Dive Brief:

• The Kansas Supreme Court's ruling that the state's current school funding formula is unequitable, and that the Legislature has not made good on its constitutional responsibility to fairly fund all schools, has created what The New York Times calls "a new crisis point" in the state's funding fight.
• Unless lawmakers present a quick fix to come up with the court-mandated amount of $40 million in extra school funding, the state's schools are slated to be shut down on June 30.
• Alternately, a Florida court this week ruled in favor of the state's current funding system, disagreeing with plaintiffs who alleged it was discriminatory and widened the acheivement gap between rich and poor students.

Dive Insight:

In Kansas, the sticky issue of school funding has been a looming concern for years now. According to The New York Times, many Kansas parents have seen school conditions deteriorate over time, including ballooning class sizes and a decrease in library books.

This past December, a group of 10 parents from the state's Shawnee Mission School District asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case challenging the state's current cap on the use of local property taxes for education. The nation's high court declined to reexamine the case in question, Petrella v. Brownback, which began in 2010. Another lawsuit, Gannon v. Kansas, is an argument by four districts that the state has "failed to fully fund schools" in accordance with its constitution, the Kansas City Star reported.

And despite the fact that this new ruling is making waves, having a school shut-down threat may not achieve its intended results. In Washington state, where a similar situation continues to unfold, the state Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that the state's school funding formulas is unconstitutional. Lawmakers still haven't found an adequate way to tackle the problem, even with an accumulation of daily fines now totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Policymakers in Arizona are also trying to come up with new budget solutions.