It seems the Court of Appeals may have a strong supporter in its assertion today that Justice Leland DeGrasse and his appointed special-masters made a multi-billion dollar mistake by running with a whopping $5.6 billion per year figure in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. And it isn't who you'd suspect it would be.

The astroniomical amount of additional spending power for New York City's school system that was ordered by DeGrasse in the lawsuit is based on a procedural "flaw" in a costing-out study that pushed the figure "billions of dollars higher than it should have been," one of the study's co-authors now says.

Oops.

James Guthrie, a Vanderbilt University professor and a principal at Management Analysis and Planning, has a piece in the new Education Next that raises serious questions about the costing-out studies that are being used in school adequacy lawsuits across the nation to convince judges that they need to pump eye-popping amounts of additional money to struggling school systems. He should know. Guthrie's been involved as an expert in cases all over the place and (along with some folks from the American Institutes for Research) co-authored the costing-out study for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity that first coughed up the staggering $5.6 billion per year figure. (You'll recall that both the court-appointed fact-finders and, later, Justice DeGrasse took the figure and ran with it - though it is still unclear how the state will make it happen, especially in the absence of significant accountability measures thrown in.)

The costing-out study, for those who have become numb to all things CFE-related in the last decade, is supposed to be a complex determination of adequacy, or how much it would cost the city to provide a "sound basic education" to its 1.1 million students.

The Ed Next piece offers a blistering insider's assessment of out-of-control costing-out studies in general, but The Chalkboard decided to catch-up with Guthrie (via email) to explain some comments he made at Harvard last fall in which he apologetically distanced himself from the New York CFE report he co-authored -- a report he now says was seriously flawed and billions of dollars off the mark.

Chalkboard: You were one of the early believers in the push for equitable school funding, yet you now say the plaintiff victories in these lawsuits are "picking taxpayers' pockets." Are you saying things have gotten out of control - in adequacy lawsuits in general and, more specifically, in the costing-out studies used to generate settlement numbers?

Guthrie: Revenue disparities still exist from state to state and within particular states. Efforts should continue to address such inequities where they persist. However, adequacy is a different question. Here there is no science, only experience and prejudice. To guide those striving to determine what is adequate in the absence of clear-cut analytic techniques and scientific methods, "adequate" should be determined by a legislative body, not a court.

Chalkboard: You say these cases have become a "self-serving cause" where plaintiffs have gained relatively uncontested judicial access to the political process. Whose interests are being served?

Guthrie: Certainly children's interests are seldom being served. It is almost always adult interests. The remedial funding goes to smaller class sizes, higher teacher and administrative salaries, and more supplies. None of these conditions is known to be associated with higher levels of student achievement.

Chalkboard: What do you think are the long-term implications for public education if these lawsuits have the ultimate effect of doing a judicial end-run around the legislative process? If elected officials are no longer responsible for making school spending decisions, might that ultimately erode overall support for public education itself?

Guthrie: Yes. Such is precisely one of our points. Courts, whatever their strengths and ability to correct injustices, are not democratic. Their decisions are not legitimate when they operate outside their chartered realm. Determining what is an adequate level of funding is not within their charter.

Chalkboard: You said last fall that your involvement in the costing-out study for New York's case was a "matter of deep professional embarrassment" and your world's "worst nightmare." Pretty strong terms. What did you mean by that?

Guthrie: I meant that my failure to oversee directly the final stages in the CFE study resulted in an inappropriate procedure being undertaken. This flaw resulted in an estimate of needed revenue that is billions of dollars higher than it should have been.

Stay tuned folks. This is getting interesting...