not otherwise .

1NC — School Choice CPNext off is the School Choice Counterplan.

The United States federal government should substantially restrict K-12 education monopolies and support school choice for parents and students by:

* attaching federal education funds to individual students and conditioning the receipt of federal funds to a school’s participation in an open enrollment process conducted by a state-sanctioned authority;

* allowing states to opt out of the statutory and regulatory requirements of federal education laws in exchange for creating a marketplace of informed school choice and competition including public, charter, private, and virtual schools;

* promoting informed parental choice by producing and disseminating research on the relative performance of students at each school; and

* enforcing civil rights laws regarding education.

First, the counterplan is the best way to improve K-12 education because it promotes competition and choice. Whitehurst 12 — Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, Member of The Koret Task Force on K–12 Education—a group of senior education scholars brought together by the Hoover Institution, former Director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement, former Chair of the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Child Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 (“Let the Dollars Follow the Child,” Education Next, Volume 12, Number 2, Spring, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/let-the-dollars-follow-the-child/, Accessed 06-15-2017)Washington is at a crossroads on K–12 education policy. Policymakers can 1) continue down the path of top-down accountability; 2) devolve power to states and districts, thereby

returning to the status quo of the mid-1990s; or 3) rethink the fundamentals, do something different, and empower parental choice.

The federal government’s involvement in K–12 education has accelerated through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. The best evidence indicates that this substantially heightened federal role has had only modest impact on student achievement, far short of what had been hoped. It might be that further centralization would yield more benefits, but it is doubtful that more federal control is politically possible, and, in any case, any additional yield is uncertain.

The second option—devolving recently accumulated federal power to the states—underlies recent reauthorization proposals for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that allow each state to establish its own accountability system and that require teeth only for the very lowest-performing schools. It is unclear to us how releasing states and school districts from federal accountability and granting them maximum flexibility is anything more than a return to the status quo. It is the regrettable consequence of that approach that motivated increased federal involvement in the first place.The Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution (see sidebar, page 16), of which I am a member, believes that an evolved form of the ESEA that retains rigorous accountability is preferable to returning control of public schooling to local public-school monopolies and states, which will fall into old habits all too quickly. But we believe that the best interests of the nation require something other than either a return to the happy days of local school governance or evolutionary improvements to the type of top-down accountability found in No Child Left Behind.We need a fundamentally new approach.

We propose to reform the nation’s schools on the basis of two principles that have served the nation exceedingly well throughout its history: federalism and choice . The federal structure of our government offers an opportunity to specify the role of Washington strategically, to leverage what it clearly can do best, while allocating to states and locales what they are best suited to do. Our particular view of federalism is disciplined by the laws of economics and empirical experience, a perspective known as fiscal federalism. The second organizing principle is choice. Much has been written and studied regarding choice in education—on charter schools, vouchers, choice among district schools, and much more—but the idea, so powerful in our economy and in other enterprises, including higher education, has rarely been examined in the context of federalism and the appropriate roles of Washington and lower levels of government.A New FrameworkWhat is fiscal federalism? Fiscal federalism argues that government services are most efficiently delivered if provided closest to the taxpayers or consumers receiving them, and that competition among local governments for residents and taxpayers will improve those services. In the context of public education, the challenge is to identify the areas of constraint for local providers of education services, determine which can be best addressed by state government, and assign the remainder to Washington.But there is a fundamental flaw in fiscal federalism theory as it applies to education: the ability of taxpaying parents of school-age children to vote with their feet (leave school districts with which they are dissatisfied) is severely constrained for the low-income populations that are most likely to find themselves served by low-performing schools. This lack of geographical mobility for large segments of the population undermines the competitive pressure that low-performing schools and school districts would otherwise expect to face. This leaves those districts vulnerable to the interests of whoever is powerful at the local level, more often than not organizations that represent teachers who are employed by school districts, rather than to the influence of parents and taxpayers.One way to correct the strong tendency of local school bureaucracies to cater more to adult than student interests is to intervene from above, the course of action taken by Washington over the last 15 years. We argue that this has been only weakly effective while imposing a heavy regulatory burden on schools. We propose instead to create real competition for students and the public funding that accompanies them among the providers of K–12 education services. Considerable research indicates that schools respond to competitive pressure. In a systematic review of 41 empirical studies on this topic through 2002, Columbia University researchers Clive Belfield and Henry Levin found that “a sizable majority report beneficial effects of competition.”In our proposal, funding must follow students and be weighted to compensate for the extra costs associated with high-need students if schools are to compete for students and if parents are to have real choice . Parents must have the widest possible choice of schools for their children and be armed with good information on the performance of schools. Informed choice that is accompanied by financial consequences for schools will create a marketplace for schooling that will evolve toward greater

responsiveness to what parents want, will be more innovative , and will become more productive .A Role for WashingtonThe federal government currently funds a wide range of K–12 education initiatives (see Table 1). The task force has identified just four functions that are essential to its role in education: creating and disseminating info rmation on school performance in each classroom and program effectiveness, including information on individual student performance; enforcing civil rights laws; providing financial support to high-need students; and enhancing competition among providers .Information : The provision of information on the condition of education and on the results of education research is primarily a public service. In such situations, a serious free-rider problem exists: because it is impossible to prevent a class of consumers who have not paid for the information from consuming it, far too little evidence will be produced if it is not supported by an organization with the entire nation’s interests at heart. The free-rider problem is one reason that state and local authorities cannot be entrusted with the task of knowledge production.

Furthermore, evidence does not merely need to be produced; it needs to be based on high-quality data. Gathering and auditing data are almost pure public services. Thus, it is easy to justify federal support for research,

data gathering, and dissemination of information. Without valid information on the performance of students at each school relative to that of their peers across the country, the entire education enterprise flies blind, leaving parents, teachers, school managers, and policymakers with nothing more than intuition and consensus as the basis for making decisions.

Civil Rights : When state and local actions in education are discriminatory, the federal government should step in to enforce civil rights laws. Acts of unjust discrimination, such as those that would deny a student an educational experience for which the student is qualified based solely on race, gender, disability, or other protected status, are costly to society. Students who fail to be educated may need cash transfers as adults; they might take up crime or engage in other antisocial behaviors. Owing to mobility and society-wide redistribution, we all suffer in these cases. Thus, the federal government, and not merely state and local governments, has an obligation to curb discrimination.

Compensatory Funding : Regardless of whether the underlying cause is disability, lack of English proficiency, or poverty, high-need students are more expensive to educate than other students. Failure to provide additional resources can provide an incentive for other students to move to another school if they are able. The burden that the high-need student produces will thus

be disproportionately borne by those who are too immobile to avoid it, most likely other high-need students. The federal government can counteract these inequities through cash transfers. The difficulty is figuring out the right financial supplement and the best mechanism for distributing it.Title I of the ESEA and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are designed to disburse funds to states and school districts for the education of high-need students. Rather than the complicated federal schemes under which funds are currently disbursed to districts, funds should be attached to the student . Individual schools would receive federal funds based on student counts , with a weighting formula to adjust for factors such as the increased burden of educating high-need students and for regional differences in costs. Sometimes called “backpack funding,” weighted funding that follows the student has been shown to direct proportionally more funds to schools that serve needy students than traditional distribution schemes.

Choice and Competition : The federal government can and should restrict education monopolies and support school choice for parents and students. The current system, which relies on residential mobility to drive school districts to improve education services, does not work well enough to improve education outcomes or to ensure equity. Such a system consigns the poor and immobile to inferior schools and leaves the control of schools in the hands of those who benefit most from the status quo. The simple feature of eliminating a default school assignment by the school district—thus requiring every parent to engage in school choice— eliminates socioeconomic differences in the likelihood that parents will shop for schools . Further, if parents could exercise school choice through web-based portals that highlight the important variables of school performance, socioeconomic differences in knowledge could be muted. Here, again,

the federal government has a role to play, for example, by funding open competitions for designers and implementers of school-choice portals.

Market-based competition cannot prevail in public education unless the consumers of public education can choose where to be schooled. We propose that as a condition of the receipt of federal funds to support the education of individual students, schools be required to participate in an open enrollment process conducted by a state-sanctioned authority . Such a process would maximize the matches between school and student preferences. Unified open-enrollment systems that

encompass as many choices as possible from the regular public, charter, private, and virtual school universes are essential to the expansion of choice and competition in K–12 education. These systems have to be designed so that all schools have the same time frame for applications and admission decisions, and so that they cannot be gamed by either schools or applying families.

The federal government has a legitimate role in overseeing the marketplace for schooling, including the architecture of parental choice systems. It is in the interest of society that the concentration of high-need students not increase in particular schools. Choice systems have to be carefully and explicitly designed to avoid students being sorted by race, economic background, and other conditions. Several options exist for ensuring that schools cannot discriminate against groups of students, including a lottery system (currently required in federal regulations for

start-up charter schools), controlled choice (in which algorithms are used to maintain balanced

enrollment), and a financial or fee supplement attached to students in protected classes.

Second, school choice is the most effective way to improve K-12 education — the best meta-study proves. Wolf 16 — Patrick J. Wolf, Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions, Principal Investigator of the School Choice Demonstration Project, holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, 2016 (“School Choice Boosts Test Scores,” Jay P. Greene’s Blog—a scholarly education blog, May 10th, Available Online at https://jaypgreene.com/2016/05/10/school-choice-boosts-test-scores/, Accessed 06-19-2017)Private school choice remains a controversial education reform. Choice programs, involving school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), provide financial support to families who wish to access private schooling for their child. Once declared dead in the U.S. by professional commentators such as Diane Ravitch and Greg Anrig, there are now 50 private school choice programs in 26 states plus the District of Columbia. Well over half of the initiatives have been enacted in the past five years. Private school choice is all the rage.But does it work? M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin Anderson, and I just released a meta-analysis of 19 “gold standard” experimental evaluations of the test-score effects of private school choice programs around the world. The sum of the reliable evidence indicates that , on average, private school choice increases the reading scores of choice users by about 0.27 standard deviations and their math scores by 0.15 standard deviations. These are highly statistically significant , educationally meaningful achievement gains of several months of additional learning from school choice. The achievement benefits of private school choice appear to be somewhat larger for programs in developing countries than for those in the U.S. Publicly-funded programs produce larger test-score gains than privately-funded ones.The clarity of the results from our statistical meta-analysis contrasts with the fog of dispute that often surrounds

discussions of the effectiveness of private school choice. Why does our summing of the evidence identify school choice as a clear success while others have claimed that it is a failure (see here and here)? Three factors have contributed to the muddled view regarding the effectiveness of school choice: ideology, the limitations of individual studies, and flawed prior reviews of the evidence.School choice programs support parents who want access to private schooling for their child. Some people are ideologically opposed to such programs, regardless of the effects of school choice. Other people have a vested interest in the public school system and resist the competition for students and funds that comes with private school choice. No amount of evidence is going to change their opinion that school choice is bad.A second source of disputes over the effectiveness of choice are the limits of each individual empirical study of school choice. Some are non-experimental and can’t entirely rule out selection bias as a factor in their results (see here, and here). Fortunately, over the past 20 years, some education researchers have been able to use experimental methods to evaluate privately- and publicly-funded private school choice programs. Experimental evaluations take the complete population of students who are eligible for a choice program and motivated to use it, then employ a lottery to randomly assign some students to receive a school-choice voucher or scholarship and the rest to serve in the experimental control group. Since only random chance, and not parental motivation, determines who gets private school choice and who doesn’t, gold standard experimental evaluations produce the most reliable evidence regarding the effectiveness of choice programs. We limit our meta-analysis to the 19 gold standard studies of private school choice programs globally .

Each of the gold standard studies, in isolation , has certain limitations. In the experimental evaluation of the initial DC Opportunity Scholarship Program that I led from 2004 to 2011, the number of students in testing grades dropped substantially from year 3 to year 4, leading to a much noisier estimate of the reading impacts of the program, which were positive but just missed being statistically significant with 95% confidence. Two experimental studies of the Charlotte privately-funded scholarship program, here and here, reported clear positive effects on student test scores but were limited to just a single year after random assignment. Two recent experimental evaluations of the Louisiana Scholarship Program found negative effects of the program on student test scores but one study was limited to just a single year of outcome data and the second one (which I am leading) has only analyzed two years of outcome data so far. The Louisiana program, and the state itself, are unique in certain ways, as are many of the programs and locations that have been evaluated. What are we to conclude from any of these individual studies?Meta-analysis is an ideal approach to identifying the common effect of a policy when many rigorous but small and particular empirical studies vary in their individual conclusions. It is a systematic and scientific way to summarize what we know about the effectiveness of a program like private school choice . The sum of the evidence points to positive achievement effects of choice.

Finally, most of the previous reviews of the evidence on school choice have generated more fog than light, mainly because they have been arbitrary or incomplete in their selection of studies to review. The most commonly cited school choice review, by economists Cecilia Rouse and Lisa Barrow, declares that it will focus on the evidence from existing experimental studies but then leaves out four such studies (three of which reported positive choice effects) and includes one study that was non-

experimental (and found no significant effect of choice). A more recent summary, by Epple, Romano, and Urquiola, selectively included only 48% of the empirical private school choice studies available in the research literature. Greg Forster’s Win-Win report from 2013 is a welcome exception and gets the award for the school choice review closest to covering all of the studies that fit his inclusion criteria – 93.3%. (Greg for the win!)Our meta-analysis avoided all three factors that have muddied the waters on the test-score effects of private school choice. It is a non-ideological scientific enterprise , as we followed strict meta-analytic principles such as including every experimental evaluation of choice produced to date, anywhere in the world. Our study was accepted for presentation at competitive scientific conferences including those of the Society for Research on Education Effectiveness, the Association for Education Finance and Policy, and the Association for Policy Analysis and Management. Our study is not limited by small sample sizes or only a few years of outcome data. It is informed by all the evidence from all the gold standard studies. Finally, there is nothing arbitrary or selective in our sample of experimental evaluations. We included all of them, regardless of their findings. When you do the math, students achieve more when they have access to private school choice .

Third, school choice is key to equal opportunity and integration. The plan locks students into a failed system. Ford 17 — Virginia Walden Ford, Executive Director of D.C. Parents for School Choice—the political grassroots organization that successfully lobbied for voucher legislation in DC, 2017 (“School choice the fastest track to integration,” The Hill, May 23rd, Available Online at http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/education/334608-school-choice-the-fastest-track-to-integration, Accessed 06-19-2017)Access to a quality education shouldn’t depend on where you live , where you came from or how much money you make .As a mom who fought like heck to make sure my son was in the right schooling environment for him, I believe education is a basic American right that keeps our nation on the right track. But recent history has shown that public schools are increasingly segregated not just by race, but also by income. Families too often are forced to send their child to a default school, regardless of the quality of the education or the achievement level of their peers. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The landmark Supreme Court case Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka — a unanimous decision that ended the deplorable “separate-but-equal” statutes that had been in place — turns 63 this month. In the 1960s and 1970s, the decision worked to integrate schools, especially as neighborhoods became more racially integrated.But by the 1980s, neighborhoods continued becoming more integrated, but public schools went in the opposite direction.Between 1970 and 2009, income-based segregation more than doubled, with the percentage of families residing either in “affluent” or “low-income” neighborhoods going from 15 percent to 33 percent.When it comes to residential real estate, schools often wind up linked to property values. That means the price of renting or owning in a “good” district continues to rise, making economic integration an impossibility for many families. Worse, there are those who use the economic segregation of education to reverse the original intent of the justices in Brown.

Take, for example, the recent case of Gardendale, Ala., a predominantly white suburb that’s attempting to separate itself from the much more diverse Jefferson County school district to which it belongs. A number of minority students from other parts of Jefferson County have taken advantage of intradistrict school choice to attend school in Gardendale. Instead of embracing these students, families in Gardendale want to create their own district, and some have openly admitted their motivation is race-based.The Jefferson County students may soon be denied the access to a quality education that we have repeatedly said defines our nation. The reality is that Brown didn’t get us where we need to be: It broke down barriers but failed to establish new pathways. That’s why I strongly believe that we must have a robust system of state-based educational choice if we ever intend to empower every K-12 student in America.

School choice addresses the problem of deepening segregation in two ways: First, it uncouples the decisions about where to live and where to send children to school. Second, it allows schools to provide different educational offerings to different audiences, empowering families to choose schools based on what their students actually need.

If we truly want to desegregate our schools and promote academic achievement, here are three easy ways to get started: First, enact universal school choice programs that allow all families to access the funds that are set aside by state governments to educate their students. Programs can be scaled to ensure greater access for lower-income and special needs families, but universality helps erode non-economic barriers and makes sure all families have shared interests in the sustainability of these programs.

Second, work with education providers, community groups, policymakers and other stakeholders to promote accountability and prevent fraud using a common-sense system of checks and balances.

Finally, make sure families are aware of and understand the schooling options available to their students, including information available in multiple languages, outreach from community groups and services to help with application forms along with other administrative support.

We know this approach works. State-based choice programs across America have been proven to improve academic outcomes, raise parental satisfaction and produce more civic- minded, tolerant students .As Congress prepares to ask Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos next week about the Trump administration’s education budget, Members should consider the importance of school choice policies made at the local and state level as opposed to being dictated by the federal government.Two decades ago, as a single mom trying to find the best educational fit for my kids, I didn’t know where to turn. My son was only able to access a great education because he received a private scholarship that paid his private school tuition. I know how drastically different — and worse — his life would be without that education.When the Supreme Court unanimously decided in Brown more than six decades ago, the justices surely didn’t anticipate desegregation followed by intense re-segregation and self-segregation.

Until the system of haves and have-nots , historically and presently defined by race and money , is upended , American K- 12 education will continue to exist as a separated, unequal enterprise.

True school choice — making sure all students can get in where they fit in — will help solve the K-12 integration dilemma .

Fourth, the plan and permutation make revolutionary school innovation impossible. Only universal choice solves. Forster 16 — Greg Forster, Senior Fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, holds a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Yale University, 2016 (A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice, Fourth Edition, May, Available Online at http://www.edchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/A-Win-Win-Solution-The-Empirical-Evidence-on-School-Choice.pdf, Accessed 06-19-2017, p. 35)Only Universal School Choice Can Sustain Dramatic ChangeUltimately, the only way to make school reform work on a large scale is to break the government monopoly on schooling. The monopoly is not just one powerful obstacle to reform among many; it is what makes all the many obstacles as powerful as they are. The monopoly ensures that no meaningful accountability for performance can occur , except in rare cases as a result of

Herculean efforts. The monopoly empowers a dense cluster of rapacious special interests resisting efforts to improve schools .The monopoly creates an environment where the urgent need for change cannot be made a tangible part of the daily cultural life of the school. Institutional culture in the existing system is hostile, not just to this or that reform, but also to reform in general , because the monopoly excludes the only institutional basis for making the need for change seem plausible and legitimate: the prospect of losing the institution’s client base and the funding that goes with it.

When any institution has a captive client base, support for innovation vanishes. Reform requires people and institutions to do uncomfortable new things, and change will not occur until discomfort with the status quo becomes greater than the discomfort of the change. An institution with captive clients can continue to function into the foreseeable future more or less as it always has, without change. Why not just continue doing things in the way that feels comfortable and natural?Worst of all, the monopoly pushes out educational entrepreneurs who can reinvent schools from the ground up. Only a thriving marketplace that allows entrepreneurs to get the support they need by serving their clients better can produce sustainable innovation.

In any field of human endeavor—whether education, medicine, politics, art, religion,

manufacturing, or anything else—entrepreneurs who want to strike out in new directions and do things radically differently need a client base . There need to be people who will benefit from the new direction and support it. And that client base must be robust on three dimensions: size,

strength, and suffrage. There must be enough supporters; they must have enough ability to provide support; and they must have enough freedom to decide for themselves what to support.

The government school monopoly crowds out this client base . School choice has the potential to solve this problem by providing enough families (size) with enough dollars (strength) and enough choice (suffrage) to support educational entrepreneurs .

Unfortunately, existing school choice programs fall short on all three dimensions. Only universal choice can open the door to the full- fledged revolution in schooling America needs in the new century.

Finally, the counterplan alone is key to prevent coercion. Reject the plan because it is an unethical violation of freedom. McCluskey 16 — Neal McCluskey, Director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, former Policy Analyst at the Center for Education Reform, holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University, 2016 (“Ultimately, ‘School Choice’ Must Be about Freedom,” Cato At Liberty—the Cato Institute’s blog, January 25th, Available Online at https://www.cato.org/blog/ultimately-school-choice-must-be-about-freedom, Accessed 06-19-2017)It is National School Choice Week, and this ever-growing event-of-events will feature discussions throughout the country tackling test scores, competition, empowering the poor, efficient use of taxpayer dollars, monopoly breaking, and numerous other, very important topics. But ultimately just one goal must be paramount: maximizing freedom . In the end, it is defending liberty – the true, bedrock American value – that school choice must be about .

This is first and foremost a normative conviction. Freedom must have primacy because society is ultimately composed of individuals, and leaving individuals the right and ability to control their own lives is fundamentally more just than having the state – be it

through a single dictator, or majority of voters – control our thoughts, words, or actions.

Of course, children are subject to someone’s control no matter what. But a corollary to free individuals, especially when no one is omniscient and there is no unanimous agreement on what is the “right” way to live, or think, or believe, must be free association –

free, authentic communities. We must allow people and communities marked by hugely diverse religious, philosophical, or moral views , and rich ethnic and cultural identities and backgrounds ,

to teach their children those things . Short of stopping incitement of violence or

clear parental abuse, the state should have no authority to declare that “your culture is acceptable,” or “yours must go.” Indeed, crush the freedom of communities and you inevitably cripple [destroy] individual liberty , taking away one’s choices of how and with whom to live.

Of course, the reasons to demand educational freedom are not just

normative. They are also about effective education, and it is not hard to understand, at a very basic level, why.If there are things on which all agree, choice is moot – all will teach and respect those things. But if we do not all agree, forcing diverse people to support a single system of “common” schools yields but three outcomes: first, divisive conflict ; then, either inequality under the law – oppression – when one side wins and the other loses, or lowest-common-denominator curricula to keep the peace. Forced conflict and curricular mush no one should want. And inequality under the law we should all loathe and fear, even if we do not care about the rights of others and think we will come out the victors today. Tomorrow, we may not.

