The dirty little secret of the Claremont and Londonderry education funding lawsuits is that their goal was not to get more money spent on public schools. It was to have the state spend more on public schools so local governments could spend less. It worked. With more state aid coming in, some communities reduced their local school funding.

Thus, the Claremont rulings created a structure in which the gap between property-rich and property-poor school districts could only grow, not shrink. All communities would get the same base amount of state aid, but affluent ones could afford to continue spending their own tax dollars on their schools. Poorer towns could ill-afford to do this. Their incentive was to replace their local school funding with state money and spend their own dollars elsewhere, or lower property taxes. Even if poor towns did not reduce their local school funding, they would not gain on the rich towns, which would have so much more to spend.

That is the system we now have. CACR 12 would change it by allowing the state to “mitigate local disparities in educational opportunity and fiscal capacity.” That means that the state could shrink the gap between poor and rich school districts in the most sensible way: giving less money to rich districts and more money to poor ones.

There are only two ways the state can shrink the education funding gap between poor and rich towns. One is to send every town the same amount of state education aid while banning local communities from spending their own money on public education. That, of course, would never fly. The only other option is to send poor towns more state aid than is sent to rich towns.

That is what CACR 12 would allow. Some say the state can do that now. But it cannot because it cannot afford to. There is not enough money left over after distributing the “adequacy” grants.

The Claremont rulings turned the “have” towns into the “have mores” without bringing up the “have nots.” CACR 12 would allow the state to bring the have nots closer to the haves by concentrating education resources where they are needed most. Both parties should be able to support that.