What the energetic fourth-graders at Deerfield School and other students across Kansas learn is under scrutiny in a Topeka courtroom like never before.

At issue in a lawsuit challenging how the state finances its public schools isn’t so much whether one school has a nicer library or gym, but whether Kansas spends enough money to make students proficient in math and reading.

Witnesses in Shawnee County District Court have agreed so far that Kansas must spend more money to avoid falling short of a constitutional mandate to provide a suitable education to all students.

And therein lies a problem: Who defines a suitable education?

Proficiency within states

The federal No Child Left Behind law suggests that a suitable education allows all students — 100 percent — to show they are proficient in math and reading. However, the federal law lets each state determine what children must learn.

Shawnee County District Court Judge Terry Bullock has defined a suitable education as “total school funding that provides every Kansas student, commensurate with their natural abilities, the skills necessary to understand and successfully participate in the world around them both as children and later as adults.”

And both definitions assume all children are equal and have equal academic prospects.

But Edith Eskilson, a fourth-grade teacher at Deerfield, knows that all students don’t come from the same background. Even her middle-class school is not immune to poverty, family struggles or learning disabilities.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius talks about her plan to improve education in Kansas. Sebelius appeared at a forum last week in Wichita. A lawsuit against the state is challenging its method for distributing funds to districts across the state.

“Is success going to look the same to them? No,” she said.

Attorneys for parents and administrators in the Dodge City and Salina school districts have spent the past week arguing that the state’s funding formula, adopted in 1992 based on a ruling by Bullock in an earlier school finance lawsuit, unfairly distributes $2.6 billion in state aid to schools.

‘Outcomes-based’

The argument isn’t based on what districts can buy or the quality of their buildings but on what they can spend to close the achievement gaps between students doing well and those who struggle.

Karen Warner shares classroom duties with Eskilson and has been teaching since 1969.

“It’s more outcomes-based than it used to be,” Warner said. “You didn’t have to reach a certain standard to move a child on to the next grade.”

In the past, Warner said, few children were retained. While teachers did care and tried to reach all students, expectations weren’t as high. Yet, as expectations have changed, so has society, making children busier.

Illustrating that point, she said the state math exam was given in March, when baseball season begins. That means practice often takes priority over homework and adequate sleep.

Her specialty is math, where the focus is on problem solving. Warner considers that a cornerstone of providing her students a suitable education.

“If I can teach you how to think, then I’ve done my job,” she said. “If you can problem solve, then you can make wise decisions.

“Some just don’t want to think.”

Warner isn’t giving up, calling teaching a passion and “her life.” And education officials generally believe that with qualified teachers grounded in subject matter and classroom skills, Kansas can meet the federal law.

But like Deerfield’s new computers that replaced circa-1983 Apple IIe models in the computer lab, Warner said, teachers and other resources will require more money — as witnesses in the school-finance case have said repeatedly.

Distributing aid

Kansas isn’t alone in school-finance litigation. Schools have sued states from Alabama to Wyoming seeking fair funding. The argument has been that it costs more to educate poor children — regardless of race — than advantaged children.

Missouri officials expect a lawsuit before year’s end challenging the fairness and adequacy of funding. More than 190 of the state’s 524 districts have joined in preparing the challenge.

In 1991, before legislators enacted the current law, mid-sized Kansas districts argued the state’s school finance formula discriminated against them, rewarding the smallest and largest districts.

Legislators based the formula on money available, taxes they could raise and the amount that districts already were spending. New accreditation standards, based on student and school progress, were introduced. Other than being contained in the same bill, funding and expectations weren’t linked.

Today, the same mid-sized districts contend that funding is not only inadequate but far below what is needed to meet student performance standards.

As a mother of two as well as a teacher, Eskilson — who grew up in California during the Proposition 13 property tax revolt — doesn’t want schools to be starved for money.

“They’re my future,” Eskilson said. “These kids are going to be the leaders of the world that my kids will have to survive in.”