Fighting for High-Quality Schools: Moving the Battle from the State House to the Courthouse

For decades, the quality of Florida’s schools has been declining. Despite years of rhetoric about increasing standards, Florida has for some time consistently fallen in the bottom half of state rankings in numerous measures, from drop-out rates to per-pupil funding.

Every year, the Florida Legislature debates various education proposals touted as crucial to improving school quality, and there is always a battle over school funding in the annual budget. But missing from these discussions is any mention of Florida’s Constitution and the requirements it imposes on the state related to education.

The 1998 "Education Adequacy" Amendment

In 1998, Florida’s Constitutional Revision Commission (CRC) placed on the ballot an amendment to the Constitution that fundamentally changed the legal status of Florida’s education system. The amendment was intended to better define the state’s duty toward public education, and to create measurable and – most importantly – legally enforceable standards.

A few years before the 1998 CRC convened, a coalition of students, parents and school boards sued the Governor and other state officials, asking the court to declare that Florida’s constitution creates a fundamental right to an adequate education and that the state had violated that right by failing to provide sufficient resources and funding to Florida schools. The coalition lost, and in its 1996 opinion, the Court held that the constitutional language requiring “adequate provision” for public education did not create a fundamental right and did not have specific standards that could be enforced by courts. They concluded that it was a “non-justiciable political question,” in other words, an issue for elected officials unsuitable for judicial intervention.

The amendment placed on the ballot by the CRC was specifically drafted to respond to the 1996 court ruling. The language was chosen carefully after a thorough review of other states’ constitutions and other court opinions, and after considerable debate among commissioners.

The proposed amendment declared that education was a “fundamental value” of the state and required the state not just to make adequate provision for a “uniform” school system, but to make adequate provision for a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education.” The CRC structured this amendment to create a legally enforceable duty that mandated very specific standards – “efficient, safe, secure and high quality” – that a court could apply.

Voters overwhelmingly supported the amendment. It passed with 71% of the vote and became part of the Florida Constitution in 1999.

A Decade Later…A Lawsuit to Force the State to Uphold Its Constitutional Duty

While we don’t know exactly how the courts will apply the new language, we can be certain the outcome will be different from that 1996 case. Florida courts have long stated that it is their duty to give effect to the will of the voters who adopted an amendment.

In its 2006 opinion in Bush v. Holmes, the Florida Supreme Court struck down the state’s private school voucher program as unconstitutional and discussed the effect of the amendment. The court said the new language moved Florida’s constitution into the category of states with the very strongest education provisions, “imposing a maximum duty on the state to provide for public education that is uniform and high quality.”

The voters in 1998 left the state with no choice but to provide Florida’s schools with the resources necessary to give our children a high-quality education. After a decade of continuing to ignore their constitutional duty, a coalition of parents and citizen groups is now going to the courts to force the state to live up to their constitutionally imposed responsibility.

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