School choice is something for which all Americans should fight .

But ultimately, it is too limiting. What we need is freedom for all .

2AC

2AC — Ban Private Schools CP1. Immediate Action Key — the plan guarantees equal access to an excellent education for everyone now. This immediately initiates aggressive reforms. Counterplan-induced change takes generations. Benedikt 13 — Allison Benedikt, Executive Editor at Slate, 2013 (“If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person,” Slate, August 29th, Available Online at http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/private_school_vs_public_school_only_bad_people_send_their_kids_to_private.html, Accessed 07-02-2017)You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations . Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime , but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.And parents have a lot of power. In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the answer . We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.)

2. Permute: Do Both. Federal guarantee plus private school ban best way to rapidly improve public schools. Avoids spending DA because private school ban transfers millions to public schools.

3. Parental Leverage Fails — wealthy parents will only lobby for their schools, not all public schools. Munger 13 — Dave Munger, Editor of ScienceSeeker—a science news portal, former Co-Founder and Editor of ResearchBlogging.org—a website that collects posts about peer-reviewed research, 2013 (“No, sending your child to public school won’t save the schools. Not even if everyone did it.,” Word Munger—a blog, August 29th, Available Online at http://wordmunger.com/?p=1822, Accessed 07-02-2017)An Allison Benedikt article on Slate is getting a lot of attention, partly due to its provocative headline: “If you send your kid to a private school, you are a bad person.”Benedikt’s argument is basically this: People who send their kids to private school care about their kids’ education, so if those kids were in public school, the parents would work to make that school better.

Oh, if only that were true. If only somehow the children of the wealthy (and their parents) could make schools a better place for everyone by their mere presence . Wouldn’t that be great? But you know what? They wouldn’t .

Sure, the wealthy parents might spend more time volunteering in the schools. They might lobby for more money to be spent on schools and for better schools to be built.

But they wouldn’t want this for everyone . They would want this for their kids . So they wouldn’t lobby for a new school to replace the crumbling central-city school; they’d lobby for a gleaming new suburban palace in their wealthy neighborhood (but not too close — wouldn’t want to spoil their view of the golf course).Think I’m wrong? Look, this already happens . Plenty of wealthy parents are too cheap to send their kids to private schools. So they send them to public schools, then set up PTAs to raise money for those schools, turning them into the next best thing to a private school, at a fraction of the cost. They lobby against busing. They support zoning laws restricting high-density development so that poor people can’t afford to live in their neighborhoods. They do all this even though they could afford to send their kids to private school.

These people are not benevolent . Sure, they care about their kids. To a lesser extent

they care about their neighbor’s kids. But they don’t care about poor kids . They might say they care, but they certainly aren’t volunteering to put on a bake sale at the poor kids’ school. They’re not coaching the poor kids’ Little League teams, they’re not advocating for higher wages so poor parents can afford a better life for their own children.There are a lot of things wrong with the public schools. I may not know

how to fix them, but I do know one thing: Asking wealthy folks to voluntarily stop sending their kids to private schools won’t fix the schools .And it especially won’t help the public schools that need help the most.

4. Ban Gets Circumvented — rich families will buy out-of-school supplements so their kids retain a huge advantage. Removes their incentive to push for improved public schools.

5. Religious Freedom DA — banning private schools violates it. Garnett 13 — Rick Garnett, Professor of Law, Concurrent Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Notre Dame Program on Church, State, and Society at the University of Notre Dame, holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, 2013 (“Mandatory public education,” PrawfsBlog—a scholarly legal blog, January 7th, Available Online at http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2013/01/mandatory-public-education.html, Accessed 07-02-2017)At Mirror of Justice, frequent Prawfsblawgger Marc DiGirolami passes on a report from the AALS Annual Meeting. Apparently, at the presentation jointly sponsored by the Constitutional Law and Education

sections, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky stated (quoting the report) that "the only way to deal with educational disparities and the problem of (de facto)

resegregation of public schools is to require all children to attend public schools and to require that they do so within districts made up of metropolitan areas."

In my view, this highly illiberal proposal is, to put it gently, morally unattractive (putting aside questions about whether it would achieve or advance the stated

objectives). Marc raises some important and interesting questions about it. I'm certainly open to (dramatic) changes in the ways we fund education (e.g., un-linking

education funding from local property values), but – as I tried to flesh out in more detail, a few years

ago, here – the burden the proposal would impose on religious freedom is far more weighty than Chemerinsky seems willing to acknowledge. (For example, the idea that after-school religious education, or even "release time"-type policies , are sufficient to allow all parents and children to exercise their religious-freedom rights is, in my view, mistaken.) A better way , it seems to me, to alleviate some (we can never eliminate all) of the inequalities that Chemerinsky (rightly!) regrets is to expand ( and support financially ) choices and options , and to include (appropriately qualified) religious schools fully in the enterprise of public education , i.e., educating the public, at public expense .

6. Residential Clustering DA — the counterplan causes rich people to move to the suburbs. They still won’t care about urban schools. Adler 13 — Ben Adler, Freelance Journalist who has reported for Newsweek, Politico, and The Nation, 2013 (“Even if Private Schools Didn't Exist, There Would Still Be Rich Suburbs,” The Atlantic, September 3rd, Available Online at https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/even-if-private-schools-didnt-exist-there-would-still-be-rich-suburbs/279295/, Accessed 07-02-2017)"You are a bad person if you send your children to private school," argues Allison Benedikt in an article that appeared on Slate last week. Benedikt makes two points to parents: that going to a diverse public school will provide their kids with an education no less important than what they learn in the classroom, and that rich parents have a moral obligation to suffer the same frustrations with public schools as poor parents, so that they will be motivated to demand that the schools be improved. Conservatives criticized Benedikt on liberty grounds, but others have failed to point out how Benedikt's argument is not right on its own terms. Even Benedikt's usually insightful colleague Matthew Yglesias praised it. Benedikt's argument is objectionable, and not just because it is obnoxious and ignorant, but because it would lead to bad policy. Benedikt claims inner-city public schools would be better off if parents were unwilling to consider private school, but she is wrong .The reason is the narrowness of Benedikt's view of America, as if she had just landed in New York City from Mars. She seems to think that the only types of people in America are the urban poor and the urban rich. She writes, "Whatever you think your children need--deserve--from their school experience, assume that the parents at the nearby public housing complex want the same. No, don't just assume it. Do something about it. Send your kids to school with their kids."Benedikt bizarrely assumes that her readers are wealthy and educated but that they live near a public housing complex. From that false premise, she infers that the only

choice facing the rich is an homogenous private school or a diverse public school.

What's missing from this portrait? The suburbs . You know, they're the place where a majority of Americans live. Sending their kids to private school is only one approach the affluent take to avoid sending their children to inner-city public schools. The more common choice is to move to the suburbs .So, is someone who moves to an exclusive, wealthy suburb and sends their kids to the gold-plated public schools a good person in Benedikt's view? Implicitly, yes, since she makes no distinction between cities and suburbs, or rich school districts and poor ones.In fact, though, the average student in a wealthy suburban public school may be exposed to no greater diversity—possibly even less, thanks to

private school scholarship programs—than one finds in most urban private schools.Consider Potomac, Maryland, which is the kind of wealthy coastal blue state community where Slate readers might live. The median household income in 2011 was $167,436. Despite being next to the "Chocolate City" of Washington, D.C., the population is less than six percent African-American. At Winston Churchill High, a public high school in Potomac, fewer than five percent of the students qualify for reduced-price or free school lunches. By contrast, elite urban private schools in D.C., such as Maret and Georgetown Day, report that their student bodies are approximately 20 percent African-American. Then there is the fact that living in many urban neighborhoods will expose a child to diversity that raising her in car-dependent fancy suburb will not.So how does a wealthy family moving to Potomac for the fancy public schools help anyone but the family itself?It doesn't. (For the New York region, just substitute for Potomac a town such as Scarsdale, in Westchester, where the median household income in 2011 was $220,119 and the school district is only 1.3 percent black.) If the choice you are making —and for most rich parents, this is the

choice, if they consider staying in the city at all—is between living in the city and sending their kids to private school or moving to the suburbs and sending their kids to public school, the inner-city poor benefit more from the former . In that case, at least the family's income and taxes will stay in the city . While the public schools don't benefit from the family's social capital, they also have one fewer student drawing on their resources. The existence of private school options may help keep rich families in the city , and cities are undoubtedly better off with wealthy residents than without them. Just compare the fiscal health and crime rates of Detroit, St. Louis or Cleveland to New York, San Francisco or Boston.

Another hole in Benedikt's logic is the presence of another option on the spectrum of urban public-school avoidance: magnet schools and charters. Plenty of well-off urban parents who do send their kids to public school choose selective magnets, or at least charters that require some parental involvement to apply. If you send your kids to public schools that are disproportionately wealthy and white compared to the city as a whole, are you an evil person? By following Benedikt's thinking on private schools, the answer should be yes. But since, like "suburbs," the words "magnet" and "charter" appear nowhere in her piece, she is implying sending your kid to an elite public magnet school is a morally pure choice while sending her to private school is evil.

The same goes for gifted programs and tracking. Are parents who send their kids to the local public school's gifted program evil as well? If not, how is their decision to make sure their child is challenged academically any different than that of a private-school parent?I grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. My parents were among the earliest wave of the neighborhood's gentrifiers. Gentrification is now seen by many people—ironically, often gentrifiers themselves—as a dirty word connoting the arrival of Starbucks and the ejection of longtime residents. In 1979, though, when my parents bought their house, New York City was struggling with rising crime, near fiscal insolvency and rapid out-migration. The decision of any educated professionals to stay was widely viewed--including by many working-class families hanging on in the Slope--as a blessing. (As Suleiman Osman, a native Slopie and professor of American Studies at George Washington University, explains in his 2011 book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, the middle-class and working-class families who did not want to leave neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens and Park Slope actively recruited gentrifiers as a stabilizing force.) Every Slope kid I know from a middle-class or wealthy family attended a magnet school, a Catholic school, or a private school, rather than one of the locally zoned public schools. Why? Some urban public schools are so bad that parents fear more than a sub-par education if their kids go there. My local district school, Sarah J. Hale—since shut down by the city for failing its students academically—was known as "Sarah Jail" and was on the news while I was in high school because a student sliced a teacher.If there were no private or magnet school options, the college-educated liberal parents who revived Park Slope would not all have, as Benedikt naively imagines, simply sent their kids to John Jay and Sarah J. Hale and shrugged at the thought they would have a better chance of getting stabbed than getting into a good college. They would have moved

to the suburbs.

7. No Solvency — no parental leverage in public schools. Pethokoukis 13 — James Pethokoukis, Columnist and Blogger at the American Enterprise Institute, former Washington Columnist for Reuters Breakingviews, former Business Editor and Economics Columnist for U.S. News & World Report, 2013 (“Please, sending your kids to private school doesn’t make you a bad person,” AEIdeas—the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, August 29th, Available Online at https://www.aei.org/publication/please-sending-your-kids-to-private-school-doesnt-make-you-a-bad-person/, Accessed 07-03-2017)I am actually reluctant to comment on Slate’s trolling-masquerading-as-analysis piece “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person.” And I certainly don’t want to spend much time refuting writer Allison Benedikt’s fact-free, data-free “argument”: If more upper-middle class and wealthy parents — a.k.a. Slate readers, I guess — sent their kids to their local public schools, the US education system would suddenly improve.1. So I asked AEI’s Michael McShane for his two cents:

Because public schools are by and large residentially assigned, the rich have their totally awesome (and essentially private due to the home price in the school’s catchment area) public schools and poor people are trapped in failing schools because they can’t move away. That’s what leads to Balkanization. You choosing to send your kids to a suburban public school does nothing for the kids in SouthEast.Private schools, especially with public support, break the connection between residence and schooling, which holds more potential for desegregation and a mixing of students from different background than residential assignment of public schooling.

2. Aren’t the “bad people” — to use Allison Benedikt’s language — here the ones who would trap lower-income and poor kids in their local education monopoly? Or as Alex Tabarrok puts it: “Barricading parents into the poor schools their government offers them is like barricading people into communist East Germany .”

Tabarrok also notes that merely having more activist parents inside a school monopoly might not change much without competition : “When you complain of delay where is your voice more likely to be heard; at a restaurant or at the d epartment of m otor v ehicles? It’s the threat of exit that makes people listen .”

3. Oh, by the way, do we have any data on the educational impact of helping lower-income and poor kids escape the public education monopoly? Like, say, data from the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program? Well, the US Education Department’s OSP study found the program, McShane points out, “produced $2.62 in benefits for every dollar spent on it. In other words, the return on public investment for the private-school voucher program during its early years was 162 percent.” What’s more, “The OSP increased the high-school graduation rate of students by 12 percentage points if they were lucky enough to win the annual scholarship lottery.”4. One more from McShane:

It’s also a proud tradition in America (since Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925) to recognize that children are not instruments of the state. They do not exist to promote the goals of the government or the community, they (and their parents) are free to (within limits) to be educated as they best see fit. Obviously this person has no idea about the anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant racism that lead people to make the same argument that she is making, albeit 100 years ago.

Choice won’t fix everything wrong with America’s school, but choice and competition create the environment where change is possible.

8. Constitutional Liberty DA — the counterplan crushes it.Volokh 13 — Eugene Volokh, Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law, Academic Affiliate for Mayer Brown LLP—a law firm, holds a J.D. from the University of California-Los Angeles, 2013 (“Equality vs. Liberty,” The Volokh Conspiracy—a scholarly legal blog, January 23rd, Available Online at http://volokh.com/2013/01/23/equality-vs-liberty/, Accessed 07-02-2017)The Center for Law and Religion Forum had a post a couple of weeks ago about a talk by Erwin Chemerinsky (dean of the new UC Irvine law school), in which he made a rather striking proposal. Indeed, Dean Chemerinsky has made the proposal in print several years ago, in an article titled Separate and Unequal: American Public Education Today, so I thought I’d quote that article and put the matter in Chemerinsky’s own words, because I think it more broadly illuminates the danger that excessive equality arguments pose to liberty:

My proposal is simple, although unrealistic at this point in American history. First, every child must attend public school through high school. There will be no private schools, no parochial schools, and no home schooling. Second, metropolitan school districts will be created for every metropolitan area. In each metropolitan area, there will be equal funding among the schools, except where educational needs dictate otherwise, and efforts will be taken to ensure desegregation. Third, states will ensure equality of spending among metropolitan school districts within their borders.How could this happen? One possibility would be through the Supreme Court, though of course not with the current Court. The Supreme Court could find that the existing separate and unequal schools deny equal protection for their students, and order the creation of a unitary system as a remedy. Another way to achieve a truly unitary system is by legislative action. Congress could adopt a law to achieve these goals or state legislatures could do so within the states’ borders.I do not minimize the radical nature of this proposal, but this may be the only way that equal educational opportunity can be achieved. If wealthy parents must send their children to public schools, then they will ensure adequate funding of those schools. Currently, they have no incentive to care about funding in public schools as long as their children are in private or suburban schools. Moreover, as described above, desegregation can be meaningfully achieved only through metropolitan school systems, which include suburbs and cities, because white students could not flee to private schools.The most significant objection to this proposal is that it is unconstitutional under current law. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court held that parents have a fundamental right to send their children to parochial schools. The Court based this on the right of parents to control the upbringing of their children. This right, however, like other fundamental rights, is not absolute. I would argue that strict scrutiny is met and therefore interference with the parents’ right to control the upbringing of their children is justified. There is a compelling interest in achieving equality of educational opportunity and the means are necessary because no other alternative is likely to succeed.Parents desiring religious education for their children would claim a violation of their free exercise of religion. Of course, under the Supreme Court’s decision in Employment Division v.

Smith, such a neutral law of general applicability would not violate the free exercise clause. Also, as explained above, strict scrutiny would be met by the proposal. I do not minimize the interests of parents in providing religious instruction for their children. Parents, however, could still do this through after-school and weekend programs. This is not the same as education where religion permeates instruction, but it does provide a way in which parents can provide religious education for their children.Perhaps the Court would need to reconsider Wisconsin v. Yoder as well, to the extent that it is read as creating a right of parents to isolate their children from the influences of public education. In Yoder, the Court held that Amish parents had the right to exempt their fourteen- and fifteen-year-old children from compulsory school requirements so as to preserve the special Amish culture. Read broadly, parents could invoke Yoder to justify a right to home schooling if parents wanted to insulate their children from the influences of public education. Simply put, the courts should hold that the compelling need for equal schooling outweighs this parental right.

A clearer example of how an excessive focus on equality undermines liberty is hard to find. And the implications of this argument, if it were accepted, are striking . After all, the argument that “[i]f wealthy parents must send their children to public schools, then they will ensure adequate funding of those schools” and that “[c]urrently, they have no incentive to care about funding in public schools as long as their children are in private or suburban schools” could apply to many things. For instance, if wealthy people know that, if they or their family members

prosecuted, they will have to use public defenders, then they will be more likely to ensure adequate funding of public defenders; currently, they have no incentive to care about funding of public defenders as long as they can hire pricey private criminal defense lawyers. There goes the right to choose your own lawyer, together with the right to choose a school for your child .

Likewise, one can argue that public libraries are underfunded , too. Maybe people should be limited in the number of books they can own, so that they will have to go to the public library instead, and thus have an incentive to vote to fund the libraries . Naturally,

private provision of medical care would have to be forbidden, too , since only that will give rich people an incentive to vote for more funding for medical care for the poor.

And of course people in poor, high-crime neighborhoods often don’t get enough police protection, especially given the greater needs for protection in those neighborhoods; and the housing stock in those neighborhoods is often quite undermaintained. How about this:

Let’s bar people from buying private housing , and instead require people to live in housing units run and randomly assigned by the government. After all, if wealthy people must live in public housing in rough neighborhoods, then they will ensure adequate funding of that housing and of policing of those neighborhoods. Currently, the rich have no incentive to care about public housing and public policing of poor parts of town as long as they and their children are in private housing in safer parts of town.

Think also of the other ways that some people find themselves “separate and unequal” — how about in the ability to reach the

public? If you are a highly educated and credentialed law professor, reporters call you, talk shows want to have you on, people are more likely to read your blog, and newspapers are more likely to run your op-eds. If you are poor and not very knowledgeable or eloquent (often through no fault of your own), obviously you don’t have equal access to an audience. Sounds like a good reason to limit the free speech rights of those whose circumstances have unfairly provided them with extra credibility and status , so as to at least reduce this inequality .To be sure, some people (Justice Scalia is one) have indeed argued against parental rights, on the grounds that they — like abortion rights and sexual autonomy rights — aren’t mentioned in the Constitution, though I expect that many of those people would nonetheless say that limits on private schooling (or requirements that children go to government-run school 30 hours a week) would violate the freedom of parents to hire people to speak to their children. But Chemerinsky is not taking this

view. He is acknowledging that there is a constitutional right to control the upbringing of one’s children, but is saying that this right, “like other fundamental rights , is not absolute,” and can be trumped by a “ compelling interest in achieving equality of educational opportunity.” It follows that other fundamental constitutional rights , such as the right to counsel, the freedom of speech, and the right to choose where one lives (to the extent that it’s

recognized as a constitutional right) would likewise have to yield to the “compelling interest in achieving equality.”

2AC — School Choice CP1. Racialized Inequality DA — choice increases segregation and racial inequality.James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)A. Race and the School-Choice MarketChoice rhetoric contemplates the sphere for reformed education as a market. The commodification of education in this way has prompted no shortage of critiques identifying the ways in which the conditions for a properly functioning education market are difficult—if not impossible—to dictate. Problems with an education market, however, go beyond the mere absence of ideal market

conditions. Rather, the problems extend to the ways in which race and racism warp the market , undermining the possibility that an education market could ever genuinely optimize educational outcomes for marginalized students and families in that market.

As an initial matter, the choices of poor, working class, and minority students and their families in the education market are severely limited . Community bias against these groups , for example, is often reflected in local policies like zoning for multi-family housing that can limit access to particular schools —charter and voucher schools included. Input and influence of marginalized communities regarding charter school policies (including school offerings,

the number of schools, location, and themes) is subject to the same limitations that undermine these groups in any political process.

Information asymmetry and unequal bargaining power also undermine the market for parents of color. Marginalized minority parents, in particular, often do not have ready access to the data and information that would enable them to make good schooling decisions . Moreover, minority parents are often on unequal footing when they engage with school systems, given the pervasiveness of cultural-deficit theories that demean and devalue minority parental participation in their children’s education.

The idea of the “rational parent” as an actor in the education marketplace, who is able to choose the best educational option for his or her child, is a myth — even if one assumes genuinely broadened options, better info rmation, and increased bargaining power. Although parents assert that they care most about academics, studies suggest that

even after controlling for educational programming and performance, parents use heuristics—namely race — when making school choices . In one study, for example, an increase of more than two percent in the African-American student population correlated with a parental perception that school quality had declined, even when objective evidence contradicted

that perception. Allowing parents to self-segregate within schools in this way is a “successful,” but undesirable, optimization of parental preferences. Moreover, a market in which parents select schools based mostly on racial composition , instead of objective measures of academic excellence, is not really an education market, but rather a racialized social market playing out in the sphere of public education. The education market, legitimate or illegitimate, is not an arena in which rational decisions about education take place.

