School district attorney Alan Rupe, left, presents his case in a school funding case at the Kansas Supreme Court Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Topeka, Kan. The hearing stems from a 2010 lawsuit brought by four school districts contending schools are underfunded by the state. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Topeka ? During oral arguments at the Kansas Supreme Court over school funding last week, much of the discussion concerned the two-thirds versus the one-third.

It was a reference to results of standardized tests that Kansas students took in 2015 showing roughly two-thirds of Kansas high school students were performing at or above grade level in math, while a little more than one-third, 37 percent, scored below grade level.

Furthermore, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Alan Rupe, argued that many, if not most, of the students falling below expectations came from identifiable subgroups: those from low-income households, non-English speaking backgrounds, Hispanics and African Americans.

At least one justice on the court indicated that in deciding the case he plans to focus solely on that one-third.

“Let’s just use your numbers,” Justice Dan Biles said. “Two-thirds of the kids are flourishing. We’ve got a third floundering. So it’s really none of the court’s business about the two-thirds. They’re meeting the standard that we’ve set, the test for adequacy. So our focus, the constitutional violation, is on that third. And we have to target any remedy that we want to do toward that one-third.”

Biles seemed to be indicating that the cost of a remedy may not be as high as the $800 million a year that the plaintiffs have suggested because two-thirds of Kansas students are meeting the state’s expectations with the current level of funding.

The only thing that may be needed, he suggested, is whatever amount of money it takes to bring the struggling one-third up to grade level.

But education experts say that’s easier said than done, and not only could it cost a staggering amount of money, it could take many years to achieve.

“I think you’re going to have to take several years,” Kansas Education Commissioner Randy Watson said. “Any school finance formula — both in terms of the capacity of the state to pay for it, and in terms of the districts in order to handle the amount of money coming in and plan for that — would have to be a multiple-year plan.”

The court’s standard

Two years ago, in an earlier phase of the lawsuit, the Supreme Court spelled out the standard it will use to decide whether K-12 education funding is adequate. It’s a standard based on a set of educational outcomes, known as the Rose Capacities, that were first set out in a Kentucky school finance case from the 1980s.

Adequacy is met, the court said, “when the public education financing system provided by the legislature for grades K-12 –through structure and implementation–is reasonably calculated to have all Kansas public education students meet or exceed the standards set out in Rose.”

The standards, or “capacities,” themselves are merely a broad, general outline of the kind of knowledge and skills students will need “to funciton in a complex and rapidly changing civilization” and “to compete favorably with their counterparts in surrounding states, in academics or in the job market.”

Specifically, they include oral and written communication skills; knowledge of economic, social and political systems; understanding of government processes; self-knowledge about the student’s own physical and mental health; arts and cultural education; and sufficient academic and vocational training to prepare the student for college or a vocation.

In light of that, Watson said, the Kansas State Board of Education used those standards in crafting the budget request it submitted to Gov. Sam Brownback’s office in July.

The cost: $900 million over the next two years.

“This is what we’re recommending in order to fund the (board’s) vision and the Rose Capacities,” Watson said.

Closing achievement gaps

State education officials say they are struggling to come up with ways of measuring each of the Rose Capacities. Some — such as the needs for “sufficient grounding in the arts to enable each student to appreciate his or her cultural and historical heritage” — would seem to defy measurement.

The best measures the state currently has, officials have said, are the standardized tests in English language arts, math, science and social studies, which at least give an indication of each student’s academic progress.

And results from those tests have consistently shown large differences in performance between minority and nonminority students, and between students from upper and lower income households.

Those same gaps also show up in national tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP exams, as well as college entrance exams such as the ACT and SAT.

Rick Ginsberg, dean of the School of Education at the University of Kansas, said it’s an issue that education professionals and researchers have grappled with for decades and, to date, no one has come up with an easy, or inexpensive, solution.

“It is a daunting task, but there are some promising programs out there that show that the gaps can be closed,” he said. “The biggest challenge is the great wealth inequality in our nation that evidence suggests drives the multiple challenges that are faced.”

Education Commissioner Watson agreed that poverty is one of the biggest drivers of low student performance. He also said there are strategies schools can use to overcome the effects of poverty, but he noted most of those come with hefty price tags.

“Mental health is an issue. We’ve got to have more counselors and social workers, and Kansans have told us that,” he said. “Well, that’s more money. And that doesn’t even count as instruction.”

“We want to reduce class sizes in some areas, and that costs more money,” Watson continued. “We have a teacher shortage, and that shortage is going to get greater if you look at the pipeline. Part, not all but part of that is salary. There are certainly other factors included. So all of those have a dollar tag to them, even though dollars exclusively are not solely the answer.”

The Lawrence school district also has launched several initiatives of its own. District spokeswoman Julie Boyle said that for the last several years, more than 1,500 administrators, faculty members, staff and school board members have gone through training workshops to learn how to talk about race and understand the nature of racial disparities.

And much of the district’s recent $92.5 million bond issue focused on renovating schools and reducing class sizes in elementary schools in the eastern and central portions of the city where most of the district’s low-income and minority students are clustered.

At the state level, however, Watson said reducing class sizes, lengthening the school day and the school year, providing more early-childhood education and funding all-day kindergarten are also strategies that have worked in some areas. And many of those are addressed in the budget request that the State Board of Education submitted this summer.

But the question will be how many, if any, of those things lawmakers will be willing or able to fund next year, given the state’s dire financial condition, and how much time the Supreme Court will give the state to close the achievement gaps.

“It’ll be interesting to see, if the court does rule in favor of the plaintiff, if they would agree to a multiple-year plan and would they keep jurisdiction over that plan,” Watson said.