Indiana's School Finance Adequacy Ruling

About a month ago, the Indiana Supreme Court handed down its decision in that state's education finance adequacy litigation.  The opinion is here.  In the case (Bonner v. Daniels), the plaintiffs claimed, in the alternative, (1) that the state constitution's Education Clause imposed a duty on the legislature to provide a certain level of quality education, and that this duty was not fulfilled by the current system; (2) that the state constitution established a fundamental right to education, and that this right was abridged by the current system; and (3) that the current system violated Indiana's Equal Privileges and Immunities Clause (the state's version of the Equal Protection Clause) due to unequal expenditures. 

The trial court granted the state defendant's motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim (under Indiana's version of Rule 12(b)(6)), and the intermediate appellate court reversed the trial court.  The state Supreme Court, however, agreed with the trial court, holding that, because the state constitution's education clause contained no quality-based language that the judiciary could use to enforce a constitutional duty to provide a certain quality of education, no relief could be granted on the plaintiffs' claims.  The court also held that, because no rights-based language accompanied the education provisions of the state constitution, no fundamental right to education existed under the constitution, and therefore, the complaint's equality-based claims were also dismissed. 

The most interesting aspect of this case is that, although the Indiana court joined the minority of state courts in dismissing the adequacy claims on the pleadings, the court did not explicitly do so on separation of powers grounds, as the others did.  Instead, the court appears to have lifted the "no judicially manageable standards" prong from the political question doctrine test in Baker v. Carr and used it as a means of evaluating the legal sufficiency of the claim itself.  If the court had applied the federal political question doctrine, it would not have mattered whether the complaint had stated a valid claim because the political question doctrine counsels judicial abstention even from valid, well-stated claims due to separation of powers concerns.  The Indiana court has apparently chosen to focus on the weakness of the language of the education clause, rather than its commitment of discretion to a coordinate branch, as the basis to deny review.