2. Blame-Shifting DA — choice gives the state an excuse to neglect public schools. Makes all aff impacts worse. James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)2. Private Responsibility for Public EducationIn addition to problematically fostering competition in a context that should be collaborative, school choice also privatizes responsibility for public education. “Privatize” does not necessarily mean that school choice results in the enrollment of students at private schools, although private school enrollment is one aspect of the opt-out revolution in public education. Rather, here, the term “privatize” means the relegation of care, concern, and investment in public education to the private sphere—to individual parents and caregivers, rather than to the public. There is not a natural line of demarcation for decisions that should not be made privately because they impact the public; rather, society has to draw those lines independently. Given, however, the interdependent nature of education, and the extent to which access to quality education has largely been shaped by the economic and racial composition of classrooms, public education is one area in which those lines must be drawn more carefully, and with less opportunity for privatization than in other spheres of American life.Like the expansion of the voucher program in Louisiana, lawmakers often present school-choice policies as the product of a proactive legislative response to state educational problems. When a state,

however, adopts school- choice policies to address problems that are widespread and structural in nature— like social, racial, and economic isolation in school districts— the state abrogates communal responsibility for those problems . Although these additional “choices” result in perverse outcomes for marginalized parents and caregivers, having already made sufficient choices available, the state can now claim it is no longer responsible for addressing the achievement gap through school or housing integration. This phenomenon has led to the privatization of individual schooling decisions that are public in their effect. It has also eliminated public debate of the merits and consequences of these ostensibly private decisions, and immunized these choices from attack or characterization as illegitimate, even as those choices marginalize some in the education system.

As responsibility shifts, so does blame . Having exercised the choices they were given, parents and caregivers of color are now made to exclusively bear a burden they cannot carry alone;

individual parents, after all, cannot address structural causes of the achievement gap . When asked to give up on genuine equality in favor of the fiction of self-reliance, however, participants in the school system ultimately play into a sort of amnesia about the history of public education and the institutional structures that impede its potential. One must not forget segregation of public schools, the imperative of integration, and vulnerability of students—as manifested in food insecurity, low socioeconomic status, or inadequate healthcare—that the school system and the broader society must manage. Ignoring these realties and instead buying into school choice will only leave the vulnerable among us more vulnerable when market options and school choices fail to magically close the achievement gap , or result in more fraud and failing schools.

This outcome is particularly troubling because others in society already devalue the decisions and preferences of poor and minority people. Given that undervaluing, responsibility for failure in education can then be easily laid at the feet of those who chose . This rhetorical move is familiar in gender equality policy debates, where any number of gender disparities (e.g., the disproportionate presence of women in lower-paying jobs and the financial insecurity which acting as primary caregiver creates) is justified as the result of women’s choices. One can similarly expect choice in education policy to play the same role—once students and parents choose, policymakers can ignore the structural problems that drive the achievement gap but that cannot be traced to any single individual choice.

3. Reject Neg Ev — Forster and Wolf are biased and wrong. Lubienski 16 — Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education Policy and Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois, Fellow with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder, holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Social Analysis from Michigan State University, 2016 (“Review of A Win-Win Solution and The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers across the Globe,” National Education Policy Center, June, Available Online at http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-meta-analysis, Accessed 06-20-2017, p. 14-15)VII. Usefulness of the Reports for Guidance of Policy and PracticeThe reports reviewed here have garnered attention in the broader policy

discussion, although often primarily with pro-voucher advocates ,54

reflecting the echo-chamber nature of the discussion reflected in these

reports. Neither report has been independently peer reviewed, and they suffer from the problems noted above, which undercut their credibility.

Both reports make a number of methodological choices that shape their results. They focus on randomized controlled trials for defensible reasons, but

without acknowledging the limitations of RCTs, even though those limitations are widely known.55 The sets of RCT studies selected for use are also problematic , with the Friedman Foundation report using a process that is not as

systematic as it indicates, and in fact is shown to have been erroneous,

while the University of Arkansas report’s selection criteria left it with a highly skewed set of studies , and no insights from the longest-running and more comprehensive national voucher programs. At the same time, the University of Arkansas report makes no effort to account for publication bias in its selection process, which may exaggerate its findings.

The reports also take very different approaches to other voucher “impacts.” The University of Arkansas meta-analysis focuses only on academic achievement , and not on issues such as the impact on segregation , which is known to

be a detrimental factor in countries that have embraced vouchers.56 The Friedman Foundation report does attempt to address some of those other factors, but in its treatment of

academic achievement (the focus of this review) it conflates learning gains with non-cognitive outcomes such as college attendance , without apparently

recognizing that these are distinct issues that are possibly susceptible to different influences besides the offer or use of a voucher.

Overall, the reports present findings that are not particularly helpful for advancing our understanding on the impacts of vouchers on student achievement. Together they tend to present

[end page 14] a mixed set of findings , with benefits appearing for one group in one context, but not for the same group in another city, or even in another subject. The results from the global meta- analysis are shaped largely by one city in one country, and the report is not designed to tell us why vouchers would have a greater impact there. Indeed, we don’t know why voucher impacts — positive or negative —

appear in one case, but not in another. Thus, the theoretical underpinnings motivating vouchers, as set out by Milton Friedman and subsequent theorists, do not appear to be very strong when applied to the real world, even when tested by voucher advocates.The Arkansas report concludes with recommendations for more RCTs, without offering any guidance about how researchers might overcome the limitations of randomization to take into account peer effects, or improve upon generalizability. But the report also encourages consideration of “the cost-benefit tradeoffs associated with voucher programs” — by which the authors mean to suggest that vouchers are “cost effective, since they tend to generate achievement outcomes that are as good or better than traditional public schools, but at a fraction of the cost.”57 Instead of focusing only on saving money when educating disadvantaged students, a better approach would be to consider vouchers in terms of their potential for enhancing student learning relative to the effects of other interventions ’ ability to do so. For example, instead of looking at school vouchers alone, we should be considering the effect sizes of school vouchers compared to, say, housing vouchers, integrated classrooms, or smaller class sizes. In fact, perhaps the largest meta-analysis on education interventions has done just that, looking at the effect sizes of various influences on student learning , and finding little support for school choice programs. Drawing on over 800 meta-analyses encompassing over 50,000 studies of different influences in

academic achievement,58 that meta-study ranked the school choice option 59 107th out of 138 factors , beneath class size, professional development for teachers and peer tutoring…but above summer vacation and television.

4. Permute: do both — guarantee equal access to excellent public education and provide choice. Avoids disads to choice alone.

5. No “Innovation” Net-Benefit — corporate reforms don’t solve the case. Michie 11 — Gregory Michie, Senior Research Associate at the Center for Policy Studies and Social Justice at Concordia University Chicago, 2011 (“The trouble with ‘innovation’ in schools,” The Washington Post, May 24th, Available Online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-trouble-with-innovation-in-schools/2011/05/23/AFEgw79G_blog.html, Accessed 06-20-2017)An irony in all this is that one of the favored words of the business-minded reformers who continue to push a results-driven, corporate model of school change is “innovation.” Of all the buzzwords that zip through

current conversations about school improvement, it may be the most repeated. It peppers the language of Race to the Top, and charter school cheerleading, and teacher recruitment pitches. If you’re not talking about innovating, you’re probably not getting heard.But the word, like so many others in education, has been hijacked . The “new reformers” have appropriated it as a descriptor for policy proposals and practices they advocate, and as an antonym for almost anything else. Charter schools? Innovative. Regular public schools? Definitely not. Competing for education funding? Innovative. Assuring that adequate monies go to schools that most need them? Passé. Evaluating teachers based on test scores? Innovative. Collective bargaining? Old school.Corporate reformers have come to own the word so completely that they’re able to promote even the most wrongheaded ideas and still be portrayed by many media outlets as innovators. Bill Gates says we should crowd more students into the classrooms of the “top 25 percent of teachers” in order to save money. Does any school-based educator believe that that’s a good idea? The film Waiting for Superman, a favorite of the innovation crowd, puts forth an image of student learning that is as ill-conceived as it is crude: the empty-vessel head of a cartoon student is opened up and a pile of information is poured in. It’s all about efficiency -- more head-filling, less fact-spilling. But hey, that’s innovation!Since many of the practices, values, and terminology (”Are you tracking me?”) of the new reformers have been borrowed from the business world, it’s also important to remember that what corporate CEOs celebrate as innovative isn’t necessarily fair or just . Bob Herbert’s final column for The New York Times in March lamented the growing wealth gap in the U.S., and highlighted the fact that General Electric, which racked up $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, paid zero federal taxes. With so many families struggling to make ends meet, how can this be? According to The Times’ own reporting, G.E. implements “an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting (italics mine) that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”I’m all for fresh ideas, but just because a notion is novel or different doesn’t mean it’s good for teachers and kids . The trouble with

many of the current “innovations” in education is that they do nothing to challenge the broader policy framework that prizes higher test scores above all else — in fact, they often embrace it. So teacher and student creativity will continue to be squashed at every turn. And the poorer the kids in a given classroom or school, the more likely that is to be true.That, for me, is the most troubling aspect of where we appear to be headed. The Obama administratin’s plan for reauthorizing NCLB would allow most schools to escape the pressure cooker of annual yearly progress-chasing that has marked the past decade, and that’s a good thing. But for the 10 percent of schools at the bottom of the test-score pile — mostly schools of the urban poor — the heat would be turned up even higher: more testing, more “data-driven” instruction, and more sanctions, while creativity, divergent thinking, and the arts continue to get left behind.I think about the seventh and eighth graders I taught in Chicago — kids like Ramon, who daydreamed in poetic verse but had a hard time sitting still, or Josefina, a recent immigrant who struggled with English but found her voice when a video camera was in her hands. What place is there for kids like them in the schools we’ve made? How will they discover their gifts, pursue their dreams? And if they become alienated by their schooling experiences — which seems likely — where will they turn?It depends on who you ask, I suppose. Michelle Rhee, former D.C. schools chancellor and one of the rock-star “innovators” in education, famously told Time magazine in 2008:

“The thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely. People say, ’Well, you know, test scores don’t take into account creativity and the love of learning.’ I’m like, ’You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.”

On the other hand, Sir Ken Robinson, professor emeritus at the University of Warwick and author of Out of Our Minds, argues in two widely circulated talks from the TED conference that schools too often end up stifling kids’ creative spirits. “Creativity is as important in education as literacy,” Robinson says, “and we should treat it with the same status.”We should — but with the continued reliance on annual testing in the administration’s Blueprint for Reform, it may not happen anytime soon. That means too many kids in our poorest neighborhoods will continue, even if their test scores rise, to receive what can

only be called an impoverished education. And no matter what the new reformers say, there’s nothing innovative about that .

6. No “Coercion” Net-Benefit — choice undermines freedom and agency. Weigh consequences.James 14 — Osamudia R. James, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014 (“Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review (99 Iowa L. Rev. 1083), Available Online at https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-99-issue-3/opt-out-education-school-choice-as-racial-subordination/, Accessed 06-20-2017)B. Beyond PaternalismIn the abstract , choice can be an integral feature of law or policy that promotes equal rights and opportunities. Accordingly, defenders of school choice may ultimately argue that limiting school choice, particularly for minority parents and caregivers unsatisfied with their local schools, is pernicious paternalism. After all, some choice is better than no choice at all. My response is threefold.First, limiting choice is not grounded in attempts to protect parents and children from their irrational choices. To the contrary, opting out, even to enroll in comparable schools that fail to improve academic outcomes, might be characterized as a rational response to the negative and racialized school experiences that families of color as well as poor and working-class families experience. And until system-wide problems in the American educational system are addressed, caregivers and families have few options other than exercising the limited “choice” they have been afforded to either take advantage of school choice or exit the public school system altogether. Accordingly, I advocate for limitations on school choice to prevent the disastrous social consequences—the abandonment of the public school system, to particularly deleterious consequence for poor and minority schoolchildren and their families—that occur as the collective result of individual, albeit rational, decisions. I also advocate for limitations on school choice in an attempt to encourage individuals to consider their obligations to children not their own, but part of their community all the same. Although outside the scope of this Article, this thought exercise applies with equal force to school choice that extends beyond charter schools and voucher

programs, including homeschooling, private school education, and even housing decisions made by the wealthy.Second, as I have argued, students of color and their families may, indeed, be “ opti ng out ,” but those decisions do not reflect genuine choice or agency. Rather, opting out is a response of parents with no reasonable alternatives who are sensitized to the way their actions, or failures to act, will be devalued on account of their race and class. In such a context, genuine choice is not exercised at all . As such, advocating for limits on school choice for those students and their families does not really undermine their exercise of choice—which was minimal or nonexistent to begin with . Placing limitations on choice for everyone in the school system, however, may materially improve education for all when those families that used their choice and privilege to leave the system are required to return.

Third, the actual impact of school choice cannot be ignored. Given the racialized realities of the current education system, choice is not ultimately used to broaden options or agency for minority parents. Rather, school choice is used to sanitize inequality in the school system; given sufficient choices, the state and its residents are exempted from addressing the sources of unequal educational opportunities for poor and minority students . States promote agency even as the subjects supposedly exercising that agency are disabled. Experience makes clear that school choice simply should not form an integral or foundational aspect of education reform policy. Rather, the focus should be on improving public schooling for all students such that all members of society can exercise genuine agency , initially facilitated by quality primary and secondary education. Ultimately, improving public education begins with preventing its abandonment.

7. Market Approach Fails — can’t solve systemic social inequalities. Sundquist 17 — Christian B. Sundquist, Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Albany Law School, former Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2017 (“Positive Education Federalism: The Promise of Equality after the Every Student Succeeds Act,” Mercer Law Review (68 Mercer L. Rev. 351), Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)IntroductionThe accepted narrative of the American public education system is one of decline, educational "crisis," n1 and systemic failure. Our public schools increasingly are segregated by race and class in the

post-Brown era, n2 while fundamental social inequalities persist among schools in regards to educational quality, financing, and outcomes. Long viewed as essential to the economic and democratic development of America's

citizenry, our unequal system of universal public education has forsaken the "faces at the bottom of [the] well" in an era of deregulation and decreased social welfare funding. n3 [*352] The federal government previously responded to the failure of Brown's promise of equal educational opportunity by introducing legislation - the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) n4 and the Race to the Top Act of 2009 (RTT) n5 - that promoted educational reform informed by the classic market principles of consumer choice, competition, and accountability. Under this schema, the failure of America's public schools could be traced to an overregulation of education that has promoted bureaucratic stasis, ineffective teaching, and unaccountability at the cost of the individual liberty of parents and children to attend the school of their choice. The role of the federal government, then, was to utilize its fiscal block grant-in-aid powers to cultivate the private and market-based properties of public education.The well-documented failures of the NCLB and RTT to promote student

achievement, much less equality in education, led Congress to pass the Every Student

Succeeds Act in December of 2015 (ESSA). n6 The bi-partisan ESSA has been hailed by both liberal and conservative education reformers for not only superseding the much-reviled NCLB and RTT framework, but also for shifting control over certain aspects of public education policy to state and local actors.The new education act nonetheless largely leaves untouched the substantive framework of NCLB and RTT. The ESSA retains the core focus of the past education framework in its continued emphasis on promoting student achievement through consumer choice, accountability, high-stakes testing, and inter-school competition. If anything, the ESSA has broadened the market-based approach of federal education policy by shifting the responsibility for employing corporate measures of accountability to states (themselves serving as "laboratories of experimentation" subject to market demands).And yet the crisis of America's system of public education is less a manifestation of under-incentivized schools, inadequate school choice, and poor teaching, than it is a reflection of unrelenting poverty and persistent racial discrimination . The modeling of education policy and law around the oft-criticized market assumptions of consumer choice, competition, and accountability have led to a deepening of the crisis confronting public schools. Since the adoption of market-based education legislation [*353]

such as NCLB and RTT in the last ten years, our public schools have been re-segregating at an accelerated rate and the achievement gaps between the rich and poor, and white and non-white have deepened. n7

The market model of public education preserved through the new ESSA legislation does not provide answers to our current educational dilemma, but the model merely deflects the responsibility of providing an equitable public education from the public sphere of federal and state government to the private sphere. There are no easy answers to the public school crisis, and simply incorporating misplaced assumptions of competition, rational choice, and market accountability into public educational policy will not resolve the situation. We need to acknowledge that our school failures are not due

to the absence of market incentives and processes in education, but are caused by systemic social inequalities - including poverty , racial discrimination and segregation , unequal school financing , and inadequate teacher compensation .

8. Public Funding Tradeoff DA — vouchers worsen segregation and inequality by shifting public funds to private schools. Chemerinsky 15 — Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law at the University of California-Irvine School of Law, former Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, former Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science and Director of the Center for Communications Law and Policy at the University of Southern California Law School, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.S. from Northwestern University where he is a member of the Debate Society Hall of Achievement, 2015 (“Remedying Separate and Unequal: Is It Possible to Create Equal Educational Opportunity?,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 260-261)At the same time, efforts that push away from unitary schools should be disfavored. Most notably, voucher systems are undesirable because they are the antithesis of a unitary system. Vouchers encourage parents to send their children to private and parochial schools and to abandon public schools. Vouchers will only exacerbate segregation and inequalities in educational opportunity. In large cities, top private schools often cost over $25,000 a year; a voucher worth $2,500 does not give poor children the ability to attend these schools. Instead, vouchers take money away from the public school, leaving poor children with the choice of attending even worse public schools , lesser private schools, or religious schools. My central point is that the focus should [end page 260] be on how to ensure that all children are in the same school system; vouchers have exactly the opposite effect .

9. Conditionality is a Voting Issue — it incentivizes coverage over engagement, discouraging clash. Lower bar for 1NC inclusion encourages counterproductive “throw-ins” that sap scarce speech time and ensure late-breaking debates. “Drop contests” don’t develop student expertise because they lack focused disagreement and iterative in-depth rejoinder. “Two conditional” interp promotes contradictory extremism by incentivizing simultaneous “fringe left” and “fringe right” options to “box-in” aff. Ruins in-depth policy comparison and destroys aff ground. “One conditional” interp preserves enough neg flexibility without sacrificing fairness and clash. Subsequent rounds ensure deeper debates over different proposals.

#3 — Right To Education Case 2AC

Explanation/Setup1. Assume the 1AC and 1NC below.

2. Students should prepare a four-minute 2AC speech that responds to this 1NC.

1AC

1AC — Inequality AdvantageContention One: Inequality

First, there are massive opportunity gaps in the K-12 education system. Millions of students are denied access to an excellent education. Robinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“Disrupting Education Federalism,” Washington University Law Review (92 Wash. U. L. Rev. 959), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)IntroductionThe United States continues to tolerate a longstanding educational opportunity gap. Today, it relegates at least ten million students in low-income neighborhoods and millions more minority students to poorly performing teachers, substandard facilities, and other inferior educational opportunities . n1 This occurs in part because the U nited States invests more money in high-income districts than in low-income districts, a sharp contrast to other developed nations. n2 Scholars and court decisions also have documented the sizeable intrastate disparities in educational opportunity. n3 In addition, interstate inequalities in educational opportunity represent the largest component of disparities in educational opportunity. n4 The harmful nature of interstate disparities falls hardest on disadvantaged schoolchildren who have the most educational needs, n5 and states do not [*962]

possess the resources and capacity to address the full scope of these disparities . n6 Furthermore, research confirms that as the gap in wealth has grown between low-income and high- income families, the achievement gap between children in low- income and high-income families also has widened . n7

Although equal educational opportunity remains a central goal of the U.S. education

system, it has never been realized . n8 Indeed, the United States relies heavily on schools to overcome the influence of a child's circumstances , such as family income and structure, on life opportunities despite evidence that schools are not effectively serving this function. n9 Fulfilling the goal of equal educational opportunity will become increasingly important to the nation's interests given research that reveals that the United States will need more highly skilled workers to fill jobs that meet the economy's demands. This research also indicates that the achievement gap

must be closed to ensure that students from rapidly growing minority communities possess the educational skills necessary to contribute to the economy. n10

Second, public school funding remains unfair and inequitable — the latest study proves. ELC 17 — Education Law Center, a non-profit organization in New Jersey that advocates for equal educational opportunity and education justice in the United States, 2017 (“School Funding Remains Unfair For Most Students Across The Nation,” Press Release Announcing Release of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, January 25th, Available Online at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxtYmwryVI00LWdhZjRXTTM5WUk/view, Accessed 06-14-2017)Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card (NRC), released by Education Law Center (ELC)

today, finds that public school funding in most states continues to be unfair and inequitable , depriving millions of U.S. students of the opportunity for success in school .

The sixth edition of the NRC uses data from the 2014 Census fiscal survey, the most recent available. The NRC goes beyond raw per-pupil calculations to evaluate whether states are making sufficient investments in public education and distributing funding relative to need, as measured by student poverty. To capture

the variation across states, the NRC uses four interrelated "fairness measures" – Funding Level, Funding Distribution, Effort and Coverage – that allow for state-by-state comparisons while controlling for regional cost differences.

The NRC released today shows almost no improvement since the end of the Great Recession in those states that do not provide additional funding to districts with high student poverty. There is also no change in the vast differences in levels of funding for K-12 education across the states , even after adjusting for cost. The states with the highest funding levels , New York and New Jersey,

spend more than two and one-half times that of the lowest , Utah and Idaho.Key findings include:* Funding levels show large disparities , ranging from a high of $18,165 per pupil in New York, to a low of $5,838 in Idaho.

* Many states with low funding levels, such as California, Idaho, Nevada, North

Carolina, and Texas, are also low “effort” states, that is, they invest a low percentage of their economic capacity to support their public education systems.

* Fourteen states, including Pennsylvania, North Dakota, New York, and Illinois, have “regressive” school funding. These states provide less funding to school districts with higher concentrations of need as measured by student poverty.

* Students in certain regions of the country face a “double disadvantage” because their states have low funding levels and do not increase funding for concentrated student poverty. These “flat” funding states include Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in the Southeast, and Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico in the Southwest.* Only a handful of states – Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Jersey – have “progressive” school funding. These states have sufficiently high funding levels and significantly boost funding in their high poverty districts.

* States with unfair school funding perform poorly on key indicators of resources essential for educational opportunity. In these states, access to early childhood education is limited; wages for teachers are not competitive with those of comparable professions; and teacher-to-pupil ratios in schools are unreasonably high.The sixth edition of the NRC released today underscores the persistence of unfair school funding as a major obstacle to improving quality and outcomes in the nation’s public schools. Most states finance public education purely on political considerations from year-to-year, and not on assessments of the actual cost of delivering rigorous academic standards to all students. Most states also continue to use outmoded methods of funding public education that fail to allocate additional funding to address concentrated poverty and other risk factors , including English language proficiency and disabilities. These antiquated methods are the cause of persistent funding disparities between low wealth, high poverty and high wealth, low poverty districts, even in states with high funding levels, such as Connecticut and New York.

