What Is Adequate? Operationalizing the Concept of Adequacy for New York

In New York, as in a number of other states in which recent state court decisions have invalidated the existing system of school financing, the court decision has focused on the failure of the existing system to provide each student with an adequate (“a sound, basic”) education. While the legal strategies that have led to these decisions have been prompted, in part, by longstanding discussions in the research literature on how to best design intergovernmental aid systems, there is no consensus in the literature on how to operationalize the concept of adequacy. The court decisions do not give policy makers the luxury of waiting for consensus in the academic literature; they must settle on a method for structuring an aid system that insures that each student has access to an adequate education. This paper will attempt to provide with some guidance on how to accomplish this difficult task. The starting point will be a working definition of adequacy. The paper will then provide a critical evaluation of methods that have been proposed for determining the spending districts in a state would need if they are to provide an adequate education. Particular attention will be paid to the lessons that can be learned from the efforts in other states and in New York to operationalize the concept of adequacy. The ultimate goal of this discussion is to suggest how existing methodologies could be combined to produce a defensible, replicable, and understandable method for determining adequacy. The paper will then turn to several cross-cutting issues that must be addressed no matter which method is used to determine the adequate level of spending in each district. Among these issues will be the possibility of creating perverse incentives by compensating for factors in that can be influenced by districts and the need for avoiding a system of adequacy determination that appears to dictate to districts and schools specific input mixes. Particular attention will also be paid to the need for updating, to account for advances in research, for changes in standards, and for the availability of new or better data. Operationalizing the concept of adequacy for New York State 2