In an "Another View" column in the January 26, 2005 Union Leader, Representative Mark Carter wrote that education funding that targets state education aid to "needy" communities complies with the Claremont decisions because, "The New Hampshire Supreme Court never said that every community must receive state aid." This is one of the claims made by certain "constitutional experts" advising the donor towns and the Governor. However, in what I believe was Claremont IX (although it may have been VIII or X -- it is hard to keep track), the supreme court said, "The New Hampshire Constitution imposes solely upon the State the obligation to provide sufficient funds for each school district to furnish a constitutionally adequate education to every educable child," which undeniably is exactly what these constitutional experts say the court never said.

The truth is that targeted aid plans that provide state aid only to needy communities manifestly do not comply with the Claremont case. Rather, they ignore Claremont. While one can certainly make the case that ignoring Claremont is the right thing to do, given that it represents judicial activism at near its worst, what is not right is the intellectually dishonest way that targeted aid is being characterized by these constitutional experts. By all means, let’s debate targeted aid. But let’s have a complete and honest debate.

What these constitutional experts really mean when they maintain that targeted aid plans are "constitutionally defensible" is that they believe they can convince the supreme court to back away from what it said in Claremont about the state having to pay for the entire cost of adequacy. They can’t say so directly because that would undermine the court’s prestige. But that is the true argument that they would have to make to the court.

There is a big problem, however, if targeted aid is passed and the supreme court were to decide not to back away from what it said in Claremont about the state having to pay for the entire cost of adequacy. For example, under the donor town plan the cost of an adequate education is defined as approximately $7,800 per student or about $1.6 billion in total. The local property tax would pay for around $1.2 billion of that cost. If the plan became law and if the court thereafter decided not to back away from Claremont, the only taxes capable of filling a funding hole of that size would be an income tax, a sales tax, a state property tax or some combination of the three.