“School finance reform is long overdue,” said Bruce Baker, the Rutgers University

Graduate School of Education Professor who developed the report's methodology. “States must develop, and then fund, school finance formulas that identify the costs of providing essential education resources to students, accounting for diverse student needs and taking into account local fiscal capacity.”

“Lawmakers in states with deeply regressive and flat funding, like

Illinois, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Arizona, urgently need to overhaul their finance systems to give students a meaningful opportunity to succeed in school,” said David Sciarra, ELC Executive Director. “Even states with higher funding levels, such as Ohio and Maine, need to do more to ensure fair funding for each and every student.”

“President Trump is flatly wrong when he says our schools are flush with cash,” Mr. Sciarra added. “In fact, for students in many states and entire regions, their schools are woefully underfunded, depriving them of the qualified teachers, support staff, reasonable class sizes and other interventions they must have to succeed in

school. It's time to put fair school funding at the top of the nation's education reform agenda."

Third, disparities in educational opportunity cement overall socioeconomic inequality. Robinson 13 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2013 (“The High Cost of Education Federalism,” Wake Forest Law Review (48 Wake Forest L. Rev. 287), Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)Although the nation's current approach to education federalism

undoubtedly generates some benefits, it also tolerates substantial inequitable disparities in educational opportunity both within and between states. n7 The reality of local control of education for many communities means the ability to control inadequate resources that provide many students substandard educational opportunities. n8 The [*289] opportunity divide in American education continues to relegate far too many poor and minority schoolchildren to substandard educational opportunities . n9 These communities are left behind in the competition for educational excellence. n10 In addition, high-poverty schools , particularly those within urban school districts, regularly yield the worst academic outcomes. n11

[*290] These disparities in educational opportunity hinder schools from fulfilling some of their essential national and institutional goals. Schools serve indispensable public functions within a democratic society : they prepare students to engage in the nation's political system in an intelligent and effective manner and transmit the fundamental societal values that a democratic government requires. n12 The nation also relies on its public schools as the principal institutional guarantor of equal opportunity within American society by serving as a mechanism to ensure that children are not hindered in attaining their dreams by their life circumstances. n13 Americans depend on schools to address the societal challenges created by social and economic inequality rather than creating the extensive social welfare networks that many industrialized countries have implemented. n14 The disparities in educational opportunity that relegate many poor and minority students to substandard schooling have hindered the ability of schools to serve these functions. Indeed, rather than solve these challenges, low graduation rates and substandard schools cost the United States

billions of dollars each year in lost tax and income revenues, higher health care costs, food stamps, and welfare and housing assistance, to name a few of the costs. n15

Fourth, closing the opportunity gap in education is vital to reduce inequality. Johnson 16 — Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, 2016 (“Can Schools Level the Intergenerational Playing Field? Lessons from Equal Educational Opportunity Policies,” Economic Mobility: Research & Ideas on Strengthening Families, Communities & the Economy, Edited and Published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Available Online at https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/Community-Development/EconMobilityPapers/EconMobility_Book_508.pdf?la=en , Accessed 06-19-2017, p. 321)Summary Discussion and ConclusionsThe key contributions of this study are three-fold. First, the paper provides a more detailed descriptive portrait of intergenerational economic mobility in the U nited States.

Second, the paper attempts to explain why black-white mobility differences narrowed significantly for successive cohorts born between 19 55 and 19 79, with a focus on the role of three major equal educational opportunity policies pursued over this period: school desegregation, school finance reforms, and roll-out and expansions of Head Start, improving the understanding of the intergenerational mobility process in the United States and illuminating the central role schools play in the transmission of economic success from one generation to the next.

Third, the paper emphasizes differences in early education and school quality —in particular, Head Start and school spending — as important components of the persistence in income across generations.

Indeed, schools —and policies that influence their optimal functioning— are transformative agents that either provide or deprive children of the opportunity to reach their full potential. These equal educational opportunity policies were instrumental in the making of a growing black middle class . The evidence shows that the footprints of paths toward upward mobility are preceded by access to high quality schools beginning in early childhood through 12th grade. These school reforms expanded on-ramps to poor and minority children to get on that path.

Evidence on the long-term productivity of education spending demonstrates that equal education policy initiatives can play a

pivotal role in reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

Fifth, educational inequality also cements political inequality that deprives students of the right to life, the right to vote, and the right to free expression. Wesche 16 — Breanne N. Wesche, Attorney at the Rizio Law Firm—a personal injury law firm in California, former Special Education Teacher in the Houston Independent School District, holds a J.D. from the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, 2016 (“Putting The American Education System To The Test: Recognizing Education As A Fundamental Right And Abolishing Unequal School Funding,” Thurgood Marshall Law Review (41 T. Marshall L. Rev. 5), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)[*5] I. Introduction In the United States of America, a child's zip code often determines the quality of the child's education . A myriad of social, economic, and political factors contributes to this tragic truth. This article,

however, focuses on the staggering, discriminatory effect that Unequal School Funding has on our nation's youth.Consider the experience of Daniel Lopez, a fifth-grade student in Houston, Texas. n1 Daniel and his family live on the south side of Houston, near William P. Hobby Airport. The public school nearest Daniel is an old, dilapidated building. When Daniel arrives at school each morning, he sees broken computers, leaky air conditioners, and chipping turquoise paint. He sees a small athletic field, occupied by ten-year-old "temporary" trailers. He sees a physical education teacher, doing her best to teach a mathematics class.Compare Daniel's experience to that of Thomas Smith, a fifth-grade student living near Houston, Texas. n2 Thomas and his family live in a neighborhood filled with multi-million dollar homes, located just miles away from Daniel's neighborhood. The public school nearest Thomas is a new, state-of-the art building. When Thomas arrives at school each morning, he sees new tablets for every student, interactive white boards in every classroom, and extra teacher assistants for individualized help. He sees the new soccer field, next to the tennis courts. He sees art and music teachers with specialized training. [*6] Which student do you expect is more likely to feel valued when he arrives at school each day? Which student is more likely to reach his potential? Which student do you think has more opportunities to succeed?Such disparate realities exist between students in different zip codes in large part because of Unequal School Funding: the discriminatory practice in which school funding is based on unequal property taxes within the district. Discriminatory practices such as Unequal School Funding exist in our country because education is not protected as a fundamental right. The United States Supreme Court has only once considered

whether education is a fundamental right. The Court's failure to recognize education as a fundamental right resulted in both the nation's pervasive practice of Unequal School Funding and the wildly varying protection of educational rights throughout the states. In light of these horrible repercussions, the Court should now readdress whether education is a fundamental right. Furthermore, the proper analysis of education as a fundamental right would undoubtedly abolish unequal and discriminatory practices such as Unequal School Funding.I. Education Is A Fundamental Right Education is a fundamental right because it is inextricably linked to the constitutional guarantees of liberty , voting , and freedom of expression . The quality and level of a United States

citizen's education has a direct impact on that citizen's ability to exercise such constitutional rights. As compared to a citizen with a low-quality and low-level education, a person with a high- quality and high-level education is less likely to be incarcerated, more likely to vote, and more equipped to exercise his freedom of expression.A. The Right to Liberty"[An incarcerated man] has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being the slave of the State. He is civiliter mortuus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man." -- Ruffin v. Commonwealth n3A United States citizen's right to liberty is forfeited upon incarceration. Thomas Jefferson once described liberty as the [*7] "unobstructed action according to our own will within limits drawn around us by the equal right of others." n4 A prisoner is stripped of the right to take unobstructed actions. For example, a prisoner cannot take the unobstructed actions of voting, traveling, starting a business, or having children. n5 A prisoner's every allowable action -- what to eat, when to sleep, when to bathe, who to see, what to wear -- is obstructed and confined by rules created by others. n6 A person's inalienable right to liberty, then, becomes alienable upon his incarceration.A citizen with a low-level education is significantly more likely to be incarcerated than his well-educated counterpart. In 2004, the Bureau of Justice Statistics concluded that 36.3% of incarcerated men over the age of 18 have less than a high school diploma, and only 11.5% of incarcerated men over the age of 18 have some college education. n7 Likewise, a survey conducted by the American Community Survey in 2009 revealed that Black and White men who are "high school dropouts are about 5 times more likely to go to prison . . . than men who have completed high school." n8 Moreover, the amount of male high school dropouts who become incarcerated continues to rise every year, while the amount of high-school-educated men who become incarcerated remains virtually stagnant. n9The statistics for female prisoners are equally as staggering. A 2009 survey found that 37% of incarcerated women had less than a high school education, while only 14% of non-incarcerated women had less than a high school education. n10 The survey also found that only 31% of incarcerated women had some postsecondary education, while 58% of non-incarcerated women had some postsecondary education. n11 In short, education levels are inversely related with the likelihood of incarceration: the increased quantity of a person's education decreases the likelihood of incarceration and resulting forfeiture of liberties.[*8] B. The Right to Vote"A share in the sovereignty of the state, which is exercised by the citizens at large in voting at elections, is one of the most important rights of the subject, and in a republic ought to stand foremost in the estimation of the law." -- Alexander Hamilton n12The right to vote and access to state and federal franchise is a revered and zealously protected right of all citizens. n13 The right to vote in federal elections is explicitly conferred by the United States Constitution, in Article I, Section 2, and in the Seventeenth Amendment. The right to vote in state elections, while not explicitly listed in the Constitution, has been provided special judiciary protection, as "it is the 'preservative of other basic civil and political rights.'" n14A citizen with a low-level education is significantly less likely to vote than his well-educated counterpart . n15 The U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey in 2012 showed that only 7.9 million citizens without a high school diploma were registered to vote, compared to over 41.6 million citizens with a high school diploma who were registered to vote. n16 The same survey showed that only 6 million citizens without a high school diploma reported voting, compared to over 34.4 million with a high school diploma who reported voting. n17 Further, a study in 2009 showed that 50.4% of those with less than a high school education were registered to vote, while 84.8% of those with bachelor's degrees or more were registered to vote.

n18 Education, thus, significantly contributes to the likelihood of a citizen's effective participation in a democratic society . n19

C. The Right to Freedom of Expression[*9] "[Education] is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities . . . It is the very foundation of good citizenship." -- Brown v. Board of Education n20The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of assembly, collectively known as "freedom of expression." n21 Justice

Benjamin Cardozo defined freedom of expression as "the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom."

n22 Exercise of freedom of expression continuously protects all other fundamental rights. n23

A poor education significantly limits a citizen's ability to exercise freedom of expression. "Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights, both as a source and as a receiver of information and ideas, whatever interests he may pursue in life." n24 The classroom – the "marketplace of ideas" n25 – holds a pivotal role of opening up an individual to key experiences in our culture and society. n26 Schools should instill in our young an interest in political discourse, the tools for political debate, and knowledge of governmental processes. n27 Indeed, Americans revere public schools as the "most vital civic institution" for encouraging political consciousness and protecting our democratic system of government. n28 A substandard education,

however, strips a child of his ability to fully participate in our democratic society, thereby losing his voice and the ability to fight for his rights.

II. THE PROBLEM: THE SUPREME COURT HAS FAILED TO RECOGNIZE EDUCATION AS A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT [*10] The Supreme Court's failure to recognize education as a fundamental right has allowed discriminatory and inconsistent treatment of educational rights throughout the states . For example,

the trend of allotting unequal funding to school districts is a pervasive practice across the country . Moreover, without guidance from the Supreme Court, each state government 's protection of educational rights is, at best , haphazard and wavering . Thus, the state where a citizen resides determines both whether education is considered to be a fundamental right and the level of educational equality the state government requires.

Sixth, only the plan can remedy this political inequality — education is key. Newman 13 — Anne Newman, Researcher at the University of California Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California—a multi-campus research program and initiative, holds a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Education from Stanford University, 2013 (“Education Policy Making in the Shadow of an Enduring Democratic Dilemma,” Realizing Educational Rights: Advancing School Reform through Courts and Communities, Published by the University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226071749, p. 17-19)The Relationship Between Education and Political Equality

Making informed decisions about representation and public policy requires a host of abilities, including analytic reasoning skills and the ability to distinguish sophistry from sound argument. This is even more true in a deliberative democracy that expects citizens to contribute to agenda setting, in contrast to a vote-centric democracy that simply asks citizens to cast ballots for representatives. The crux of the relationship between education and political equality centers on the types of advantages that education affords citizens in public discourse. People who have comfortable housing, lucrative employment, and good health care may participate in deliberation more easily than those who are less well-off in these respects. Moreover, severe deprivation in any of these welfare domains may impede political participation altogether. Yet inequalities with respect to housing, income, or health care do not result in deliberative inequality per se . Having a bigger house, a more lucrative job, or better health care does not directly confer superior deliberative skills upon citizens.

By contrast , education is directly tied to deliberative influence , and it is not possible to neutralize educational inadequacies to restore political equality without addressing educational deficits head on . The political disadvantage that follows from having poor reasoning skills or limited literacy, for

example, is hard to remedy without addressing these problems directly. Moreover, educational inequalities cannot be readily contained for the sake of achieving political equality in public forums. How could well-educated citizens refrain from using their skills in deliberations? Basic income , on the other hand, is largely instrumental to deliberative influence , and the wellbeing it provides can be achieved through various means, such as public assistance for food and housing. By contrast , the quality of citizens’ education directly affects their effectiveness in public deliberation , and nothing short of giving citizens the requisite skills can compensate for their lack thereof. A few caveats are necessary here. Some citizens may secure the skills that constitute an adequate education outside formal schooling because these skills are not the sole province of formal education. And not all schools successfully teach students the requisite deliberative skills. Even many well-funded schools may fail on this front. Moreover, a charismatic personality may more than compensate for educational disadvantage in some deliberative settings. Yet the possibility of autodidacts and compelling personalities cannot vindicate miserly provisions for public education. Nor do the deficiencies of civic curricula today diminish the importance of the state’s responsibility to do better on this front. After all, for the vast majority of citizens, educational opportunity is limited to the

offerings of the public system. When public schools fail them, a significant portion of the population is likely to be severely disadvantaged in the political sphere.

The tight link between education and political equality is poignantly expressed in Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissenting

opinion in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, in which the majority opinion refused to recognize a federal right to education.29 In addition to finding no legal ground for such a right, the majority expressed concern that recognizing a right to education would open the floodgates to myriad other welfare rights. Marshall refuted the Court’s slippery-slope argument by contending that education is distinctively tied to individuals’ ability to exercise constitutional liberties, including free speech and the right to vote , and to participate in politics

more generally: “Education may instill the interest and provide the tools necessary for political discourse and debate. Indeed, it has frequently

been suggested that education is the dominant factor affecting political consciousness and participation.”30 His dissent highlights how the meaningful exercise of political liberties is inextricably tied to educational opportunity—a connection that is even tighter in a deliberative democracy, where one’s reasoning skills and ability to communicate determine one’s opportunity to have political influence.

Seventh, utilitarian balancing can’t justify educational inequality. Any solvency deficit to a counterplan should be rejected as a preventable injustice. Gross 1 — James A. Gross, Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2001 (“A Human Rights Perspective on U.S. Education: Only Some Children Matter,” The Catholic University Law Review (50 Cath. U.L. Rev. 919), Summer, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)VI. Concluding ObservationsTo understand that education is a human right is to understand that the problems of education in this country and the proposed solutions are inextricably interconnected with issues of morality, justice and values . Fundamental issues of human rights, justice and morality must be addressed and resolved before any reconstruction of the educational system is attempted. What is excused as misfortune must be recognized as injustice and what has been dismissed as the status quo must be traced to the action or inaction of the unjust.

A just society, particularly one with the economic resources of the United States, would not choose to reject any of its children. A just society would treat each of its children as an "unprecedented wonder" n243 and would be committed to enabling them to realize their potential for living a full human life. n244 Each child would be recognized for the person he is; his presence on this earth would be treated as an "unconditional blessing." n245

This recognition and celebration of life is the core principle of human rights. It was recognized by a Freedmen's Bureau commissioner who urged that the freed people in the Bureau's schools be "treated as men with immortal souls rather than as beasts of burden or machines for pulling cotton." n246 More than 100 years later, Thomas Sowell similarly noted that the "only common denominator among the successful schools [in the black community/ghetto] was that the students were treated like human beings and everything was geared to the expectation that they would succeed." n247 The children understood that they were important in and of themselves. n248 [*952] Conscious choices violate the human rights of certain children . Yet human rights constitute the most essential moral claims that all human beings can assert . n249 They confirm the sacredness of human beings and their intrinsic dignity . Human rights are entitlements. The great disparity in the amount of money spent for some compared to that spent on the education of other people's children is a measure of how little certain children are valued as human beings. As a result, a message is sent that those children "deserve to be neglected [and] to be surrounded by a blatant lack of respect." n250

A solution to this problem will require the problem solvers to know what it is like for children to grow up rejected and shunned by the dominant society, what it means and does to them, and whether they think they deserve to be treated that way. As Kozol asks, "what is it that enables some of them to pray? When they pray, what do they say to God?" n251 Other previously ignored questions must also be answered:

how certain people hold up under terrible ordeal, how many more do not, how human beings devalue other people's lives, how numbness and destructiveness are universalized, how human pity is at length extinguished and the shunning of the vulnerable can come in time to be perceived as natural behavior ... . How does a nation deal with those whom it has cursed? n252

Others wonder about the impact of long-standing devaluation on both the children devalued and on those responsible for that devaluation: "after all that has happened, in history and in our own time, can black people still be seen with empathy and without sentimentality as human beings with aspirations and potential that deserve fulfillment?" n253 Andrew Hacker maintains that persuading Americans to care about children other than their own is imperative because indigent children are looked upon as a burden. n254Where is the public indignation at the abuse of innocent children who have done nothing wrong? Despite a "reverence for fair play" and a "genuine distaste for loaded dice" in the United States, Kozol maintains [*953] that in the realms of education, health care and inheritance of wealth, fairness is not evident. n255 In those areas, Kozol says, "we want the game to be unfair and we have made it so; and it will likely so remain." n256 If our motives can be judged most accurately by our actions or inaction, Hacker and Kozol's perceptions are on the mark. Many in our country, including children, are isolated in helplessness while others choose to isolate themselves by their own selfishness. It is a selfishness that consists not only of an unwillingness to redistribute resources to others in need, but also of a deliberate perpetuation of an unfair distribution of the benefits of the educational system which secures advantages in society .Americans pride themselves on their morality. The "American Creed" is the ideological foundation of the nation, encompassing the ideals of the inherent dignity of the individual human being, and of the fundamental equality of all, as well as "inalienable" rights to freedom, justice and fair opportunity. All of these ideals are reconciled within the framework of the common good. These are the elements of a democratic creed that, although pre-dating the United States, represents the "national conscience." n257 The creed is the basis for the realization of the "American Dream," which in addition to being a dream of wealth has also "been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman" to benefit "the simple human being of any and every class." n258In 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal characterized U.S. race relations as an "American Dilemma": the moral dilemma of the disparity between ideals and actual behavior. n259 It is tragic that any such gap remains after all of these years. Yet, it is not unrealistic to believe in and work for change unless

those with economic and political influence are completely hypocritical. The civil rights and women's rights movements in this country are among the precedents that justify some optimism and hope.No matter how discouraging the prospects for fundamental change in the educational system, it would be even more irresponsible to fail to act. n260 If human rights violations are to end, then the moral choices that [*954] underlie those violations and the values that influence those moral choices must be changed. n261 Without that change, we will continue merely to remodel on a faulty foundation. Despite commentaries about the futility of trying to reverse these choices, fundamental change is possible and one of the many reasons for that change is the ability of challengers to redefine a policy issue.

Acceptance of education as a human right changes our understanding of the essential purpose of education and requires a fundamental and thorough redefinition of education policy. The primary objective of education policy would become compliance with the rights of all children to the type and quality of education needed to live full human lives rather than , as now,

conceiving of education as merely a utilitarian instrument for maximizing payoff for those who invest in it - or for those who can afford the type of education most likely to provide the greatest return on investment. It puts into sharp historical and cultural perspective the fact that since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945, nations from all over the world have recognized education as a human right while our own Supreme Court does not consider education to be even a constitutional right.It may be that domestic human rights issues go unacknowledged by the public because of the myth that the United States is a paragon of human rights observance. As human rights become more important in international relations, this country is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy for attempting to maintain a "facade of championing human rights when it does not protect the rights of its own citizens." n262 Despite the rhetoric about the sanctity of human rights, hypocritical or not, it is likely that most people in this country comprehend human rights only in the context of such egregious human evils as genocide or systematic torture. Beyond that there is little understanding of the meaning, significance and implications of human rights.All education systems want to produce a certain kind of human being, and values have always been an essential and unavoidable part of education. Ironically, therefore, the redefinition of education policy [*955] issue requires education. From the time they start school, children need to learn about human rights and to respect the human rights and dignity of all people regardless of race, color, language, gender, or faith. Human rights education needs to occur at all levels from elementary school through college or university.Promotion of internationally recognized human rights principles emerging in international law, moreover, would educate our judiciary as well as the public. These international human rights principles pose a growing challenge to what some experts consider the isolation and provincialism of U.S. courts. n263 Given the influence of values on judicial decision-making, these human rights principles provide an important source of law for U.S. courts to use in the interpretation of the Constitution, including filling in the gaps in constitutional protections. To ignore those principles is to express indifference to them and expresses a willingness to put the United States in direct conflict with international law. n264No attempt is made here to spell out the details of a curriculum or the content of specific course subjects needed to enable people to live full human lives. However, a quality education is about reading, writing, computing, communicating, imagining, thinking, reasoning, creating, participating, questioning, analyzing, challenging, judging, and changing. It is about the unprecedented wonder of each and every human being, the rights and duties of each other. It is about history and heritage as well as partaking in cultural stories and heritage. It is about

sharing all the intellectual adventures at the heart of civilization. It is about morals and ethics and the content of character. It is also about participating in decisions that affect one's life.A quality education must not be indoctrination in an "Aren't-We-Americans-Just-Dandy curriculum" as Theodore and Nancy Sizer called it. n265 Education needs to have a global perspective with an understanding of all peoples, their cultural heritage, values, problems and ways of life. Education needs to be about human solidarity, respect for human dignity, the equal rights of all human beings, and justice and equality for all people.

