If David Boies Wants to Help, He Should Join School Finance Litigation

David Boies is making headlines again.  This time it is by becoming the chairman of the Partnership for Educational Justice, a group founded by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown to challenge teacher tenure laws.  These lawsuits seek to use the precedent and constitutional right to education developed in school finance litigation.  David Sciarra, Executive Director of the Education Law Center, has helped establish and develop these educational rights in a number of cases.  His response is that if David Boies really wants to help education, he should join school funding lawsuits in New York, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Texas, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Mississippi.  Sciarra's comments strike at the irony of the new and impending upsurge in education litigation.  Boies purports to be viewing education through a civil rights lens now, but to focus solely in on teacher tenure is to ignore any number of fundamental inequalities that stem from funding and segregation, not tenure.  Even if tenure is a problem, eliminating it will do nothing to touch the underlying fundamental inequalities and segregation in schools that purportedly want to get rid of ineffective teachers but cannot.