With all the talk of a purported right to “a sound basic education” surrounding the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, most New Yorkers assume those words appear in the state constitution. But the constitution merely states, “The legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated.”

The “sound basic education” phrase comes from a 1982 decision, Levittown v. Nyquist, in which the state Court of Appeals held that New York’s constitution assures “minimal acceptable facilities and services” rather than equal funding across the state. If what New York’s school system provides “may properly be said to constitute an education, the constitutional mandate is satisfied,” said the court. “Interpreting the term education, as we do, to connote a sound basic education, we have no difficulty in determining that the constitutional requirement is being met in this State, in which it is said without contradiction that the average per pupil expenditure exceeds that in all other States but two.”

We thought of this passage while reading a recently released report from the U.S. Census Bureau, “Public Education Finances 2003,” which confirms that New York’s per pupil expenditure still exceeds all other states but New Jersey. The District of Columbia, which isn’t a state, also spends more. And that’s just for operating costs. When it comes to capital outlays, such as investments in construction and equipment, New York spends more than every other state but California and Texas.

The Court of Appeals in Levittown v. Nyquist took New York’s high level of expenditure as prima facie evidence that the state was, in fact, providing a “sound basic education” to its pupils. But the same court’s 1993 decision in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case bizarrely ignores comparisons to students of other states because “the record discloses no information on whether those students are receiving a sound basic education.”

Because the court defined a “sound basic education” as “the basic literacy, calculating, and verbal skills necessary to enable children to eventually function productively as civic participants capable of voting and serving on a jury, “it seems that the majority of judges actually entertained the possibility that all the graduates of America’s public schools, save those in New Jersey and the capital district, are unfit for the franchise.

Indeed, by the judges’ reckoning, all Americans might be too boorish. The Supreme Court judge charged with implementing the Court of Appeals decision, Leland DeGrasse, has decided that “a sound basic education” requires new spending that would amount to about $17,500 a pupil annually. Well, the Census Bureau’s “Public Education Finances 2003” lists the per pupil spending of every school system in the country with an enrollment of 10,000 or more. No school district outside New Jersey, which suffers from its own court-imposed increases in school funding, spends close to that much. Judge DeGrasse wants to do for New York what the New Jersey courts did for Newark, which spends more than any other major school district in America with a per pupil expenditure of $17,652.

But does anyone really believe that the schools in Newark are better than those in Cherry Hill, N.J., which spends only $11,364 a pupil? Or that Washington, D.C., which spends $13,328, boasts better schools than Palo Alto, Calif., which spends just $11,045?

New Jersey’s court decisions haven’t created better schools, just more expensive ones. Two economics professors at Rutgers University, Douglas Coate and James VanderHoff, conducted a thorough study in 1999 that found no positive effect on student performance from the increased expenditures, even in the neediest school districts that got extra state aid. The lack of a connection between funding and student achievement has been replicated in study after study over decades of education research.

The plain fact is that New York City schools don’t lack resources. New York City’s $11,920 per pupil ranks well above the national average of $8,019 and the statewide averages of 48 states. It’s true that a few cities, such as Boston, spend more. Yet in Boston, 55% of public-school funding comes from local taxes. Only 42% of New York’s funding comes from the city; the rest is from Albany and Washington. So some of the differences have to do with priorities decided at the local level. Even then, New York actually spends more per pupil on instruction and teacher salaries than does Boston, which spends more on support services and school administration.

Still, most other cities spend much less overall than New York. Chicago spends $7,967 a pupil. Philadelphia spends $7,554. Baltimore spends $9,639. Miami spends $6,956. Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest district in the country, spends $8,447.

If “meaningful civic participation” has something to do with relating to one’s fellow citizens – and we, unlike New York’s current Court of Appeals, think it does – New York’s level of funding can’t reasonably be said to be denying students those skills. There’s no constitutional mandate for the courts to be adding billions of dollars to an already generous education budget. What’s worse is that it won’t even make the schools better.