There is no reason that can justify the perpetuation of human rights violations to education: not transparent appeals to the democratic principle of local control of education (it would be a perverted [*956] democracy that commits or tolerates violations of the human rights of children); not a state's use of local control as an excuse rather than as a justification for interdistrict inequality; n266 and not the federal government's evasion of the duty by hiding behind the myth that education is exclusively a state and local matter in this country . n267

A just society would not tolerate anything less than the end of these violations of our children's human right to education. Of course, our willingness to end these violations depends on the type of a society we desire and what kind of people we want to be.

Eighth, American democracy will collapse without excellent and equitable K-12 education. Political inequality results in fascism. Brown 10 — Wendy Brown, Heller Professor of Political Science at the University of California-Berkeley, Co-Chair of the University of California-Berkeley Faculty Association, holds a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Princeton University, 2010 (“Without Quality Public Education, There Is No Future for Democracy,” The California Journal of Politics & Policy, Volume 2, Issue 1, Available Online at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/72s6p9ph, Accessed 07-09-2017, p. 2-3)Without quality public education, we the people cannot know, handle, let alone check the powers that govern us . Without quality public education, there can be no substance to the promise of equality and freedom, no possibility of developing and realizing individual capacities, no possibility of children overcoming disadvantage or of teens reaching for the stars, no possibility of being a people guiding their own destiny or of individuals choosing their own course. Above all, there is no possibility of being a self-governing people, a democracy .

As the world grows more complex and integrated and the media grows ever more sophisticated and powerful in shaping events and ideas, what maintains democracy is not the technical

instruction into which resource-starved schools are rapidly retreating. It is not the reduction of high school to two years, college to three and only

vocational training for the many, but the kind of education through which future citizens learn to understand and engage the complexities of this world.

For democracy to survive, let alone thrive, the people must be able to know and analyze the powers organizing our lives . The people must be able to reflect on the perils and possibilities of our time and develop considered views about how to navigate them. The people must be able to analyze written and oral arguments, journalistic accounts, images and sound bites—distinguishing the reasonable from the sensational, the serious from the simplistic, the well-founded from the fatuous.

If such capacities have always been important to democratic citizenship, our increasingly complex world demands them all the more , and quality public education is the key to their acquisition. Without quality public education in our future, there is no future for democracy . Without quality public education in our future, we face a huge divide between the educated and uneducated, corresponding to a divide between the rich and the poor and [end page 2] magnifying the power of the former and the powerlessness of the latter. This is plutocracy, not democracy.

Without quality public education in our future, we face a populace taught only the skills needed for work, ill-equipped to understand or participate in civic and political life. This is corporate oligarchy, not democracy.

Without quality public education in our future, we face a people manipulable through their frustrations, mobilizable through false enemies and false promises . This is the dangerous material of democracy’s opposite— despotism if not fascism .

So California’s disinvestment in education not only entrenches and deepens inequalities , not only breaks the promise of opportunity for every able student, not

only chokes the engine of invention and achievement that built California’s 20th century glory. It destroys the fundament of democracy itself —an educated citizenry capable of thoughtful analysis and informed judgment.

California must recommit to first-class K-12 education and the California Master Plan for higher education. We must come to our senses, quickly, about preserving the most esteemed public university system in the world. And we must do so not only because education is what lifts people from poverty , equalizes opportunities , reduces crime and violence , builds bright individual and collective futures, but because education makes democracy real.Educate the state. Sí se puede.

Ninth, this is an existential risk — concentrated private power causes global warming and nuclear war. Chomsky 14 — Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania 2014 (“America’s corporate doctrine of power a grave threat to humanity,” Salon — originally published on TomDispatch, July 1st, Available Online at http://www.salon.com/2014/07/01/noam_chomsky_americas_corporate_doctrine_of_power_a_grave_threat_to_humanity/, Accessed 07-09-2015)The Final Century of Human Civilization?There are other examples too numerous to mention, facts that are well-established and would be taught in elementary schools in free societies.There is, in other words, ample evidence that securing state power from the domestic population and securing concentrated private power are driving forces in policy formation . Of course, it is not quite that simple. There are interesting cases, some quite current, where these commitments conflict, but consider this a good first approximation and radically opposed to the received standard doctrine.Let us turn to another question: What about the security of the population? It is easy to demonstrate that this is a marginal concern of policy planners. Take two prominent current examples, global warming and nuclear weapons . As any literate person is doubtless aware, these

are dire threats to the security of the population . Turning to state policy, we find that it is committed to accelerating each of those threat s — in the interests of the primary concerns, protection of state power and of the concentrated private power that largely determines state policy.

Consider global warming. There is now much exuberance in the U nited

States about “100 years of energy independence ” as we become “the Saudi Arabia of the next century ” — perhaps the final century of human civilization if current policies persist.

That illustrates very clearly the nature of the concern for security, certainly not for the

population. It also illustrates the moral calculus of contemporary Anglo- American state capitalism: the fate of our grandchildren counts as nothing when compared with the imperative of higher profits tomorrow.These conclusions are fortified by a closer look at the propaganda system. There is a huge public relations campaign in the U.S., organized quite openly by Big Energy and the business world, to try to convince the public that global warming is either unreal or not a result of human activity. And it has had some impact. The U.S. ranks lower than other countries in public concern about global warming and the results are stratified: among Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the interests of wealth and corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.The current issue of the premier journal of media criticism, the Columbia Journalism Review, has an interesting article on this subject, attributing this outcome to the media doctrine of “fair and balanced.” In other words, if a journal publishes an opinion piece reflecting the conclusions of 97% of scientists, it must also run a counter-piece expressing the viewpoint of the energy corporations.That indeed is what happens, but there certainly is no “fair and balanced” doctrine. Thus, if a journal runs an opinion piece denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin for the criminal act of taking over the Crimea, it surely does not have to run a piece pointing out that, while the act is indeed criminal, Russia has a far stronger case today than the U.S. did more than a century ago in taking over southeastern Cuba, including the country’s major port — and rejecting the Cuban demand since independence to have it returned. And the same is true of many other cases. The actual media doctrine is “fair and balanced” when the concerns of concentrated private power are involved, but surely not elsewhere.

On the issue of nuclear weapons, the record is similarly interesting —

and frightening. It reveals very clearly that, from the earliest days, the security of the population was a non-issue, and remains so. There is no time here to run through the shocking record, but there is little doubt that it strongly supports the lament of General Lee Butler, the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, which was armed with nuclear weapons. In his words, we have so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” And we can hardly count on continued divine intervention as policymakers play roulette with the fate of the species in pursuit of the driving factors in policy formation.

As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in human history . There are many problems that must be addressed, but two are overwhelming in their significance: environmental destruction and nuclear war . For the first time in history, we face the possibility of destroying the prospects for decent existence — and not in the distant future. For this reason alone, it is imperative to sweep away the ideological clouds and face honestly and realistically the question of how policy decisions are made , and what we can do to alter them before it is too late .

Tenth, racial and economic inequality is a form of structural violence that condemns entire populations to preventable suffering and death. Bezruchka 14 — Stephen Bezruchka, Senior Lecturer in Health Services and Global Health at the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, holds a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University and an M.D. from Stanford University, 2014 (“Inequality Kills,” Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, Edited by David Cay Johnston, Published by The New Press, ISBN 9781595589446, p. 194-195)Differences in mortality rates are not just a statistical concern—they reflect suffering and pain for very real individuals and families. The higher mortality in the U nited States is an example of what Paul Farmer, the

noted physician and anthropologist, calls structural violence. The forty-seven infant deaths occur every day because of the way society in the United States is structured, resulting in our health status being that of a middle-income country, not a rich country. There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist

changing. Inequality is the central element , the upstream cause of the social disadvantage described in the IOM report. A political system that fosters inequality limits the attainment of health.

The claim that economic inequality is a major reason for our poor health requires that several standard criteria for claiming causality are satisfied: the results are confirmed by many different studies by different investigators over different time

periods; there is a dose-response relationship , meaning more inequality leads to worse health; no other contending explanation is posited; and the relationship is biologically plausible , with likely mechanisms through which inequality works. The field of study called stress biology of social comparisons is one such way inequality acts.

Those studies confirm that all the criteria for linking inequality to poorer health are met , concluding that the extent of inequality in society reflects the range of caring and sharing, with more unequal populations sharing less. Those who are poorer struggle to be accepted in society and the rich also suffer its effects. A recent Harvard study estimated that about one death in three in this country results from our very high income inequality. Inequality kills through structural violence . There is no smoking gun with this form of violence, which simply produces a lethally large social and economic gap between rich and poor.

Finally, the structural violence of inequality outweighs other impacts. There is an ethical obligation to address it.Ansell 17 — David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (Chicago), holds an M.D. from the State University of New York Upstate Medical University College of Medicine, 2017 (“American Roulette,” The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, Published by the University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226428291, p. kindle 307-363)There are many different kinds of violence. Some are obvious : punches, attacks, gunshots, explosions. These are the kinds of interpersonal violence that we tend to hear about in the news . Other kinds of violence are intimate and emotional.

But the deadliest and most thoroughgoing kind of violence is woven into the fabric of American society. It exists when some groups have more access to goods, resources, and opportunities than other groups , including health and life itself. This violence delivers specific blows against particular bodies in particular neighborhoods . This unequal advantage and violence is built into the very rules that govern our society. In the absence of this violence, large numbers of Americans would be able to live fuller and longer lives .

This kind of violence is called structural violence , because it is embedded in the very laws, policies, and rules that govern day-to-day life.8 It is the cumulative impact of laws and social and economic policies and practices that render some Americans less able to access resources and opportunities than others . This inequity of advantage is not a result of the individual’s personal abilities but is built into the systems that govern society. Often it is a product of racism , gender , and income inequality . The

diseases and premature mortality that Windora and many of my patients experienced were, in the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, “biological reflections of social fault lines.”9 As a result of these fault lines, a disproportional burden of illness, suffering, and premature mortality falls on certain neighborhoods, like Windora’s. Structural violence can overwhelm an individual’s ability to live a free , unfettered, healthy life .As I ran to evaluate Windora, I knew that her stroke was caused in part by lifelong exposure to suffering, racism, and economic deprivation. Worse, the poverty of West Humboldt Park that contributed to her illness is directly and inextricably related to the massive concentration of wealth and power in other neighborhoods just miles away in Chicago’s Gold Coast and suburbs. That concentration of wealth could not have occurred without laws, policies, and practices that favored some at the expense of others. Those laws, policies, and practices could not have been passed or enforced if access to political and economic power had not been concentrated in the hands of a few. Yet these political and economic structures have become so firmly entrenched (in habits, social relations, economic arrangements, institutional practices, law, and policy) that they have become part of the matrix of American society. The rules that govern day-to-day life were written to benefit a small elite at the expense of people like Windora and her family. These rules and structures are powerful destructive forces. The same structures that render life predictable, secure, comfortable, and pleasant for many destroy the lives of others like Windora through suffering , poverty , ill health , and violence . These structures are neither natural nor neutral. The results of structural violence can be very specific. In Windora’s case, stroke precursors like chronic stress, poverty, and uncontrolled hypertension run rampant in neighborhoods like hers. Windora’s illness was caused by neither her cultural traits nor the failure of her will. Her stroke was caused in part by inequity. She is one of the lucky ones, though, because even while structural violence ravages her neighborhood, it also abets the concentration of expensive stroke- intervention services in certain wealthy teaching hospitals like mine. If I can get to her in time, we can still help her. Income Inequality and Life Inequality Of course, Windora is not the only person struggling on account of structural violence. Countless neighborhoods nationwide are suffering from it, and people are dying needlessly young as a result. The magnitude of this excess mortality is mind-boggling. In 2009 my friend Dr. Steve Whitman asked a simple question, “How many extra black people died in Chicago each year, just because they do not have the same health outcomes as white Chicagoans?” When the Chicago Sun-Times got wind of his results, it ran them on the front page in bold white letters on a black background: “HEALTH CARE GAP KILLS 3200 Black Chicagoans and the Gap is Growing.” The paper styled the headline to look like the declaration of war that it should have been. In fact, we did find ourselves at war not long ago, when almost 3,000 Americans were killed. That was September 11 , 2001. That tragedy propelled the country to war. Yet when it comes to the premature deaths of urban Americans, no disaster area has been declared . No federal troops have been called up. No acts of Congress have been passed. Yet this disaster is even worse : those

3,200 black people were in Chicago alone, in just one year. Nationwide each year, more than 60,000 black people die prematurely because of inequality.10

While blacks suffer the most from this, it is not just an issue of racism, though racism has been a unique and powerful transmitter of violence in America for over four hundred years.11 Beyond racism, poverty and income inequality perpetuated by exploitative market

capitalism are singular agents of transmission of disease and early death. As a result, there is a new and alarming pattern of declining life expectancy among white Americans as well. Deaths from drug overdoses in young white Americans ages 25 to 34 have exploded to levels not seen since the AIDS epidemic. This generation is the first since the Vietnam War era to experience higher death rates than the prior generation.12 White Americans ages 45 to 54 have experienced skyrocketing premature death rates as well, something not seen in any other developed nation.13 White men in some Appalachian towns live on average twenty years less than white men a half-day’s drive away in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Men in McDowell County, West Virginia, can look forward to a life expectancy only slightly better than that of Haitians.14But those statistics reflect averages, and every death from structural violence is a person . When these illnesses and deaths are occurring one at a time in neighborhoods that society has decided not to care about —neighborhoods populated by poor, black, or brown people — they seem easy to overlook , especially if you are among the fortunate few who are doing incredibly well. The tide of prosperity in America has lifted some boats while others have swamped. Paul Farmer, the physician-anthropologist who founded Partners in Health, an international human rights agency, reflects on the juxtaposition of “unprecedented bounty and untold penury”: “It stands to reason that as beneficiaries of growing inequality , we do not like to be reminded of misery of squalor and failure. Our popular culture provides us with no shortage of anesthesia.”15

That people suffer and die prematurely because of inequality is wrong . It is wrong from an ethical perspective . It is wrong from a fairness perspective . And it is wrong because we have the means to fix it.

1AC — PlanThe United States federal government should establish and enforce a constitutional right to education guaranteeing that all children in the United States receive equal access to an excellent elementary and secondary public education and should increase funding to a level necessary to accomplish this goal.

1AC — SolvencyContention Two: Solvency

First, requiring equal access to an excellent education is vital to close opportunity and achievement gapsRobinson 15 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2015 (“How Reconstructing Education Federalism Could Fulfill the Aims of Rodriguez,” The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity, Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Published by Harvard Education Press, ISBN 9781612508313, p. 205-206) I contend that the United States should strategically restructure and strengthen the federal role in education to establish the necessary foundation for a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education . This restructuring and strengthening of the federal role in education would require shifting some power away from the state and local governments and toward the federal government. The U nited States would then need to adopt a new understanding of education federalism that embrace s the federal government as the guarantor of equal opportunity , because it is the only government with the capacity and sufficient incentive to lead a national effort to achieve this widely supported, yet persistently elusive, goal. Although this would not require federalizing the nation's education system as at least one scholar has recommended, it would require acceptance of a larger federal role in education to hold the states accountable for ensuring that all students receive equal access to an excellent education.7

I define equal access to an excellent education as the opportunity for all students to attend a high-quality school that enables them to effectively pursue their life goals, to become engaged citizens, and to develop their abilities to their full potential.8 Equal access to an excellent education enables all students to receive “a real and meaningful opportunity to achieve rigorous college- and career-ready standards.” 9 If the United States pursues equal access to an excellent education as the primary goal for its education system, it will break the traditional link between low-income and minority status and inferior educational opportunities . This goal recognizes that educational opportunities should be tailored to meet the individual needs of students that may vary dramatically

depending on a variety of factors, including family structure and stability, students' health and nutrition, and neighborhood climate. This goal also embraces closing the opportunity gap as an essential prerequisite for closing the achievement gap. Furthermore, embracing racially and economically diverse schools is essential for achieving this goal given compelling research regarding the harms of racial and class isolation, the benefits of diversity, and evidence of diverse schools providing important educational benefits that cannot be duplicated by alternative reforms. 10 An excellent education for all schoolchildren should be the nation's ultimate [end page 205]

education goal , because all families ultimately want a first-rate education for their children and because the United States would benefit economically, socially, and politically from providing such an education.

Second, comprehensive federal action is needed for successful reform. Robinson 16 — Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Scholar at the University of Richmond School of Law, Researcher at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, former Associate Professor at the Emory School of Law, former General Attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the United States Department of Education, holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2016 (“Fisher’s Cautionary Tale and the Urgent Need for Equal Access to an Excellent Education,” Harvard Law Review (130 Harv. L. Rev. 185), November, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)B. Overturning RodriguezTo be most effective, a comprehensive federal agenda requires the assistance of all three branches of government . The executive branch enjoys the fewest obstacles to reform because it could use its existing authority to accomplish incremental shifts to education federalism through modest reforms that employ its existing authority and resources. n295 Nevertheless, given the full scope of the shift to education

federalism that I recommend, reforms instituted without any significant involvement of Congress or the Court would lack the comprehensive nature that ensuring equal access to an excellent education for all schoolchildren will ultimately demand. Legislation consistent with this agenda would send a n even more powerful message that the agenda represents the will of the people and thus may encourage greater state and local buy-in . n296 However, the eight-year delay in reenacting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which eventually led to the reduction of the federal role in education in the Every Student Succeeds Act, n297 and the great difficulties that Congress is experiencing in passing legislation n298 suggest that legislative reform consistent with my proposal is unlikely in the near term. [*231] Fortunately, the Court possesses the authority to unleash a powerful tool that could help to reduce the opportunity and achievement gaps that lead

universities and colleges to rely on affirmative action in admissions. It could overturn

Rodriguez , which held that the Constitution does not protect education as a fundamental right. n299

For over forty years, Rodriguez has served as a roadblock to access to federal courts for those who hope to address the entrenched disparities in funding and resources that relegate many disadvantaged and minority students to inferior educational opportunities in the United States. n300 Because the Court held that education was not a fundamental right, Rodriguez applied rational basis review to the funding gaps between districts within Texas. n301 The Court determined that Texas easily met this standard because its funding approach advanced local control of education, the Court lacked the expertise to second-guess the Texas system, and a ruling for the plaintiffs would greatly upset the balance of federalism. n302 The Court nonetheless noted the need for reform of school funding and challenged the states to undertake this reform. n303 Although many states have implemented funding reform since Rodriguez and state litigation has resulted in some important victories, these state efforts have fallen far short of the reforms required to provide all children equal access to an excellent education. n304 In light of the continuing disparities in educational opportunity, numerous scholars, myself included, have argued that Rodriguez was wrongly decided and should be overturned to provide a consistent and powerful federal remedy to address these disparities . n305 [*232] However, disagreement exists over the scope of the right that the Court should recognize. The Court left the existence of a fundamental right to some minimum education an open question in Rodriguez n306 and subsequently acknowledged that the question remains open. n307 If Rodriguez is overturned, some scholars envision the Court addressing only extreme forms of educational inequality by providing a federal right to a minimally adequate education. n308 Leading education scholar Professor Derek Black, on the other hand, has argued that such an education today would require that students receive the state-defined minimum of education and that this definition does not have to equal "a minimalist education." n309Given the likelihood that the Court will insist that affirmative action eventually end, the Court should take some responsibility for addressing the conditions that lead institutions to rely on affirmative action by overturning the decision that insulated opportunity gaps from federal accountability. The Court could choose from a variety of constitutional provisions to recognize a right to education. n310 For [*233] instance, the Court could hold that the Fourteenth Amendment 's requirement that states not deny equal protection of the laws n311 serves as a prohibition of the inequitable state disparities in educational opportunity or guarantees students an education that enables them to effectively employ their First Amendment rights and to be competent voters. n312 Recognizing and enforcing a federal right to education would provide greater authority and consistent impact than the state education clauses that vary widely in their protection — or lack thereof — of the right to education. n313

The federal courts have been and will remain an important and powerful avenue for enforcing education rights for all students throughout the United States in ways that do not make the content of a right dependent on the happenstance of geography or state law. n314 A federal constitutional right also

would enable the federal courts to address the substantial interstate disparities in funding that currently account for seventy-eight percent of per-pupil spending gaps . n315 This tremendous interstate disparity , which has reached a [*234]

"historic high" for spending differences, n316 reveals the failure of state courts to close spending gaps on their own. n317

If the Court chooses to overturn Rodriguez in a manner that would help to

close opportunity gaps, it should incorporate four essential principles into a constitutional right to education. First, the Court must embrace a robust fundamental right to education that moves beyond guaranteeing a rudimentary floor of educational opportunity. A minimal right would not make a meaningful impact on opportunity or achievement gaps. Instead, the Court should consider recognizing a right to education that requires states to provide an education-based justification for the quality of education provided and any disparities in educational opportunity . Such a standard would enable states to offer disparate opportunities to students with disabilities, English-language learners, and low-income children, but would force states to end the superior opportunities that are provided to wealthier children absent an educational justification for such disparities. Defining a fundamental right to education in this way would help to level the playing field within public schools and insist that states design education systems based on research and students' needs rather than power, politics, and privilege.

