A judge has decided, more than once, how much your child’s education should cost. The real question isn’t whether Kansas spends enough. It’s who decides what “enough” means.
“The Constitution is many things.
A spreadsheet isn’t one of them.”
A judge has decided, more than once, how much your child’s education should cost.
Not a governor. Not your state legislator. A judge — someone almost no Kansan could name — ultimately deciding whether the Legislature had spent enough to satisfy the Constitution.
Other state supreme courts confronted the same question and declined to answer it. Kansas’s court didn’t.
How much money does it take to educate a child? Every few years, the court takes another swing at an answer.
Another cost study. Another ruling. Another number.
The search continues.
If the answer keeps changing, maybe the calculation isn’t wrong. Maybe it has no judicial answer. Only a political one.
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Every school-funding adequacy lawsuit rests on the same chain of reasoning. Students aren’t meeting state standards. Therefore the school system is failing. Therefore the failure is caused by inadequate funding. Therefore the Constitution has been violated. Therefore a court should order more money.
Only the first step is directly observable: Kansas students are not meeting the educational standards the State has established. Every step after that requires a judgment — about performance, causation, law, and remedy.
In Gannon v. State, the Kansas Supreme Court’s long-running school-funding case, the court never announced a constitutional dollar figure. But once a court concludes funding is constitutionally inadequate, it must eventually decide whether the Legislature has spent enough to satisfy the Constitution. In practice, that means judges reviewing legislative funding decisions until they are satisfied. In Gannon, that process lasted more than a decade. The court repeatedly held the Legislature’s revisions unconstitutional and required lawmakers to return with new funding plans before finally concluding the Constitution had been satisfied.
The opinions never explain how anyone can translate dollars into educational outcomes with enough precision to make that a constitutional judgment — because no generally accepted model exists. Other state supreme courts, applying broadly comparable education clauses, recognize that and have taken a different path. They have treated the cost of educational adequacy as primarily a legislative judgment, not a judicial one.
Legislatures don’t know the perfect number either. They simply have to choose one. If voters disagree, they can elect different legislators. Kansas Supreme Court judges don’t face that kind of accountability.
Kansas itself exposes the weakness of the court’s reasoning.
On commonly used measures of education spending, Kansas ranked relatively high by the mid-2010s, while its ranking in fourth-grade reading proficiency fell from 5th to 36th over that same stretch, and other measures of college and career readiness moved the same direction. That doesn’t prove money doesn’t matter. It shows the relationship is not predictable. If large funding increases and declining outcomes can coexist, courts should be cautious about treating funding as the decisive constitutional variable.
The logic only runs one way. In adequacy litigation, poor educational outcomes are translated into a funding problem. That translation may sometimes be justified, but it is not automatic. Imagine Kansas had climbed from 36th to 5th while spending stayed flat — no one would conclude the Constitution had become “more satisfied” because the state found a better curriculum. Yet when outcomes worsen after spending increases, adequacy litigation reaches for the opposite conclusion: more funding is needed.
Mississippi shows the same logic in reverse: a lower-spending state that produced major reading gains after adopting reading-focused curriculum and accountability reforms. Mississippi doesn’t prove money never matters. It shows that curriculum, accountability, and literacy reforms can matter just as much. No generally accepted model converts a marginal dollar into a predictable improvement in reading, graduation, or civic capacity with the precision needed to set a constitutional funding remedy. Yet adequacy lawsuits still ask judges to decide how much more money the Constitution requires. If large funding increases and declining outcomes can coexist, courts should be cautious about treating funding as the decisive constitutional variable.
Kansas’s constitution requires the legislature to “make suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state.” That’s Article 6 of the Kansas Constitution — the finance clause itself contains no number and no formula.
Gannon made the adequacy of school funding a constitutional question for courts to answer. Once a court finds funding unconstitutional, it eventually has to answer one practical question:
Has the Legislature spent enough to satisfy Article 6?
Article 6 asks for “suitable provision.” It never explains how anyone is supposed to measure “suitable.”
In 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court decided Rose v. Council for Better Education, holding that a constitutionally adequate education should produce seven broad capacities — communication skills, knowledge of civic and economic systems, preparation for further training, and the like. Kansas later enacted statutory goals that substantially mirror the Rose capacities, and Gannon uses those goals as the constitutional standard.
Rose tells us what students should become. It doesn’t tell us how to get there. A curriculum, a teacher, a principal, a family, a school year — dozens of things stand between a dollar and student outcomes, and Rose never sorts out which of them is doing the work.
Kansas hasn’t closed that gap in the thirty-plus years since Rose. The decision tells us what students should become, but not how schools produce those results or what producing them costs.
Two respected economists can study the same schools and produce very different price tags — hundreds of millions of dollars apart. Both use real data. Both follow recognized methodologies. They differ because there’s no accepted answer to the question underneath both models: how much of a reading score is caused by money, as opposed to a teacher, a curriculum, or a household.
Courts can handle uncertainty; they do it constantly, in damages cases, tax valuations, and environmental disputes. The problem here is different. Adequacy lawsuits ask courts to choose one disputed theory of education and turn it into constitutional law, when competing theories advanced by different experts remain on the table — because the theory itself, not merely the number, is in dispute.
Courts deal with estimates all the time. If a contractor damages your house, a judge doesn’t need to know the exact repair cost down to the penny. A reasonable estimate is enough, because everyone already agrees the damage was caused by the contractor. School-funding litigation is different. Before anyone can estimate the remedy, someone has to decide what caused the problem. Was it funding? Curriculum? Reading instruction? Teacher quality? Family circumstances? Some combination of all five? The price tag depends on the answer. If you begin with a different explanation, you end with a different number. The question courts are being asked to answer is not “how much did the damage cost?” It is “what caused it?” — and no one agrees on the answer.
Florida concluded this wasn’t a question courts could answer. Illinois reached the same conclusion. Texas gives the Legislature substantial deference. North Carolina stepped back after decades of litigation.
Kansas chose one path. Other states chose another.
The fix isn’t complicated to state, even if it’s hard to achieve: Kansas courts should scale back Gannon and give real deference back to the Legislature — closer to the floor Texas applies than the continuing oversight role Kansas built for itself.
Courts should ask whether the Legislature acted through a reasoned legislative process and followed the Constitution — not whether it discovered the correct price of education. Judges can review whether lawmakers considered evidence and explained their decisions. They shouldn’t pretend the Constitution contains a formula for how much money is enough. The Constitution is many things. A spreadsheet isn’t one of them.
The deeper point isn’t that courts happen to be bad at this particular question. It’s that no institution can answer it. The Constitution asks judges to interpret law. It does not ask them to discover the price of learning. Those are different jobs. Kansas’s court took on both.
Gannon is unlikely to disappear on its own. Constitutional doctrine changes one justice at a time.
If courts are going to continue making judgments this political — judgments about how much taxpayers must spend and when the Legislature has spent enough — then the people should have a more direct voice in choosing the judges who make them.
If, instead, Kansans believe courts should play a more restrained role in education policy, changing how justices reach the court is also the most practical way to move the law in that direction over time.
The amendment won’t change Article 6. It won’t erase Gannon. But it will let voters shape the judicial philosophy that interprets both. Given the choices actually available today, it is the most practical path Kansas has. The real question isn’t whether Kansas spends enough. It’s who decides what “enough” means.
Josh Dambacher is a fifth-generation Kansan, a Managing Partner at a leading international law firm, and a member of the Board of Literacy Partners. He writes The Plains Ledger.
— J.D.
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