The issue of school choice in Chicago suffered a blow Tuesday when a judge tossed out an unusual lawsuit that had sought to establish a voucher program that would allow public school children to attend private schools.
The complaint brought last year was replete with statistics about how Chicago public schools were not fulfilling their mandated task of educating children.
What it was missing, Cook County Circuit Judge Aaron Jaffe said Tuesday, was any justifiable claim that the conduct of the schools and the education they provided was somehow unconstitutional.
Although the parents who brought the suit wanted the court to remedy the problems, Jaffe said the proper arena for it was the state legislature.
“If one lives in the Chicagoland area, hardly a day passes by without media attention focusing in on some problem in the Chicago school system,” Jaffe said in court and in his written opinion. “While few would argue that drastic measures are necessary to cure these problems, that does not mean that courts should step in without legal justification.
“The complaint in this case states that it is based upon constitutional grounds. However, there is absolutely no showing of any factual or legal basis upon which to make a case for constitutional violations.”
Clint Bolick, an attorney for the Libertarian Institute for Justice, the Washington public interest law firm that brought the case, said it is likely the group will appeal, probably directly to the Illinois Supreme Court. The organization has filed a similar suit in California, Bolick said.
It was unlikely the issue would fare much better in the General Assembly.
Still pending before it is a pair of bills that would provide vouchers to parents who could use them to send their children to the school of their choice. Both measures were voted out of committee earlier this month, but neither is expected to have enough support to be enacted.
“We can’t give up like this; we can’t let this decision be the end,” said Linda Gayles, one of the parents who brought the suit.
The lawsuit brought on behalf of 70 low-income children in Chicago, had maintained that their constitutional right to a decent education guaranteed by the Illinois Constitution was being violated by an inadequate public school system. The suit contended that merely transferring the students to another school or spending more money would not solve the problem.
The only solution, the suit contended, was to allow the parents to take their portion of what the state sent in aid to Chicago schools and use it to pay for an education at the school of their choice.
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But in his ruling, Jaffe said that though the constitution mandates that the state provide a free education to all children, the issue of how that should be carried out has clearly been addressed by the legislature in a voluminous school code that includes programs for disadvantaged students.