Second, the Court should include safeguards that reduce the likelihood that states level down their educational opportunities

n318 or seek to avoid the Court's requirements . n319 One safeguard could be an instruction to states that guaranteeing a federal right to education should avoid reducing the quality and nature of existing educational opportunities and instead should seek ways to expand the delivery of a high-quality education to those who are currently denied it. The Court also can reduce the likelihood of decreasing the quality of educational opportunities within a state by providing clear requirements on the nature of the education right. In this regard, the Court can learn from decades of school finance litigation that has worked to give meaning to the right to education embodied in state constitutions, n320 while recognizing [*235] that this litigation has had significant shortcomings and has not ultimately resulted in equal access to an excellent education for all children. n321Third, the Court must acknowledge that a constitutional right to education would shift education federalism in ways that would increase federal influence over education and reduce some aspects of state control over education. The Court must wrestle with its own prior pronouncements heralding the importance of local control of education. n322 Such a shift in an

area of traditional state control must be justified with an explanation for why this shift is both appropriate and warranted. n323When the Court provides this explanation, it should remind the states that Rodriguez urged state reform of school finance systems in light of the persistent and heavy reliance on property taxes and the disparities in educational opportunity. n324 The limited nature and impact of subsequent reforms remains apparent in light of the Equity and Excellence Commission's finding in 2013 that "students, families and communities are burdened by the broken system of education funding in America." n325 The Commission further noted that over forty years of reforms "have not addressed the fundamental sources of inequities and so have not generated the educational gains desired." n326 Scholars also have recognized the limited success of decades of funding litigation to remedy longstanding inequitable disparities in educational opportunity. n327 School funding data and research also confirm a host of shortcomings in state funding systems despite the Court's invitation to reform funding in ways that increase equal educational opportunities. n328In addition to the shortcomings noted above, most states have not designed their funding systems to accomplish their education goals. n329 Instead,

politics oftentimes drives the distribution of funding as state [*236]

politicians assess how much funding is available for a given school year and then bargain over how that amount should be divided among the students in the state. n330 When the Court acknowledges

that its decision will result in a shift in education federalism, it also should acknowledge that the laboratory of the states has failed to develop the reforms needed to ensure an equitable and excellent education for every child.Fourth, the Court must acknowledge that recognizing a constitutional right to education would only begin the process of closing opportunity and achievement gaps. The reform of funding systems and the redistribution of educational opportunity will take a significant amount of time. The Court will need to encourage lower courts to retain jurisdiction over cases enforcing this right, just as state courts typically retain jurisdiction over cases enforcing a state right to education. n331In this regard, the Court must avoid the errors of its desegregation cases, which initially insisted on effective desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, n332 but then eventually emphasized the return to local control of schools rather than the effectiveness of desegregation orders. For example, in Milliken v. Bradley, n333 the Court overturned an interdistrict desegregation plan for the metropolitan Detroit area in part because the plan's inclusion of districts surrounding Detroit would cause a reduction in local control. n334 The Court took this action in spite of the Sixth Circuit's finding that crossing district boundaries was particularly appropriate given the state's discrimination that maintained racial segregation across school district boundaries and that failing to include the surrounding districts would "nullify" Brown v. Board of Education. n335 As I have explored in prior work, the Court's desegregation decisions in Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, n336 Freeman v. Pitts, n337 and Missouri v. Jenkins n338 [*237] also reified local control of the schools by focusing on releasing districts from court supervision rather than on effective and lasting school desegregation. n339 Scholars have documented how these cases signaled that the Court had determined that desegregation had gone on long enough and it was time for school boards to regain control even if desegregation was never ultimately accomplished. n340If a federal right to education is going to serve as a mechanism to close educational opportunity gaps and to reduce the need for selective institutions to rely on consideration of an applicant's race to achieve diversity's benefits, the Court must learn from how its desegregation decisions undeniably contributed to the racial isolation that pervades so many school districts today. n341 The Court's impatience with the slow nature of desegregation reveals a shallow understanding of the depth of the social ill that the Court declared unconstitutional in Brown and an unwillingness to insist upon ongoing federal court investment in the effective dismantling of segregation. Overturning Rodriguez will require the Court to confront longstanding and deeply entrenched inequalities within public education. The federal courts will be called upon to oversee reforms that topple the settled expectations of more privileged sectors of society, just as the Court confronted the expectations of racism and white privilege that supported racial segregation. Thus, the reforms required by the Court cannot give a wink and a nod to those who benefit from the status quo while simultaneously claiming to demand reform.The Court must eschew any approval of unwarranted delay, as

occurred in Brown II's command to desegregate with "all deliberate speed," n342 or any invitation to incomplete or ineffective results, as the Court sanctioned in

Dowell, Freeman, and Jenkins. n343 Instead, the Court must insist that states implement the reforms that will ensure [*238] equal access to an

excellent education. It must make clear that states will not be released from court oversight until they have done so. Consistent Supreme Court insistence on an excellent and equitable education for all children will provide lower federal courts the support that they will need both to confront state legislatures that resist changing the status quo and to prevent evasive actions similar to those invited by the Court's ambiguous pronouncements in Brown II. n344

In sum, a federal right to education that embraces these principles provides the most promising path toward closing opportunity and achievement gaps such that selective postsecondary institutions may not be required to

consider race to achieve diversity's benefits. n345 Unless the Court overturns Rodriguez, the Court will remain complicit with the deeply entrenched educational opportunity gaps and should not blame postsecondary institutions that must build diverse institutions despite those gaps.Foonote n345: Additionally, Congress could take a variety of actions to support the Court's recognition of a constitutional right to education. Congress could embrace the Court's requirements as conditions on funding in the E lementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 or on any education funding, authorize grants to support reform, extend funding for the DOE to enforce new conditions, and monitor DOE enforcement of the conditions . See Robinson, supra note 141, (manuscript at 34-49) (proposing congressional mechanisms that could lead states to offer equal access to an excellent education); Robinson, supra note 18, at 1006-12 (describing how Congress can still expand the federal role in education despite the limits NFIB v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566 (2012), placed on congressional spending). The executive branch could issue an executive order on the importance of compliance with the Court's decision recognizing a federal right to education, establish a commission to study and recommend effective responses, enforce any statutory conditions on education funding , and modify education regulations and guidance consistent with the Court 's pronouncements. These efforts would provide critical support for the Court's decision to recognize a constitutional right to education by overturning Rodriguez. See San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 35 (1973).

Third, restoring the positive federal role in education is necessary to rectify racial and class oppression and promote integration. Only federal action can achieve educational equality. Sundquist 17 — Christian B. Sundquist, Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Albany Law School, former Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, 2017 (“Positive Education Federalism: The Promise of Equality after the Every Student Succeeds Act,” Mercer Law Review (68 Mercer L. Rev. 351), Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)B. A Positively Federalist View for Future Reauthorizations of the ESEA

A positive conception of federalism is particularly justified when attempting to divine the appropriate federal role in public education. As discussed previously, the primary constitutional basis for federal involvement in public education is premised on the government's responsibility to take positive action to remedy racial and class inequalities. n186 The Brown constitutional doctrine and the "War on Poverty" driven by the ESEA forged an understanding of education federalism rooted in positive social justice . It is particularly appropriate today that we restore this fundamental understanding of education federalism, given evidence of increasing racial disparities in public education and the noted failures of modern education federalism policy.

The federal guarantee of equal public education is critical ly important to the functioning of our democracy . As a public good, education helps our society develop those "fundamental values necessary to the transmission of our democratic society." n187 The provision of an equitable public education , devoid of identity- based disparities , is critical to provide children with " the knowledge needed to understand and participate effectively in the democratic process and to cultivate among children respect for and the ability to interact with others as beings of inherently equal moral worth ." n188 Indeed, both classic and contemporary constitutional scholars

argue that equal public education should be regarded as " a fundamental duty , or positive fundamental right because education is a basic human need and a constituent part of all democratic rights ." n189 The need, then, for a robust application of positive education federalism principles in this context cannot be stronger. [*385] The purpose of this Article is not to provide specific curricular recommendations to guide the future of public education. n190 Rather, this Article has attempted to define a new vision of positive education federalism - one that is rooted in a historical understanding of the constitutional obligation of the federal government to shape education policy goals in a manner that responds to unrelenting racial and class disparities. A few core principles regarding the substantive dimension of positive education federalism can be gleaned from this discussion:1. First Principle: Providing an equal public education is a federal responsibility that cannot be transferred to or assumed by private market forces.

The overarching conclusion of this Article is that ESSA, NCLB, and RTT unconstitutionally transfer federal responsibility for positively eliminating racial and class inequality in public education to private market forces under the auspices of competitive federalism. n191 This reading of the federal role in public education is ahistorical and undermines the core principles of equality informing Brown-era education federalism . n192

2. Second Principle: Positive federal action is justifiable in public education when necessary to rectify historical patterns of racial and class oppression.

It follows from the first principle that positive federal intervention in public education is justified when employed to directly respond to our unbroken history of racial and class disparities in educational outcomes. The original vision of the ESEA and Brown anticipated future positive efforts by the federal government to wield its block grant powers to actively dismantle old systems of oppression. n193 The current statutory framework has abandoned this vision of equality in its misguided pursuit to harness the market forces of consumer choice, accountability, and competition to limit the federal role in education . n194 [*386] 3. Third Principle: Our education federalism must acknowledge that racial discrimination and class oppression are the true roots of current educational disparities .Third, it is of the utmost importance that our education federalism fully acknowledge the historical and continuing causes of education disparities: racial discrimination and poverty. n195 The race and class-based roots of educational inequality are well-known and well-documented, and our education federalism can no longer hide behind the veil of ignorance provided by ESSA, NCLB, and RTT. n196 Far from acknowledging the reality of educational disparities, our current competitive federalist framework for education actively attempts to conceal these roots, with the specious promise that the free market principles of choice, accountability, and competition will eventually equalize education. n197 Modeling our education federalism around such race and class "neutral" market principles have led to a deepening of the crisis while allowing society to ignore the ways in which privilege shapes outcomes. n198

4. Fourth Principle: Our education federalism must strive to promote racial and class integration.

Finally, any equality-based vision of education federalism must promote the social integration of our public schools. The current competitive conception of education policy has failed those "faces at the bottom of [the] well" n199 and led to a rampant racial re-segregation of our schools . n200 This failure evinces a lack of faith and duty in fulfilling the original integrationist goals of Brown and the ESEA. Therefore, a positive theory of education federalism must promote federal efforts to integrate our public schools.

These core principles, on a theory of positive education federalism, can be used to inform future reauthorizations of the ESEA. While this Article does not attempt to advance specific changes in statutory law, it has attempted to redefine the substantive dimension of our education federalism in a manner that restores our faith in Brown, the ESEA, and the promise of racial and class equality. [*387] ConclusionThe neoliberal vision of education federalism embodied by ESSA, NCLB, and RTT has improperly shifted the federal government's role in public education from one of promoting desegregation and social equality to one of promoting market efficiency through the artifices of competition, choice, and accountability. This deflection of moral responsibility for class and racial inequality is tied to a larger process of post-racialism and "post-oppression," whereby seemingly "neutral" market solutions are seen as sufficient to promote equality in a liberal democracy. There is, after all, a comforting allure to believing that social inequality is non-systemic, and thus avoiding the cognitive dissonance (and structural upheaval) that comes from confronting our continuing legacy of racial and class privilege.

Allowing the "invisible hand" of the market to sort educational outcomes under the guise of "competition," "choice," and "accountability," however, has led to a deepening of the crisis confronting our public schools . The federal role in public education has been reduced to incentivizing reform centered around market principles, rather than promoting desegregation and the equality envisioned by Brown and the original ESEA. "Our

federalism" demands more than this. The substantive dimension of education federalism , as constitutionalized by Brown and framed by the original ESEA, must be restored in our public education policy. The adoption of a positive conception of the federal role in public education to frame future policy discussions can put us once again on the path towards achieving equality of educational outcome for all students.

Fourth, increased funding is vital to improve schools — the best research confirms. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 1-2)Executive Summary

This second edition policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education . It includes research released since the original brief in 2012 and

covers a handful of additional topics. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn’t make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to

education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality.In the following brief, I discuss major studies on three specific topics: (a) whether how much money schools spend matters; (b) whether specific schooling resources that cost money matter; and (c) whether substantive and sustained state school finance reforms matter. Regarding these three questions, I conclude:Does Money Matter?Yes . On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes . The size of this effect is larger in some studies than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that may moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. In other words, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Do Schooling Resources That Cost Money Matter?Yes . Schooling resources that cost money , including smaller class sizes, additional supports, early childhood programs and more competitive teacher compensation (permitting schools and districts to recruit and retain a higher-quality teacher workforce), are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, in some cases, those effects are larger

than in others, and there is also variation by student population and other contextual variables. On the whole, however, the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Do State School Finance Reforms Matter?Yes . Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes . While money alone may not be the answer, more equitable and adequate allocation of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the equity and adequacy of outcomes. The available evidence suggests that appropriate combinations of more adequate funding with more accountability for its use may be most promising. [end page 1]While there may in fact be better and more efficient ways to leverage the education dollar toward improved student outcomes, we do know the following:• Many of the ways in which schools currently spend money do improve student outcomes.

• When schools have more money, they have greater opportunity to spend productively. When they don’t, they can’t.

• Arguments that across-the-board budget cuts will not hurt outcomes are completely unfounded .

In short, money matters , resources that cost money matter , and a more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes . Policymakers would be well-advised to rely on high-quality research to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance .

Finally, claims that “money doesn’t matter” are unethical and wrong. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 15-19)Summing Up The EvidenceThis brings me to a summary of the evidence on whether money matters in education. Despite the relative consistency of empirical findings over time regarding (a) whether per-pupil spending itself is related to student outcomes; (b) whether spending-related resources, such as teacher wages and class sizes, are related to student outcomes; and (c) whether improving the adequacy and equity of school funding can have positive effects on student outcomes, a persistent cloud of doubt hangs over political deliberations on school funding. Here, I review briefly the sources of that doubt, relative to what we do know with some confidence as well as what we still have yet to figure out about money and student outcomes.Main sources of doubtThe primary source of doubt to this day remains the above-mentioned Eric

Hanushek finding in 1986 that “there appears to be no strong or systematic relationship between school expenditures and student performance.”117 This single quote, now divorced entirely from the soundly refuted analyses on which it was based, remains a mantra for those wishing to deny that increased funding for schools is a viable option for improving school quality. Add to this statement the occasional uninformative and inflammatory anecdote regarding urban district spending and student outcomes in places

like Kansas City or New Jersey, or the frequently re-created graphs showing spending and achievement over the past few decades, and one has a rhetorical war against an otherwise overwhelming body of empirical evidence.118

While research evidence regarding the importance of funding and specific schooling resources for improving student outcomes has become clearer with time, Hanushek and a [end page 15] handful of peers have become even more entrenched in their views , as reflected in recent public testimony. Rhetoric among detractors has continued to drift from the cloud of

doubt to a rock of certainty. That is, certainty that money has little or no role in improving school quality, and that school finance reforms that infuse additional funds only lead to greater inefficiency, having little or no effect on either equity or adequacy of schooling. Notably, Hanushek asserts (now and then) that it’s not that money doesn’t matter at all, but rather that additional money doesn’t matter on top of the already high levels of spending that currently exist across all U.S. schools.To summarize, the current dogma of Hanushek includes the following core tenets:1. Because schools already spend so much and do so with such great inefficiency, additional funding is unlikely to lead to improved student outcomes.2. How money is used matters much more than how much money is spent.3. Differences in the amount of money some schools have than others are inconsequential, since those with less may simply make smarter spending decisions.According the recent rhetoric of Hanushek, these principles are ironclad. In his own words, they are “conventional wisdom” on which “virtually all analysts” agree. They are “commonly believed,” “overall truth” and backed by an “enormous amount of scientific analysis,” “substantial econometric evidence” and “considerable prior research.” For example, in the winter of 2015, in the context of school funding litigation in New York state, Hanushek opined:

“An enormous amount of scientific analysis has focused on how spending and resources of schools relates to student outcomes. It is now commonly believed that spending on schools is not systematically related to student outcomes.”119

Yet, the enormous amount of scientific analysis to which Hanushek referred in his expert testimony was primarily referenced to a 2003 summary of much of his prior work from the 1980s , work which has been discredited on numerous occasions , 120 including by research produced in the last 12 years. Similarly, in the same context (Maisto v. State of New York), Hanushek proclaims:

“There has been substantial econometric evidence that supports this lack of relationship.”Hanushek again backs his claims with the same short list of dated self-citation.121 In an even more recent attempt to rebut a new, major study finding positive effects of school finance reforms,122 Hanushek (2015) makes the following version of the same claim:

“Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom.”123

This time, he anchored that claim only to his 2003 piece (by hyperlink to the “prior research” phrase) on the failure of input-based schooling policies, 124 choosing to ignore entirely the considerably larger body of more rigorous work I summarize in my 2012 review on the topic.The extension of these claims that nearly everyone agrees there’s no clear relationship between spending and student performance is the assertion that there is broad agreement that how money is spent matters far more than how much money is available. As phrased by Hanushek in the context of New York state school finance litigation:

“Virtually all analysts now realize that how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent.”125As with the prior declarations, this one is made with the exceedingly bold assertion that virtually all analysts agree on this point—without reference to any empirical evidence to that point (a seemingly gaping omission for a decidedly empirical claim about a supposedly empirical truth). Further, “how money is spent” is constrained by whether sufficient money is there to begin with. While common sense dictates that how money is spent clearly matters, thus making this part of the statement widely agreeable, this does not preclude the relevance of how much money is available to spend.Perhaps most disconcerting is that Hanushek has recently extended this argument to declare that equity gaps in funding, or measures of them, aren’t an important policy concern either. Specifically, Hanushek proclaims:

“It also underscores how calculations of equity gaps in spending, of costs needed to achieve equity, or of costs needed to obtain some level of student performance are vacuous, lacking any scientific basis” (p. 4).126

Put differently, what Hanushek is opining by declaring calculations of equity gaps to be

vacuous and lacking scientific basis is that it matters not whether one school or district has more resources than another. Regardless of any spending differences, schools and districts can provide equitable education—toward equitable outcome goals. Those with substantively fewer resources simply need to be more efficient. Since all public schools and districts are presently so inefficient, achieving these efficiency gains through more creative personnel policies, such as performance-based pay and dismissal of “bad teachers,” is easily attainable.Of course, even if we assume that creative personnel policies yield marginal improvements to efficiency, if schools with varied levels of resources pursued these strategies [end page 16] with comparable

efficiency gains, inequities would remain constant. Requiring those with less to simply be more efficient with what they have is an inequitable requirement. This argument is often linked in

popular media and the blogosphere with the popular book and film Moneyball, which asserts that clever statistical analysis for selecting high-productivity, undervalued players was the basis for the (short-lived) success in 2002 and 2003 of the low-payroll Oakland Athletics baseball team. The flaws of this analogy are too many to explore thoroughly herein, but the biggest flaw is illustrated by the oft-ignored subtitle of the book: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game . That is, gaining a leg up through clever player selection is necessary in baseball because vast wealth and payroll differences across teams make baseball an unfair game. The public’s interest in providing equitable and adequate funding for education is likely greater than ensuring equitable and adequate baseball payrolls. Put more bluntly,

the education of present and future generations should not be an unfair game.

From judges to scholars , critics of Hanushek have characterized his evidence as “ facile ,” based on “ fuzzy logic ,” 127 and “ weak and factually tenuous .” 128 Two recurring examples used by Hanushek to illustrate the unimportance of funding increases for improving outcomes are the “long-term trend” or “time trend” argument and anecdotal claims of the failures of input-based reforms in New Jersey. Baker and Welner (2011) tackle in depth the fallacies of Hanushek’s New Jersey claims.129 Here, I point to Hanushek’s own, albeit facile, unacknowledged self-debunking of his New Jersey claims. But first, I address the long-term trend claim.Again, from recent testimony in New York state, Hanushek provides the following exposition of the long-term trend assertion:

“The overall truth of this disconnect of spending and outcomes is easiest to see by looking at the aggregate data for the United States over the past half century. Since 1960, pupil-teacher ratios fell by one-third, teachers with master’s degrees over doubled, and median teacher experience grew significantly (Chart 1).4 Since these three factors are the most important determinants of spending per pupil, it leads to the quadrupling of spending between 1960 and 2009 (after adjusting for inflation). At the same time, plotting scores for math and reading performance of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows virtually no change since 1970 (Charts 2 and 3).5”130

This claim, like many of Hanushek’s, is made with language of astounding certainty—the “overall truth” as it exists in the mind of Hanushek. This claim is commonly accompanied by graphs showing per-pupil spending going up over time, pupil-to-teacher ratios going down and national assessment scores appearing relatively flat, much of which is achieved via the smoke and mirrors of representing spending and outcome data on completely different scales, and via the failure to adjust appropriately for the changing costs and related obligations of the public education system and for the changing demography of the tested population.131 Oversimplified visuals are used to make the proclamation that student achievement shows “virtually no change,” a statement discredited on closer inspection.132 Jackson, Johnson and Persico (2015) provide additional examples of how such facile analyses lead to fallacious conclusions.133As explained by Baker and Welner (2011),134 Hanushek for years has cited the failures of New Jersey’s school finance reforms as the basis for why other states should not increase funding to high-poverty schools. In litigation in Kansas in 2011, Hanushek proclaimed:

“The dramatic spending increases called for by the courts (exhibit 34) have had little to no impacts on achievement. Compared to the rest of the nation, performance in New Jersey has not increased across most grades and racial groups (exhibits 35-40). These results suggest caution in considering the ability of courts to improve educational outcomes.”135

Hanushek reiterated these claims in the context of a even more recent New York school funding challenge.136 This is a surprising claim to preserve when one’s own recent (2012), marginally more rigorous analyses of state achievement growth rates on national assessments (from 1992 to 2011)137 find the following:

“The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.”138

Further, the same report reveals that New Jersey has seen particularly strong growth in reducing the number of the lowest-performing students (those scoring at the “below basic” level), especially for eighth-grade math. To be sure, there are others in academe and policy research that raise questions about the most effective ways to leverage school funding to achieve desired outcomes, and do so via more

rigorous, thoughtful analyses. The most recent rigorous and relevant academic research is addressed in the remainder of this brief. There are others who opine in the public square139 and courtroom140 that school finance reform—specifically infusing additional funding to districts serving high-need student populations—is neither the most effective nor the most efficient path toward improving schooling equity or adequacy. But empirical evidence to support claims of more efficient alternatives remains elusive.No rigorous empirical study of which I am aware validates that increased funding for schools in general, or targeted to [end page 17] specific populations, has led to any substantive, measured reduction in student outcomes or other “harm.” Arguably, if this were the case, it would open new doors to school finance litigation against states that choose to increase funding to schools. Twenty years ago, economist Richard Murnane summarized the issue exceptionally well when he stated:

“In my view, it is simply indefensible to use the results of quantitative studies of the relationship between school resources and student achievement as a basis for concluding that additional funds cannot help public school districts. Equally disturbing is the claim that the removal of funds … typically does no harm” (p. 457).141

Murnane’s quote is as relevant today as it was then. The sources of doubt on the “Does money matter?” question are not credible .While there remains much to debate, discuss and empirically evaluate regarding the returns to each additional dollar spent in schools—and the strategies for improving educational efficiency, equity and adequacy—we must finally be willing to cast aside the most inane arguments and sources of evidence on either side of the debate. Specifically, the following five contentions no longer have a legitimate place in the debate over state school finance policy and whether and how money matters in K-12 education:1. Vote counts of correlational studies between spending and outcomes, without regard for rigor of the analyses and quality of the data on which they depend; 2. The long-term trend argument and supporting graphs that show long-term spending going up and NAEP scores staying flat ; 3. International comparisons asserting , and perhaps illustrating via scatterplot,

that the United States spends more than other developed countries but achieves less on international assessments; 4. Anecdotal assertions that states such as New Jersey and cities such as Kansas City provide proof positive that massive infusions of funding have proven ineffective at improving student outcomes; and5. The assertion that how money is spent is much more important than how much is available .

