Adequacy

Adequacy refers to the provision of strategies and programs, and their subsequent funding, to educate students to high standards. Adequacy is not a comparative measure or a relative concept; that is, it does not depend on what one school does, compared with another. The achievement of adequacy is not dependent on the activities or achievement of one school or district compared with another. Adequacy is an outcome measure. To meet adequacy requirements, all students must be taught to the extent that they meet high achievement standards.

Concerns about adequacy in education began to surface in the 1980s as the result of lawsuits filed in several states over dissatisfaction with public education. The earliest legal cases, dating back to the early second half of the 20th century (some say in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas), focused state and national attention on equity in education—that is, equal education for all. However, in the 1980s, researchers and other education professionals realized that an equal education in terms of programs and dollars did not, in fact, ensure an adequate education. The 1989 case Rose v. The Council for Better Education in Kentucky is often cited as the formal beginning of the adequacy reform movement after dissatisfaction with the outcomes of earlier equity legal cases. Researchers and educators realized that programming and funding for adequacy might well require an unequal expenditure per pupil because different strategies are required to educate different students (low-income, disabled, non–English-speaking) to high standards.

Once the courts recognized adequacy as necessary to the success of public education, implementation problems surfaced. The two major problems were how to measure adequacy and how to fund it. Although adequacy was defined as students educated to high standards, high standards did not exist.

At least 40 legal cases were heard on the basis of an inadequate education, either with respect to general or facilities funding or in terms of academic level, between 1981 and 2002. Often as a result of lost legal cases finding state education funding mechanisms unconstitutional because they did not provide for an adequate education system, states began establishing outcome standards for all students to meet. For example, as a result of DeRolph v. Ohio in 1997, Ohio passed its first statewide academic standards legislation in 1997 and issued its first academic report card in the 1998–1999 academic year. However, even as late as 1999, adequacy was not universally accepted as a necessary component of public education. In two Illinois cases, Committee for Education Rights v. Edgar (1996) and Lewis E. v. Spagnolo (1999) the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that education quality was a nonjusticiable issue.

In late 2001 the federal government joined the education reform movement promoting adequacy with the passage of the federal legislation commonly referred to as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This legislation required each state to establish performance standards for all public school students and mandates that all students meet state standards by the year 2014. NCLB also mandated yearly testing in Grades 3 through 8 by 2005–2006. This was the first serious effort made at the national level to hold states accountable for student learning; adequacy was legislated. By the 2004–2005 academic year, all states had content standards in reading and mathematics, 38 states had performance standards in science, and [Page 27]28 states had yearly testing in Grades 3 through 8. NCLB played a major role in advancing the adequacy movement. However, at this writing, scholars have proposed several methods for assigning a cost to an adequate education, but no agreement regarding the best method has been reached.

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