ILLINOIS JUDGES CORRECTLY STAY OUT OF SCHOOL FUNDING ISSUE

Earlier this month, the Illinois Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the state's school funding system. In a lawsuit similar to the one that resulted in Missouri's formula for distributing state aid to local school districts' being struck down, 100 school districts had claimed that the Illinois formula was unconstitutional. The local districts claimed that the funding formula is unequal, with the result that students in wealthier districts in the suburbs receive a better education than students from poorer districts throughout much of the rest of the state. Over the last 20 years, state funding of education has gone from 47 percent in the 1976-77 year to 32 percent during the current school year.

The Illinois Supreme Court said the question of education funding is properly one for a legislative, not a judicial, determination. "While the school funding scheme might be thought unwise, undesirable or unenlightened from the standpoint of contemporary notions of social justice, these objections must be presented to the General Assembly," Justice John Nickels wrote for the majority.

This is a superb statement of what lawyers and judges call judicial restraint. Such decisions do properly belong with the elected representatives of the people in the General Assembly. Would that we in Missouri had had similarly restrained judges, rather than those who, by striking down Missouri's school funding formula, set us up for Gov. Mel Carnahan's huge tax increase in the outstanding Schools Act of 1993.