The Plaintiffs in this class action case were 15 African-American schoolchildren representing the class of children and racial minority children who attended public school in the City of Rochester. These children lived in a school district with high levels of poverty concentration and racial isolation. State law required students to attend schools near where they reside or to pay tuition to attend a distant school. Whereas the state had in the past financed low income housing in Rochester suburbs to enable the city’s poor and minority residents to live in less racially isolated and economically depressed neighborhoods, the state no longer did so at the time of this lawsuit. The Rochester City School District (RCSD) had some of the lowest test scores and graduation rates in the state. The Plaintiffs believed that the demographic composition of the school district in which they resided, together with the obstacles to attending schools in other districts – the residency requirement and the non-resident tuition—and the state’s failure to take measures to integrate the schools “enforce(s) and perpetuate(s) segregation of RCSD students by race and economic status,” which leads to a failure in the education system.

Their claim was that the state’s policies, which include its system of school residency requirements, nonresident tuition requirements and failure to address the racial and economic isolation of these children, amounted to a violation of the New York State Constitution’s Education Article. This Article requires the Legislature to “provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all children of this state may be educated.” As interpreted by the New York State Court of Appeals in previous cases, this means that children are entitled to a “sound, basic education,” which means “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.”

In Paynter, the New York State Court of Appeals decided that the Education Article was not being violated by New York State. It reasoned that:

· the Article does not require the State to provide equal educational opportunities in every school district;

· the State cannot be held responsible for the demographic composition of every school in the district, which would mean either making it responsible for where people choose to live or redrawing school district lines, which is now and should continue to be the role of localities; and

· if the State puts adequate resources into the classroom it satisfies the Education Article even if student performance remains substandard.

There was one dissenting opinion in the case, Justice Smith, who wrote that racially and socially separate education does not comport with the opportunity of sound, basic education as required by the New York State Constitution so long as Plaintiffs can show this to be true. He goes into detail regarding the history of New York laws providing for separate but equal schools for African Americans and the post-Brown v. Board of Education efforts to thwart desegregation efforts in its schools.

Learning Activities

Terms to Know

• class action

• demographics

• plaintiff

• segregation

Compare and Contrast

Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S. 483 (1954)) interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution as prohibiting segregation in schools. It held, among other things, that “the opportunity of an education…is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” In Paynter the Plaintiffs claimed segregation in schools as a violation of the New York State Constitution’s Education Article and lost. What can explain the difference in the results of Brown and Paynter? How do the facts of Paynter differ from the facts of Brown?

Before 1954 the schools at issue in Brown were legally required to be segregated. In 2003, the school at issue in Paynter was racially and economically segregated, but it was not required by law to be so. Plaintiffs in Paynter believed that in order to provide a sound, basic education the state needed to take steps to integrate the schoolchildren in the RCSD with others. The dissent would agree, especially in light of New York’s history of legally-required school segregation.

Should it make a difference that the school was segregated as a result of economic factors rather than government mandate when the goal of the Education Article is “sound, basic education?”

Students can make their own decisions and should be required to back them up with reasons. Teachers can focus the question by making students think about active discrimination versus passive discrimination.

Relevant to this discussion is the case Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. (CFE) v. State of New York (100 N.Y.2d 893, 769 N.Y.S.2d 106, 801 N.E.2d 326), decided on the same day as Paynter. In CFE, the New York State Court of Appeals decided that the Education Article was violated by the state funding system because it failed to provide a sound, basic education to New York City’s schoolchildren. The basis for the decision was a finding that the city’s children were not being adequately educated and that this was due to the state funding system. In Paynter, the contention was not that a failure of funding caused the problem but that the failure to properly integrate the Rochester City schools resulted in a deprivation of a sound, basic education.