Vote count tallies without regard for study quality and rigor are of relative little use for understanding whether money matters in schooling and are of no use for discerning how. The long-term trend argument is perhaps the most reiterated of all arguments that money doesn’t matter,

but it is built largely on deceptive, oversimplified and largely wrong characterizations (accompanied by distorted visuals) of the long- term trends in student outcomes and school spending. Facile international comparisons are equally deceitful , in that they (a)

fail to account for differences in student populations served and

the related scope of educational and related services provided; and (b) fail to appropriately equate educational spending across nations, including the failure to account for the range of services and operating costs covered under “educational expense” in the United States versus other countries (for example, public employee health and pension benefits). And anecdotal assertions of failures resulting from massive infusions of funding are rebutted herein and elsewhere.142Finally, while the assertion that “how money is spent is important” is certainly valid, one cannot reasonably make the leap to assert that how money is spent is necessarily more important than how much money is available. Yes, how money is spent matters, but if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it. It is unhelpful at best for public policy, and harmful to the children subjected to those policies, to pretend without any compelling evidence that somewhere out there exists a far cheaper way to achieve the same or better outcomes (and thus we can cut our way down that more efficient path). As so eloquently noted by a three-judge panel in Kansas when faced with this question:

“Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes , then for most, it is most likely gone . We all know that the struggle for an income very often—too often— overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

“If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.”143

What do we know?Based on the studies reviewed in this brief, there are a few things we can say with confidence about the relationship between funding, resources and student outcomes.First, on average, even in large-scale studies across multiple contexts, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved and/or higher student outcomes. In some studies, the size of this effect is larger than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters . [end page 18] Second, schooling resources that cost money, including class size reductions and

increased teacher compensation, are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, these effects are larger in some cases and for some populations. On balance, though, there are ways to spend money that have a solid track record of success. Further, while there may exist alternative uses of financial resources that yield comparable or better returns in student outcomes, no clear evidence identifies what these alternatives might be.Third, sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes . While money alone may not be the answer, adequate and

equitable distributions of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the adequacy and equity of outcomes. That is, if the money isn’t there, schools and districts simply don’t have a “leverage option” that can support strategies that might improve student outcomes. If the money is there, they can use it productively; if it’s not, they can’t. But, even if they have the money, there’s no guarantee that they will use it productively. Evidence from Massachusetts, in particular, suggests that appropriate combinations of more funding with more accountability may be most promising.

1NC

1NC — Inequality Advantage1. No Inequality-Based Mortality Gap — it’s already closed. Currie and Schwandt 16 — Janet Currie, Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and Director of the Center for Health and Well Being at Princeton University, Director of the Program on Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, and Hannes Schwandt, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), 2016 (“Falling inequality in mortality in the US,” VoxEU.org—the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s policy portal, July 2nd, Available Online at http://voxeu.org/article/mortality-inequality-good-news-county-level-approach, Accessed 06-19-2017)Overall, our results show that the health of the next generation in the poorest areas of the US has improved tremendously and that the race gap has largely closed . It is surprising how little attention has been paid to this health success story in either the academic or the public discussion.

Likely drivers for the strong decline in mortality inequality are social policies that helped the most disadvantaged families. One of the most important may be expansions of public health insurance to poor pregnant women and children that took place in the late

1980s and 1990s. Other important factors include reductions in smoking prevalence, expansions of food and nutrition programs, and reductions in pollution. Overall, these findings show that even in times of great economic inequality , inequality in health outcomes is not inevitable but is strongly mediated by policy .

2. Long Timeframe — it takes decades for ed reform to reduce inequality because mobility isn’t affected until children grow up.

3. No Inequality D-Rule — it’s not a moral obligation. Frankfurt 15 — Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Princeton University, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, 2015 (“Let's Get This Straight: Income Inequality And Poverty Aren't The Same Thing,” Forbes, August 24th, Available Online at https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/08/24/lets-get-this-straight-income-inequality-and-poverty-arent-the-same-thing/#6fd78168273a, Accessed 06-19-2017)There is very considerable discussion nowadays about the increasingly conspicuous discrepancy between the incomes of wealthier Americans and the incomes of those Americans who are less wealthy. President Barack Obama has declared that income inequality is the greatest political challenge of our time. But just what is so awful about economic inequality? Why should we have this great concern, urged upon us by so many politicians and public figures, about the growing gap between the incomes of the richest people in our country and the incomes of those who are less affluent?The first thing to notice is that economic inequality, however undesirable it may be for

various reasons, is not inherently a bad thing . Think about it: We could arrange for the members of a society to be economically equal by ensuring that the economic resources available to each member of the society put everyone equally below the poverty

line . To make everyone equally poor is , obviously, not a very intelligent social ambition.

Insofar as people aim for equality (i.e., having the same as others), they are distracted from measuring the specific economic needs that are implied by their own particular interests, ambitions and capacities. The trouble with adopting equality as a social goal, then, is that it is alienating. It diverts people from being guided, in assessing their personal economic circumstances, by the most pertinent features of their own lives; and it leads them instead to measure their economic needs according to the significantly less pertinent circumstances of others.It isn’t especially desirable that each have the same as others. What is bad is not inequality; it is poverty . We should want each person to have enough—that is, enough to support the pursuit of a life in which his or her own reasonable ambitions and needs may be comfortably satisfied. This individually measured sufficiency, which by definition precludes the burdens and deprivations of poverty, is clearly a more sensible goal than the achievement of an impersonally calibrated equality.There is, of course, an evil other than poverty which it is important to avoid. The social undesirability of wide economic inequality does not lie only in a concurrent incidence of poverty. It lies also in the superior political influence, and other competitive advantages, enjoyed by those who are especially well-off. These advantages, when they are deliberately exploited, tend to undermine a fundamental requirement of our constitutionally mandated social order. Accordingly, such anti-democratic misuses of the competitive advantages provided by exceptional wealth must be discouraged by suitable legislative, regulatory and judicial oversight.It is not inequality itself that is to be decried; nor is it equality it - self that is to be applauded. We must try to eliminate poverty, not because the poor have less than others but because being poor is full of hardship and suffering. We must control inequality, not because the rich have much more than the poor but because of the tendency of inequality to generate unacceptable discrepancies in social and political influence. Inequality is not in itself objectionable—and neither is equality in itself a morally required ideal.

4. K-12 Not Key — preschool and college access also needed. Plan can’t solve without extra-topical reform.

5. “Right To Education” Fails — many other policies also key. Darby and Levy 11 — Derrick Darby, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, and Richard E. Levy, J.B. Smith Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Kansas School of Law, holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago School of Law, 2011 (“Slaying The Inequality Villain In School Finance: Is The Right To Education The Silver Bullet?,” Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy (20 Kan. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 351), Summer, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)C. ImplicationsWhether school finance litigation relies on adequacy or equity and whether one chooses to understand the philosophical demands of a right to education in terms of adequacy or equality, attending to the empirical evidence suggests that it will take much more than improved resources to address the complex problem of educational inequality . Indeed, once we expand our horizons to consider the full and complex array of factors that affect educational achievement, it is clear that the right to an education cannot alone bear the burden of alleviating educational inequality , especially if the right is understood in terms of educational

funding. To illustrate, assuming that adequacy theorists are correct about the negative impact of

segregation on unequal group-based educational outcomes, societal efforts may have to reach well beyond schools , perhaps to mandate greater integration in places where people live, work, worship, and play. It is unlikely that simply bringing young and middle school age children together in school for a few hours a day, five days a week, will be enough to overcome many of the negative effects of voluntary segregation in other parts of society. Of course, such a proposal would be met with serious resistance and criticism. Still, it may be difficult for proponents of greater integration to avoid moving in this direction.If we consider additional factors , such as the health and cognitive effects of poverty, teacher perceptions of student ability, or teacher expectations or student expectations of discrimination in the labor market as factors shaping educational outcomes, then it is also clear that merely recognizing a right to education will not suffice. We would have to combine this right with a larger effort to reduce poverty, greater enforcement of existing anti-discrimination laws, or the development of new approaches to targeting subtle and not so subtle forms of discrimination throughout society . Hence, a serious appreciation of the complexity of the empirical debate regarding the factors that shape educational outcomes seems to demand a more cautious assessment about the prospect of recognizing a right to education as the silver bullet to slay the educational inequality villain .Although we may someday have a better empirical understanding of the factors affecting educational success, it is clear that scholars have yet to settle this matter. For practical purposes, then, what matters most is that we are more circumspect when we draw conclusions about weighty matters pertaining to the demands of equality and justice. In the present case, the variety of competing explanations of unequal educational outcomes forces us to curb our enthusiasm for the prospects that recognizing a right to education will suffice to eradicate educational inequalities. Many factors affect educational outcomes - some related to resources, others related to the educational system and the manner in which education is delivered, and many that are unrelated to the educational system. Pending a final settlement of these matters, which is highly improbable, it will be all the more difficult for courts, lawyers, and [*377] policymakers to sort out the problem of educational inequality. n121

6. Funding Not Key — empirically proven. Hanushek 15 — Eric A. Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Texas Schools Project and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Dallas, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, former Commissioner of the Equity and Excellence Commission at the U.S. Department of Education, former Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of Rochester, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015 (“Not Enough Value to Justify More of the Same,” Room for Debate—a New York Times scholarly blog, March

26th, Available Online at https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/26/is-improving-schools-all-about-money/not-enough-value-to-justify-more-of-the-same, Accessed 06-07-2017)It is hard getting around the historic facts. Real per pupil spending has more than doubled in the past 40 years, but the math ematics and reading scores of 17-year-olds have barely budged .

We must recognize that more of the same is unlikely to yield better results – and by implication reform through spending is not the way to improvement.

Advocates of more spending frequently attempt to trivialize the position of critics by twisting it into “money does not matter.” That statement is, of course, silly, because schools must pay salaries, buy equipment and run a variety of programs that do indeed require money. But in simple terms, how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent . The problem has been that schools have not systematically used additional funds in ways that lead to improvements in student outcomes — and there is no reason to expect better choices in the future.Supporters of added funding — as opposed to more fundamental reform in how money is used — frequently argue that it is other forces that prevent schools from doing better: Their students are more disadvantaged or there is more need for special education, etc. Even generous allowances for spending associated with educational mandates do not explain or justify the more than doubled spending over the past four decades, without any gains in achievement.To an economist, a central issue is incentives for school personnel. There are no extra rewards for teaching well or consequences for teaching badly. If we simply raise all salaries for school personnel — for both effective and ineffective educators — we should not be surprised when student achievement does not change. If we further reduce teacher-pupil ratios, even after the disappointing results of the past two decades, we should not be surprised that spending rises with no gain in achievement.Given decades of unproductive spending increases, it is a mistake to lead with greater spending and hope for the best .

7. Solvency Empirically Denied — courts backed down in the face of local backlash after Brown v. Board. History will repeat. Aff can’t fiat follow-through, only the initial mandate.

8. Schools Not Key To Inequality — Finland proves. Bruenig 14 — Matt Bruenig, Freelance Writer specializing in Poverty and Political Theory, has written for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The American Prospect, In These Times, Jacobin, and Dissent, 2014 (“America’s dangerous education myth: Why it isn’t the best anti-poverty program,” Salon, May 12th, Available Online at http://www.salon.com/2014/05/12/americas_dangerous_education_myth_no_it_isnt_the_best_anti_poverty_program/, Accessed 06-19-2017)If you’ve followed the education reform debate in this country, the Finland story should be familiar by now. Almost as if engaged in an elaborate troll, Finland has apparently organized its educational system in exactly the opposite way as the reform movement here claims is necessary. The reformers say we need longer school days, but the Finns have short ones. The reformers say we need extensive standardized testing, but the Finns have almost none. The reformers say we need to keep a close leash on teachers, but the Finns give their teachers considerable freedom. Despite all of these pedagogical mistakes, the Finns consistently find themselves at the top of the international education scoreboard.Normally, the suggested lesson of the Finland story is that the education reformers’ proposals are at minimum unnecessary and perhaps even counterproductive. Whether this lesson actually falls out of the Finland story is the subject of hotly contested arguments that are insufferably boring. However, flying under the radar of these Finland debates is a much less contestable and interesting lesson: Education cannot deliver economic equality.

If ever there was an opportunity to show that education can fix inequality and poverty, Finland is it. The children come into its education system with the lowest poverty rates in the world. In addition to its overall excellence, Finland’s education system is

also extremely egalitarian in the way that it instructs its pupils. There are almost no private schools, college is free, and an ethos of total inclusion seems to reign. It is the closest thing to the liberal education utopia as you will probably ever find .

Despite all of this, Finnish economic inequality and poverty is still quite high, at least when you look at the market distribution of income. In 2010, Finland’s market poverty rate (defined as those with incomes below 50 percent of the

median income) was 32.2 percent. By comparison, the United States’ market poverty was actually lower at 28.4 percent. When it comes to overall inequality, Finland’s Gini coefficient in 2010 was 0.479. This was only slightly lower than the U.S.’ Gini coefficient, which stood at 0.499.

Education boosters bizarrely think that providing everyone a high-quality education will somehow magically result in them all having good-paying jobs. But, as Finland shows , this turns out not to be true. Apparently, it’s not possible for everyone to simultaneously hold jobs as well-paid upper-class professionals because at least some people have to actually do real work. A modern economy requires a whole army of lesser-skilled jobs that just don’t pay that well and the necessity of those jobs doesn’t go away simply because people are well-educated.

The reason Finland’s ultimate distribution of income is so equal is not because its great education system has made everyone receive high paychecks (an impossible task), but because Finland has put in place distributive policies that make sure its national income is shared broadly. In 2010, Finland’s tax level was 42.5 percent of its GDP, which was nearly double the tax level of the U.S. By strategically spreading that tax money around through a host of cash transfer and benefit programs, Finland’s high market poverty rate of 32.2 percent fell to just 7.3 percent. Its child poverty rate, which Finland focuses extra attention on, fell down to 3.9 percent. Overall economic inequality took a similar dive.

The real lesson that the Finland story teaches us is not the one about

pedagogical techniques that draws so much fierce debate. Rather, it’s a lesson about what very successful pedagogy and excellent education can actually do for a society. Good education can make your society well-educated and more productive, but it cannot generate a labor market in which everyone works a high-paying job. It cannot ensure that

market income is distributed evenly or adequately. It cannot even come remotely close to doing those things.

The upshot of this lesson is that the fixation on education as a solution to poverty, inequality or any other distributional problem is totally wrongheaded . Good and equitable education is a huge plus for all sorts of

things, but it doesn’t create an egalitarian society . Those who say it will – a group that includes reformers and their opponents – have no idea what they are talking about and , through their ignorant distractions,

help sow the seeds of never-ending stratification and low-end material insecurity.

9. Status Quo Solves — ESSA promotes equity. Cook-Harvey et al. 16 — Channa M. Cook-Harvey, Senior Researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, former Research and Practice Associate at the School of Education at Stanford University, holds a Ph.D. in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education from Stanford University, et al., with Linda Darling-Hammond, President of the Learning Policy Institute, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University, former President of the American Educational Research Association, former Senior Social Scientist and Director of the RAND Education and Human Resources Program at the RAND Corporation, holds an Ed.D. in Urban Education from Temple University, Livia Lam, Senior Policy Advisor at the Learning Policy Institute, Charmaine Mercer, Director of the DC office and Senior Researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, and Martens Roc, Policy and Outreach Advisor at the Learning Policy Institute, 2016 (Equity and ESSA: Leveraging Educational Opportunity Through the Every Student Succeeds Act, Published by the Learning Policy Institute, Available Online at https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Equity_ESSA_REPORT.pdf, Accessed 06-18-2017, p. 2)ESSA and Its Implications for Educational EquityA critical role for the federal government is to promote equity for underserved children and youth, and the nation’s most prominent education laws have long had equal educational opportunity as a central mission. However, equity is still far from accomplished in the United States.4

Fortunately, there is greater attention to these issues than has been true for many years.

The recent passage of ESSA is intended to address many of the shortcomings of NCLB. ESSA explicitly calls for the teaching of higher-order thinking skills , and allows states to replace the sanctions that narrowed the curriculum and caused good teachers to flee from low-performing schools with strategies for continuous improvement.5 However, its emphasis on state control of accountability systems to achieve these goals has raised concerns among

advocates that states may overlook the needs of low-performing schools or fail to address the achievement gap between traditionally

underserved students and their peers. This has led some advocates to question if equity has been lost under ESSA .

These concerns are legitimate given the long history of unequal educational opportunity in the United States, from the time of slavery— when it was a crime to teach an enslaved person to read—through segregated systems offering dramatically different resources for learning. At the same time, it is clear that a new strategy is needed to ensure a high-quality education for all. In fact, a close examination of ESSA

shows that , in many respects, it provides more leverage for equity than NCLB. For example, it is more insistent that states illuminate and address inequalities in resources, students’ access to a full and rich curriculum, and the distribution of effective , properly assigned, and experienced teachers . In addition, the law offers broader opportunities for states to consider what schools and educators need to inspire the kinds of student learning outcomes that our nation’s most privileged children enjoy .

10. No “Structural Violence” Solvency — aff doesn’t expand access to health care, safe housing, child care, or nutritious food. Many people will still suffer and die because of these factors after the plan.

11. Distribution Outweighs Education — there aren’t enough good jobs to solve poverty and inequality even if all students receive excellent educations. Bruenig 12 — Matt Bruenig, Freelance Writer specializing in Poverty and Political Theory, has written for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The American Prospect, In These Times, Jacobin, and Dissent, 2012 (“Education reform will not fix poverty or inequality,” Matt Bruenig’s blog, March 12th, Available Online at http://mattbruenig.com/2012/03/12/education-reform-will-not-fix-poverty-or-inequality/, Accessed 07-04-2017)As regular readers know by now, I am fairly skeptical of the Education Reform Movement. I am not convinced that the reforms advocated by this well-funded movement will actually work because I suspect that the real problem is economic inequality, not bad schools or bad teachers. But even if one believed that the policies pushed by the reformers would be successful, a question then arises: successful at what?Education reformers observe that a large achievement gap exists between poor and wealthy students, and try to find ways to eliminate that gap through reforms. But why? What is the point of eliminating the achievement gap? Reformers give many reasons, some of which are undeniably legitimate. Quality education is a freestanding good, and our present economic and educational system denies that good to multitudes of students. Eliminating ignorance is an intrinsic good worth striving for even if nothing else results from it.However, education reformers do not view reducing the achievement gap as good simply because knowledge and learning are good; they also view it as a way of reducing poverty and economic inequality . It is not just the education reformers who think this either. Almost every milquetoast liberal effort to reduce poverty centers around trying to funnel more poor people into college. The reasoning for this proceeds as follows: people with college degrees make significantly more money; therefore if everyone had a college degree, everyone would make significantly more money.This analysis does not actually make sense . It is true that if you take any given poor person and push them through college, that specific poor person will probably escape poverty as a result.

However, taking all poor people and putting them all through college will not result in all of them escaping poverty. Anyone can escape poverty, but not everyone can.

The reason you cannot scale up college as a poverty-reducer is that high-paying jobs are scarce, positional goods . In the present economy, only so many people can capture good jobs, not because only

so many people have the credentials to do so, but because only so many good jobs exist. The number and quality of jobs are decided by market forces , not the number of college graduates. You could educate every single person in the U nited States to the point where they held a joint PhD-JD-MD-MBA, but that does not mean we would suddenly become a society of doctors, lawyers, managers, and professors . The market defines how many people can hold those positions: we cannot keep adding management jobs and law jobs if there is not market demand for more.

Ultimately, someone has to clean toilets, prepare food, and build infrastructure. In fact, as Doug Henwood pointed out in the latest LBO newsletter, only 5 of the

top 20 growing professions even require a college degree. Putting more people through college wont change that, and will thus have little impact on the total amount of inequality or poverty in the U nited States. Although better educating the population wont create high-paying jobs out of thin air, it may marginally increase the productivity of workers in general. But as we have seen over the past 4 decades, increased productivity does not necessarily translate into more income for working people.In many ways, capturing high-paying jobs is a lot like capturing one of the tickets to a very popular concert. If you camp out for five days, you will capture one of the tickets. But if everyone camps out for five days, that does not mean they will all get tickets. There are only so many tickets to be captured and there are only so many high-paying jobs to be captured .So closing the achievement gap will not reduce poverty or economic inequality; it will merely change the distribution of it . Once the achievement gap is closed and we enter into the utopian world of genuine equal opportunity, poor and rich kids will have an equal chance at winding up in miserable poverty. As I

have written before, providing kids an equal opportunity to compete for the scarce , non-poverty jobs is not really an improvement , and it

certainly does not make an economy just . Education Reformers who think that they can take a bite out of inequality and poverty through closing the achievement gap misunderstand how the economy — and the labor market in particular — works.

