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Justices Spar Over Funding Mandates for English-Deficient Students

By Bill Mears CNN Supreme Court Producer         

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court appeared to split along familiar ideological lines Monday over the power of judges to decide how money is spent to help students increase their English language skills.         

At issue is whether Arizona has provided enough resources to improve its English Language Learner (ELL) program, allowing it to end years of federal oversight.         

Some legislators claim a 2006 state law essentially eliminated long-standing funding inequities.

But parents say officials continue to drag their feet when it comes to complying with an appropriate classroom model for non-English speaking students.         

The high court arguments divided evenly over questions about funding and empirical results.         

"I'm sure progress has been made, but it doesn't seem to me that you could say the [state] objectives are achieved," said Justice Stephen Breyer, reciting a bevy of statistics.         

"I still have trouble with the idea of district courts ordering state legislatures to fund it," said Chief Justice John Roberts, "Isn't the preferable approach for the district court [judge] to say, 'You have a violation, you have to fix it, and I'm going to check to see if you fixed it at particular intervals.'?"         

 It is the first high-court case on the "No Child Left Behind Act," a leading domestic policy initiative of the Bush administration.         

The cases go back 19 years when the mother of Miriam Flores, a minority student enrolled in the Nogales, Arizona, English Language Learner program sued the state. Court records show the girl entered an English-language immersion class in the third grade after two years of instruction in her native Spanish. She continued to lag behind and was cited as a disruptive classroom influence because she was often asking a fellow student for help.         

The mother -- also named Miriam Flores -- along with other parents claimed that school officials in the border town 71 miles south of Tucson did not provide enough money to get English-deficient students up to speed when it came to mastering the standard academic curriculum for writing and reading comprehension.         

A federal judge in 2000 agreed, concluding Arizona violated the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, and ordered the state to rework its plan and increase funding. The ELL program was then placed under federal oversight. The current dispute has pitted the GOP-led state legislature and the school superintendent against the Democratic governor and attorney general, along with civil rights and teacher groups.         

In oral arguments, Kenneth Starr -- arguing for school officials -- criticized state mandates placed on Nogales. "The state funding remedy here is extraordinarily intrusive and overreaching," he said about the governor and attorney general's efforts at reform. "The remedy was originally designed to address the situation in Nogales, but it was expanded."         

What is the district court supposed to do?" countered Justice David Souter, his voice rising noticeably. "The attorney general for the state comes in and says do it this way. It seems to me the state [legislature] has no standing later on to say, 'Oh, Mr. Attorney General, you don't know anything about your state law, we won't do it this way.'"         

Breyer said such continued federal oversight may be necessary, since the schools are, he said, "not quite home yet. I would say that, looking at this record, it seems to suggest that."          Flores' attorney, Sri Srinivasan, ran into skeptical questioning from Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia over whether state education officials should have some greater flexibility to eliminate existing defects in the program.         

"The whole focus" of the state's argument, said Alito, "was that we have a new plan, and it is not tied to funding, and it will produce good results."         

"What's wrong" with a "new approach" asked Roberts.         

Justice Anthony Kennedy, as is typical in many hot-button cases, could prove the swing vote in favor of his more conservative benchmates. He and Scalia were concerned federal courts would have too much power to apply problems from one community like Nogales to the entire state.         

"What you're saying," Kennedy told Srinivasan, "that any time a [federal] district court in a single district orders more money to remedy a constitutional problem, that it has to apply to every other district. That just can't be."         

Arizona says it increased more than two-fold the amount of money it spends per non-English speaking pupil, and that it has complied with the No Child Left Behind Act, the sweeping public classroom accountability act passed in 2002 that ties federal education funding to improvements in measurable student achievement.          

The divided court seemed poised to issue a narrow ruling, fact-specific to the ELL plan in Nogales. But groups on both sides of the issue asked the high court for broader guidance on settling state-federal conflicts involving institutional reform mandates, especially those involving disadvantaged groups. Such political turf battles often end up in the courts, and can lead to decades of federal oversight, such as the fight over school desegregation beginning in the 1950s. Against that backdrop is the continuing fight over immigration and the responsibility of states to fund the education of illegal aliens and their children.         

The young girl at the center of the case is now an adult and a student at the University of Arizona.          The cases are Horne v. Flores (08-289) and Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives v. Flores (08-294). A ruling is expected in about two months.