Cincinnati City School District Board of Education v. Walter (1979)

The decision is the baseline against which DeRolph has to be read. The same constitutional text produced opposite results eighteen years apart, on facts that had changed in degree rather than in kind — the disparities were larger by 1997, and H.B. 920’s reduction factors had by then been operating for two decades. inference

And DeRolph I neither overruled this decision nor merely distinguished it. It applied it. The word “overrule” does not appear in DeRolph I at all, in an opinion that names Walter 76 times. See findings. verified crates/regime-diff

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.

One standard, two records, two answers # ↑ Contents

Two sentences in the majority carry it. One keeps the law: Walter’s observations on judicial power are “as applicable today as they were at the time Walter was decided”. The other applies it — “when we apply the tests of Miller and Walter as to what is meant by the words ‘thorough and efficient,’ the evidence is overwhelming that many districts are ‘starved for funds,’ and lack teachers, buildings, or equipment”. Both quoted phrases are Walter’s own words for the limit on legislative discretion, turned on a record eighteen years later. What the opinion says changed is “a statutory system for school funding that has since been repealed and replaced”. verified

So the answer the [open] was choosing between is a false pair. Overruling would have put the change in the law and left the corpus reading two doctrines; distinguishing would have set Walter aside. The opinion does neither: it takes Walter’s test as given and finds the facts the other way, which is why the two cases can be read as one line of authority. inference

The disagreement below was entirely about whether the facts had moved # ↑ Contents

Three courts read this decision’s reach three ways. The trial court “found that Walter was not controlling precedent”; the court of appeals “disagreed, concluding that the system of educational funding had not substantially changed since Walter was decided” and that it therefore dictated the result; the Supreme Court agreed with the trial court that Walter “is confined to its own set of facts.” Nobody argued about what Article VI, Section 2 requires. verified

The DeRolph I dissent makes the same point from the other side, answering the majority by finding this decision’s facts again rather than defending its law: “as in Walter, plaintiffs did not provide evidence that any student received fewer than the full number of days of instruction required by law”, and, quoting Walter directly, districts claiming to be starved for funds that “in fact offer programs and services in excess of state minimum standards.” verified

It is also the authority that let the case be heard # ↑ Contents

The DeRolph I dissent argued the question was a nonjusticiable political one. The answer is this decision: “in 1979 … this court made clear that in certain instances we would have jurisdiction to determine the constitutionality of Ohio’s system of funding public schools.” The precedent the state would have wanted is the precedent that opened the courthouse door. verified

What had not happened since 1979 is a costing # ↑ Contents

“[T]he General Assembly does not know the actual per-pupil cost of education in Ohio, since it has not calculated the cost of a quality education since 1973-1974.” Written in 1997, about a figure last computed twenty-four years earlier — six years before this case was even decided. verified

That is this corpus’s own subject arriving in the opinion. Every regime since builds a base cost per pupil and multiplies it; the court’s complaint is that in 1979 and in 1997 alike nobody had priced the thing being multiplied. It dates the gap the FY2002 model was built to close. inference

Still open, and narrower # ↑ Contents

Reading this decision’s dissent against the DeRolph I majority. DeRolph I quotes Walter at length and never quotes its dissent, so the continuity cannot be established from what the corpus holds — it needs Walter itself, which ohio-courts can reach and has not been asked for. open