12. Education Can’t Change Politics — money outweighs. Paige 15 — Mark Paige, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015 (“Realizing Educational Rights,” Journal of Law and Education, Volume 44, Issue 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via ProQuest)

Finally, the book omits an essential reference regarding the influence of money on the democratic process. An educated, engaged citizenry are necessary to a vibrant democracy. However, because of the disproportionate influence of money on the political system , it is insufficient .9 Those who have more money have more influence, notwithstanding their individual education . Thus,

an adequate or equal education may be a hollow victory , unless larger political reform occurs .

13. No Democracy Impact — data disproves and education isn’t key. York 17 — John York, Research Assistant at the Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, Director of Public Relations at the Program for Constitutional Democracy and Adjunct Faculty at the University of Virginia, holds a Ph.D. in American Government and Politics from the University of Virginia, 2017 (“Does Rising Income Inequality Threaten Democracy?,” The Heritage Foundation, June 30th, Available Online at http://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/does-rising-income-inequality-threaten-democracy, Accessed 07-10-2017)The argument that rising inequality threatens democracy hinges on three interlocking claims :* The upper, middle, and lower classes have divergent policy priorities. While the rich seek to cut social welfare programs and lower taxes, the middle class and poor seek to buttress the social safety net while shifting more of the tax burden to the upper class.* Those in the upper class (i.e., the rich) have outsized influence in Washington, primarily with Congress but also in the White House.* As economic inequality has grown in recent decades, the political influence of the rich has grown along with it.For the most part, as plausible as these claims may appear to be, they are not supported by the data. Political scientists who have looked into these claims have concluded that the empirical evidence supporting them suffers from four major shortcomings:* There are very few data about what the richest 1 percent—the group whose soaring incomes have been principally responsible for rising inequality since the late 1970s—want from government. There are almost no data on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans because polls typically ask respondents about their income and not their net worth. Most studies instead investigate the policy preferences of the affluent: the top 10 percent or 20 percent of income earners.

* Studies reveal that it is unusual for a policy to attract strong support among people from one income bracket only . More commonly,

policies that are unpopular with the affluent are unpopular with both the middle and lower classes. This pattern has held over time: There is no evidence that the policy preferences of the affluent are becoming more disconnected from those of the average voter as income inequality grows .

* Recent research shows that the top decile of income earners and the middle class have largely equivalent influence in

Washington with respect to major pieces of legislation and prominent executive actions (the two policy outcomes studied in the literature).5

* There is no evidence that the influence of the affluent on major policy outcomes has increased as income inequality has grown . Contrary to what one would expect from reading the studies on inequality and democracy, spending on welfare programs benefitting the poor has gone up dramatically and the tax burden on the wealthy has increased in recent decades .

Ultimately, the focus in the literature on income inequality and its impact on major federal policies like the income tax rate, welfare, and public education funding distracts attention from the real problems facing our democracy . While there is not much evidence that the affluent have more influence than the average citizen on the highly salient, broadly consequential policy matters upon which survey questions are based, this does not mean that every voice is heard equally in the halls of power.

14. Trump Thumps — his policies and character are expanding corporate influence and destroying democracy. Plan can’t undo his election.

15. Status Quo Solves Democratic Influence — their authors are too pessimistic. Stimson 14 — James Stimson, Raymond Dawson Bicentennial Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina, 2014 (“Don’t Underestimate the Power of Public Opinion,” Room for Debate—a New York Times expert blog, April 22nd, Available Online at http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/04/21/do-the-rich-call-the-shots-13/dont-underestimate-the-power-of-public-opinion, Accessed 08-12-2015) “Government doesn’t care about the views of people like me,” people often say in surveys. And undoubtedly they believe it to be true.

But that pessimistic view is wrong . The systematic evidence of broad opinion movements and government policy-making shows a strong connection between them. When public opinion changes, demanding for example more or less government, government responds in the demanded direction. And it does so quickly .

Such evidence is broadly consistent with the ideas that professionals in politics are ambitious to be re-elected and that they are astute observers of public opinion movements . We have a constitutional structure that makes them attuned to the important subgroup of Americans who turn out at the polls. (Among nonvoters the “government doesn’t care” claim is probably closer to the truth.)And we don’t need sophisticated statistical analyses to see such a pattern. Observe a 2008 election in which a more left- leaning than usual public elected Barack Obama and produced a jobs-producing stimulus and healthcare reform, followed by a Tea Party election result in 2010 which shifted the public debate

to budget cuts and deficit reduction, coming close to repeal of the Affordable Care

Act. This sort of evidence tells us that the public as a whole gets what it wants.

16. No “Right To Vote” Solvency — plan doesn’t stop voter suppression and gerrymandering.

17. Data Disproves “Funding Key” — comprehensive study. Coulson 14 — Andrew J. Coulson, Director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, former Senior Fellow in Education Policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2014 (“State Education Trends: Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis Number 746, March 18th, Available Online at https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf, Accessed 07-06-2017, p. 57)ConclusionAcademic performance and preparation for college success are widely shared goals, and so it is useful for the public and policymakers to know how they have varied over time at the state level. The present paper estimates these trends by adjusting state average SAT scores for variation in student participation rates and demographic factors known to be associated with those scores.In general, the findings are not encouraging. Adjusted state SAT scores have declined by an average of 3 percent. This echoes the picture of stagnating achievement among American 17-year-olds painted by the Long Term Trends portion of the N ational Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of

tests administered to a nationally representative sample of students since 1970. That disappointing record comes despite a more-than-doubling in inflation-adjusted per pupil public-school spending over the same period (the average state spending increase was 120 percent). Consistent with those

patterns, there has been essentially no correlation between what states have spent on education and their measured academic outcomes. In other words, America’s educational productivity appears to have collapsed, at least as measured by the NAEP and the SAT.

That is remarkably unusual. In virtually every other field, productivity has risen over this period thanks to the adoption of countless technological advances—advances that, in many cases, would seem ideally

suited to facilitating learning. And yet, surrounded by this torrent of progress, education has remained anchored to the riverbed, watching the rest of the world rush past it.

Not only have dramatic spending increases been unaccompanied by improvements in performance, the same is true of the

occasional spending declines experienced by some states. At one time or another over the past four decades, Alaska, California, Florida, and New York all experienced multi-year periods over which real spending fell substantially (20 percent or more of their 1972 expenditure levels). And

yet, none of these states experienced noticeable declines in adjusted SAT scores —either contemporaneously or lagged by a

few years. Indeed, their score trends seem entirely disconnected from their rising and falling levels of spending .Two generations seems a long time for a field to stand outside of history, particularly when those generations have witnessed so many reforms aimed at improving education. Perhaps it’s time to ask if there are inherent features in our approach to schooling that prevent it from enjoying the progress typical in other fields.

18. Weigh Consequences — deontology is irresponsible in the policy sphere. Goodin 95 — Robert E. Goodin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Social & Political Theory in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, holds a D.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, 1995 (“Utilitarianism as a public philosophy,” Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, Published by Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521462630, p. 8-10)The strength of utilitarianism, the problem to which it is a truly compelling solution, is as a guide to public rather than private conduct . There, virtually all its vices - all the things that make us wince in recommending it as a code of personal morality -

loom instead as considerable virtues .Consider first the raft of criticisms couched in terms of the impersonality of utilitarianism. Like all universalist philosophies, utilitarianism asks us to take "the view from nowhere.”19 There is no obvious place within utilitarian theories for people's idiosyncratic perspectives, histories, attachments, loyalties or personal commitments.That rings untrue to certain essential qualities of personal life. The essence of the communitarian challenge is that everyone comes from somewhere. There are no free-floating individuals, of the sort with which liberals generally, and utilitarians paradigmatically, populate their moral theories."20 People have, and upon reflection we think they should have, principled commitments and personal attachments of various sorts.21[end page 8]As an account of the peculiar role responsibilities of public officials (and, by extension, of ordinary individuals in their public capacities as citizens) that vice becomes a virtue, though. Those agents, too, have to come from somewhere, bringing with them a whole raft of baggage of personal attachments, commitments,

principles and prejudices. In their public capacities, however, we think it only right and proper that they should stow that baggage as best they can.

Complete neutrality might be an impossible ideal . That is another

matter.22 But it seems indisputable that that is an ideal which people in their public capacities should strive to realize as best they are able . That is part (indeed, a central part) of what it is to be a public official at all. It is the essence of public service as such that public servants should serve the public at large . Public servants must not play favorites.

Or consider, again, criticisms revolving around the theme that utilitarianism is a coldly calculating doctrine.23 In personal affairs that is an unattractive feature. There, we would like to suppose that certain sorts of actions proceed immediately from the heart, without much reflection much less any real calculation of consequences. Among intimates it would be extremely hurtful to think of every kind gesture as being contrived to produce some particular effect.

The case of public officials is, once again, precisely the opposite. There, it is the height of irresponsibility to proceed careless of the consequences. Public officials are , above all else, obliged to take care : not to go off half cocked, not to let their hearts rule their heads. In Hare's telling example, the very worst thing that might be said of the Suez misadventure was not that the British and French did some perfectly awful things (which is true, too) but that they did so utterly unthinkingly.Related to the critique of utilitarianism as a calculating doctrine is the critique of utilitarianism as a consequentialist doctrine. According to utilitarianism, the effects of an action are everything. There are no actions which are, in and of themselves, morally right or wrong, good or bad. The only things that are good or bad are the effects that actions produce.25That proposition runs counter to certain ethical intuitions which, at [end page 9] least in certain quarters, are rooted deeply. Those who harbor a Ten Commandments view of the nature of morality see a moral code as being essentially a list of "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" - a list of things that are right or wrong in and of themselves, quite regardless of any consequences that might come from doing them.26That may or may not be a good way to run one's private affairs. 27 Even those who think it is, however, tend to concede that it is no way to run public affairs. It is in the nature of public officials' role responsibilities that they are morally obliged to " dirty their hands " — make hard choices, do things that are wrong (or would ordinarily be wrong, or would be wrong for ordinary private individuals) in the service of some greater public good.28 It would be simply irresponsible of public officials (in any broadly secular society, at least) to adhere mindlessly to moral precepts read off some sacred list, literally " whatever the consequences ." 29 Doing right though the heavens may fall is not

(nowadays, anyway) a particularly attractive posture for public officials to adopt.

19. Plan Violates Rights — Robinson says it forces districts to desegregate. This undermines a parent’s right to choose a school for their kids and state’s rights to manage education policy under the Tenth Amendment.

20. Rights Not Absolute — avoiding catastrophe is a lesser evil. Nielsen 96 — Kai Nielsen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary, 1996 (“There Is No Dilemma Of Dirty Hands,” South African Journal of Philosophy, Volume 15, Issue 1, February, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Elite)It might be thought that I am begging questions and sweeping things under the rug with my conception of the lesser evil. I am just implicitly assuming, it might be argued, that the lesser evil is what results in the least harm (the fewer deaths, the lesser misery, pain, undermining of self-respect, autonomy, security and the like). But, the objection will continue, the 'lesser evil' may not be that, but the not doing of certain things, for example, not violating someone's rights, not administering unjust laws, not taking (let alone shooting) hostages, not refusing to take prisoners, not lying and the like. The, in short, not doing of these plain moral evils. Where any of the rights violations that go with the doing of these forbidden things occur, we have a greater evil than if they do not. Suffering and misery are bad, but rights violations are even worse.It seems to me that this is an implausible response. Sometimes violating someone's rights may avert a catastrophe. And then, it seems to me, their rights should be violated. But there are other sorts of examples that drive home my point as well.

Even when under the Nazis it became apparent that he would be

required to administer abhorrent (and thoroughly abhorrent to him as well) Nazi racial laws, a German judge, appointed during the Weimar republic, might rightly not resign. He does not resign because he realizes that he might very well in the discriminatory way he applied these vile laws be able to save lives that would not have been saved if he had been replaced by a Nazi hack. And, to move to a still different example, shooting some hostage, and threatening to shoot some others, might prevent the sacking and putting to the sword of a whole village or at least give the villagers time to flee. (Remember here, Berthold Brecht, as well as

Karl Marx, on the Paris Commune.) It seems to me that there is no serious question where the lesser evil lies in such situations, for example, violating someone's rights to prevent a massacre. The violating of a person's rights is there plainly a lesser evil. It is blind rights worship or rule worship not to see that .

#4 — Topicality Subsets

Explanation/Setup1. Assume that the affirmative read the plan and solvency card below.

2. Assume that the negative read the topicality argument below.

3. Assume that the 2AC responded to topicality with the frontline below.

4. Students should prepare a three-minute negative block speech that extends the topicality subsets argument.

1AC — Plan/SolvencyThe Department of the Interior should substantially increase its funding for primary and secondary education to meet the requirements set by the Indian Education Act to provide educational opportunities that equal or exceed those for all other students in the United States.

The federal government has failed to deliver adequate educational opportunities to Native American children by actively neglecting its responsibilities under federal law - maintaining funding to fulfill those obligations is key. Brown 17 (Emma, Washington Post Reporter, “U.S. government has ‘dismally failed’ to educate Native American children, lawsuit alleges”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/01/12/u-s-government-has-dismally-failed-to-educate-native-american-children-lawsuit-alleges/?utm_term=.5b4217df7317)The federal government has repeatedly acknowledged and even lamented its failure to provide adequate education for Native American children. Now, nine Native children are taking to the courts to force Washington to take action.The children are all members of the Havasupai Nation, whose ancestral homelands are in and around the Grand Canyon. They attend an elementary school that is run by the federal Bureau of Indian Education and is, according to a lawsuit filed

Thursday, hardly recognizable as a school at all.Havasupai Elementary School does not teach any subjects other than English and math, according to the complaint; there is no instruction in science, history, social studies , foreign language, or the arts. There aren’t enough textbooks or a functioning library or any after-school sports teams or clubs , according to the complaint. There are so many and such frequent teacher vacancies that students are allegedly taught often by non-certified staff, including the janitor, or they are taught by a series of substitutes who rotate in for two-week stints. The school shuts down altogether for weeks at a time.

The school has no system for evaluating or serving children with disabilities, who comprise about half of the student body, according to the complaint. And school officials are so incapable of meeting the needs of students with special needs that they often require those children to be educated at home, attending school as little as three hours per week.The school excludes tribal community members from decisions about their children’s education, according to the complaint,

and does not address Havasupai students’ unique cultural needs ,

as federal law requires . And in a community wracked by the historical trauma of displacement and discrimination, and the day-to-day trauma of poverty, the school allegedly failed to provide counseling for years and does not provide the mental health supports that children desperately need.“Federal law requires that the federal government provide Native children with educational opportunities that equal or exceed those for all other students in the United States,”

the complaint says, alleging violations of the Indian Education Act, the Rehabilitation Act and a host of other federal laws. “The U.S. government has dismally failed to fulfill these responsibilities.”

Lawyers for the Havasupai children said that while the conditions at Havasupai Elementary are extreme, they are not uncommon. The lawsuit could establish an important precedent that the federal government has failed to meet its legal obligations and must do better for all children enrolled in Bureau of Indian Education schools, they said.“This is a crisis across BIE schools that the federal government has acknowledged again and again,” said Kathryn Eidmann, a lawyer at Public Counsel, which is representing the children along with the Native American Disability Law Center, a co-plaintiff, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico and two private firms.The 95-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona, names the Bureau of Indian Education and the U.S. Interior Department as defendants, as well as Interior Secretary Sally Jewell; Lawrence Roberts, Interior’s deputy assistant secretary for Indian affairs; BIE Director Tony Dearman; and Jeff Williamson, principal of Havasupai Elementary School.A spokeswoman said the Interior Department does not comment on pending litigation.The Obama administration has been candid about the federal government’s failure to meet the needs of nearly 50,000 Native young people in nearly 200 schools the Bureau of Indian Education oversees.“Indian education is an embarrassment to you and to us,” Jewell told the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in 2013.As a result of the federal government’s failure to provide even the most basic of educational services, Havasupai Elementary is the lowest-performing Bureau of Indian Education school in the country, according to the complaint. Its students scored in the 1st percentile in reading — the lowest possible — and in the 3rd percentile in math, according to 2012-2013 data, the most recent available.“Many Havasupai Elementary students have never learned basic information, such as what the states are and where they are located, the difference between North America and South America, and how to spell simple words,” the complaint says.About 70 students in grades K through 8 are currently enrolled at Havasupai Elementary. It is located in the remote village of Supai, on the Havasupai reservation at the base of Havasu Canyon, which is part of the Grand Canyon, about 100 miles northwest of Flagstaff, Ariz. Supai is a popular desert tourist destination, reachable only by taking a helicopter or walking eight miles along a dirt trail.“The United States government has confined us to this remote location. The United States government promised quality education to our people ,” Don E. Watahomigie, chairman of the Havasupai tribal council,

told reporters Thursday. “The United States government failed on this promise , and as a result our people suffer .”

1NC — Topicality SubsetsNext off is Topicality Subsets.

“United States” means all of the statesEPA 6 – EPA, US Environmental Protection Agency Terminology Reference System, 2-1-2006, http://iaspub.epa.gov/trs/trs_proc_qry.alphabet?p_term_nm=U

United StatesWhen used in the geographic sense, means all of the States . Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics : Commercial Chemical Control Rules Term Detail

“The” refers to a group as a wholeWebster’s 5 (Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary, http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary)4 -- used as a function word before a noun or a substantivized adjective to indicate reference to a group as a whole <the elite>

“In” means “throughout”Words and Phrases 8 (Permanent Edition, vol. 20a, p. 207)Colo. 1887. In the Act of 1861 providing that justices of the peace shall have jurisdiction “in” their respective counties to hear and determine all complaints, the word “in” should be construed to mean “throughout” such counties. Reynolds v. Larkin, 14, p. 114, 117, 10 Colo. 126.

Native reservations don’t exist in all fifty states.Indians.org no date — http://indians.org/articles/indian-reservations.html

There are roughly three hundred Indian Reservations in the United States. An Indian Reservation is a piece of land that has been given over to Native Americans. They do not have full power over the land, but they do have limited governmental rule. Many Indian Reservations make money through gambling casinos.Not every state in the U nited States has an Indian Reservation, and not every Native American tribe has one. There are also Indian Reservations in Canada, however they are set up and run a bit differently then here in America.

Voting issue for limits and ground. Their interp devolves into single state or locality affs, multiplying the neg’s research burden and dodging core DAs to national-level change. This makes specific preparation impossible.

2AC — Topicality Subsets1. Counter-interpretation:

“The United States” means any of the states or territories. Army CPOL no date — The Department of the Army's Office of the Assistant G-1 for Civilian Personnel, no date (“Questionnaire for Overseas Benefits Determination,” Available Online at http://cpol.army.mil/library/employment/fareast/Overseas%20Allowances%20Questionaire.pdf, Accessed 07-11-2017)The United States is defined as: Any of the 50 States , the District of Columbia , Puerto Rico , and any U.S. territory or possession.

“In” means within, not “throughout.” Cullen 52 – Cullen, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, 52, Commissioner, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, November 13, 1952 Riehl et al. V. Kentucky unemployment compensation commission; the judgment is affirmed. Rehearing denied; COMBS, J., and SIMS, C. J., dissenting. http://ky.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.19521113_0040095.KY.htm/qxWe do not find any ambiguity in KRS 341.070(1). It is our opinion that the key word in the statute is the word 'in,' preceding the words 'each of three calendar quarters', and if the word is accorded its ordinary and common meaning, the statute does not require simultaneous employment. According to Webster's New International Dictionary, the word 'in,' used with relation to a period of time, means 'during the course of.' The same meaning, expressed in another way, would be 'within the limits or duration of.' Employing this meaning, the statute says that an employer is subject to the Act if, during the course of, or within the limits or duration of each of three calendar quarters, he had in covered employment four or more workers, to each of whom the required amount of wages was paid. This clearly means that the employment need not be simultaneous. Obviously, the word 'in' does not mean 'throughout' or 'for the entire period of,' because then there would be no point in adding the requirement of the payment of a minimum of $50 in wages. In these times, no worker employed for a full calendar quarter would be paid less than $50 in wages. The appellant seeks to read into the statute the words 'at the same time,' following the words 'had in covered employment'. There is no justification for this, unless the word 'in' means 'during any one period of time in.' We are not aware of any authority for ascribing such a meaning to the word 'in' .

2. Plain Meaning DA — policies implemented “in the United States” include policies implemented in Michigan. Deviations from plain meaning are unpredictable and elitist — outweighs “grammatical precision.”

3. Unbeatable PICs DA — requiring plans to be throughout the U.S. gives the neg PICs out of single schools or districts. The aff can’t beat these because advocates of national-level policies don’t discuss specific exceptions and even a trivial net-benefit will outweigh an unquantifiable solvency deficit. Neg has a better shot against small affs than the aff does against PICs.

4. Unbeatable States Counterplan DA — aff needs federal jurisdiction affs to beat the states counterplan. State control of education makes most national cases unstrategic — the states can mostly solve, and structural advantages ensure the neg will win some risk of a DA.

5. Infinite Regression DA — “must affect all fifty states” is arbitrary because their definition of “in the United States” is “throughout all fifty states.” They exclude core cases like Title I reform and desegregation because some schools won’t be affected by these policies.

6. We Meet — native schools could exist in all fifty states in the future. The mandate of the plan applies to the whole country. Evaluate the plan in a vacuum to prevent mixing burdens.

7. Functional Limits Protect Neg Ground — few affs can simultaneously beat the states counterplan and non-education advantage counterplans. Tilting the topic toward federal jurisdiction cases keeps it small enough for negs to thoroughly prepare.

8. Good is Good Enough — debatability outweighs precision. Requiring the aff to meet the “best” definition incentivizes negs to specialize in T at the expense of substantive policy research.