![]() Since 2008, New York State has never met its constitutional and legal obligation to fund NYC schools in compliance with the CFE decision. In 2007 the legislature complied, but the savage 2008 recession forced severe budget cuts at state and local levels of government across the following decade. In 2006, the Court of Appeals, New York State’s highest tribunal, ruled in favor of CFE and directed the state legislature to substantially increase education funding to NYC schools. Governor Pataki appealed Judge deGrasse’s decision and several rounds of court action followed. In 2001 Judge Leland deGrasse ruled for CFE, finding the state’s school funding system unconstitutional. (Full disclosure: my wife, Heather Lewis and I were among the founding members and served for many years on the CFE board.) The CFE lawsuit argued that New York’s governors and legislatures, by consistently and severely underfunding NYC’s schools, failed to provide the “sound basic education” that New York State’s constitution guarantees all the state’s students. ![]() The Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) was a coalition of community school board members, education advocates and parent groups, founded in 1993 by Michael Rebell, an education lawyer and scholar and Robert Jackson, a Bronx community school board president. Starting this July, New York City will receive an initial $1.4 billion down-payment on the accumulated debt the state owes the city’s schools, based on the New York State Court of Appeals 2006 final decision in CFE v State of New York. Kudos to the New York State legislature, which ended decades of legal and political struggle by fully funding the Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s court mandate.
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