The Future of School Finance Litigation

Posted 476 days ago by Jay Willis

This week, the Harvard Law & Policy Review published Aaron Tang’s excellent article on the landscape of litigation over public school funding.  Tang briefly provides a snapshot of the history of such litigation, before highlighting some of its challenges.  As the author notes, the major problem with recent suits challenging the adequacy of state educational funding is that a court, if it finds in favor of the plaintiffs, must then necessarily define what level of school funding is “adequate.”  Determining appropriate thresholds for a policy decision as nuanced and complex as school funding is not a task traditionally left to the judiciary, and legislatures in Ohio, among other states, have bristled at courts’ attempts to insert themselves into the policy-making process. . . .

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HLPR Blog Roundup: Hot Topics in Education

Posted 479 days ago by HLPR blog editorial staff

Few topics have received greater recent national attention than education, evidenced by the prominent role the theme played in President Obama’s State of the Union Address.   It’s not surprising, then, that education has also been a popular topic amongst HLPR bloggers:

• Jessica Jackson questioned the merits of California’s budget proposals to make draconian cuts to education while proposing to spend millions more on its prison system.
• Jay Willis discussed a broad range of issues affected education on the state and federal level.  He described how states have taken aim at their secretaries of education, challenged the notion of education in America as a meritocracy, and introduced the new Chair of a key Congressional education subcommittee.
• Smita Ghosh analyzed North Carolina’s novel approach to protecting community college students and noted a constitutional challenge to one state’s cuts in education funding.

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Redefining Reasonable Representation

Posted 480 days ago by Jessica Jackson

[UPDATE: This post was edited on Jan. 28 to correct an inadvertent deletion  from the author's original draft.]

Under Strickland v. Washington and its progeny, a criminal defendant not only has the right to counsel, but also has the right to effective assistance of counsel. But that guarantee seems to be in danger due to two recent Supreme Court opinions, Harrington v. Richter and Premo v. Moore. The court has begun to relax its standards for effective assistance of counsel, refusing to grant defendants’ Sixth Amendment claims in spite of quite troubling facts.

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More Fun with Taxes

Posted 480 days ago by Zach Luck

Imagine you are in charge of an enterprise that has to process over 140 million forms each year.  Each form, on paper, costs about $2.87 to process.  Wait, you say, it is the 21st century and computers might not be a passing fad — shouldn’t there be a way to process the form electronically at some lower cost?  Very astute.  It turns out that there is, and it will cost you about 35 cents to process each electronic version.

Obviously, you would decide that it should be entirely free to mail in the forms on paper and cost money to submit electronically, right?  (Oh, with an important exception that turning in the form electronically must be free for anyone who makes less than around $58,000 a year.)

Would you use your website to distribute, for free, forms which can be turned in by mail, but offer no method on your website for turning in the same forms electronically? People who want to send you an electronic form can use third-party services (some of which might be free, and most of which will use the opportunity to advertise additional products to a captive audience).

Ok, maybe this is not what you’d do.  But it is what the IRS does each year when it faces this seemingly obvious choice.

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Introducing Congresswoman Virginia Foxx

Posted 481 days ago by Jay Willis

In the wake of November’s midterm elections, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) was appointed this past January as Chair of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education, Lifelong Learning, and Competitiveness.  She takes over from Congressman Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX), who chaired the subcommittee during the 111th Congress. Though she is undoubtedly qualified to chair the committee, some of her recent comments indicate that she may pose serious resistance to the President’s educational goals.

Congresswoman Fox’s professional background fits nicely with this position.  She holds a Doctorate of Education from UNC-Greensboro and, prior to launching her legislative career, held both faculty and administrative positions at Appalachian State University.  She also served as President of and, later, consultant to Mayland Community College (NC) before entering the North Carolina Senate in 1994.  In addition to her recent appointment and her education credentials, Foxx is a member of the powerful House Rules Committee, and she previously gained notoriety in 2009 during House debate over the Matthew Shepard Act, when she referred to the characterization of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime as a “hoax” (a statement that she retracted soon afterward).

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Holes in Gentrification

Posted 482 days ago by Yevgeny Shrago

I visited Washington, D.C. last weekend and walked around the rapidly gentrifying Columbia Heights neighborhood. While admiring the fantastic looking old houses and the shiny new development, I noticed dozens of abandoned houses dotting the streets.  These weren’t houses in the process of being gutted and rebuilt.  They were simply boarded up and vacant. With the way property values have shot up in that area since the D.C.’s metro put in the Green Line ten years ago, I was shocked that so many houses could still be abandoned.  The explanation I came up with comes from a piece of tax policy known as fractional assessment, which means that only a small percent of a house’s actual value is taxed.  This policy became enshrined in statute in large part to protect homeowner’s from the effect rising property values would have on their tax bills.

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