Putting parity on hold

It is easier to be patient in a chair. Having to stand while waiting for officials to get around to providing you with an equal education can be as tough on the spirit as it is on the legs.

Julie Hancock said she was ''somewhat frustrated" yesterday to be told she had to wait a while longer for Massachusetts to bridge the disparity between rich and poor school districts. The junior at Brockton High School thought she had waited long enough. She was in the fifth grade when her parents lent her name to a class action lawsuit challenging the fairness of the state's education funding formula.

The 16-year-old said she hopes the Supreme Judicial Court knew what it was doing when it declared that Massachusetts was meeting its responsibilities to students. What Julie knows for sure is that, 12 years after the enactment of the Education Reform Act, there are not enough computers at her school and her teacher had to scramble to find chairs to accommodate his math class.

If Julie or the students in the 19 school districts represented in the suit were looking for clarity from the court, they had to be disappointed by the decision. The 5-2 ruling was not nearly as one-sided as the vote suggests. There were four opinions from the seven justices.

Writing in the majority, Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall acknowledged the persistence of ''sharp disparities in the educational opportunities, and the performance, of some Massachusetts public schools," but said the state is ''moving systemically to address those deficiencies and continues to make education reform a fiscal priority."

While the plaintiffs have amply shown that many children in the focus districts are not being well served by their school districts, they have not shown that the defendants are acting in an arbitrary, nonresponsive, or irrational way to meet the constitutional mandate," she said.

A system that fails its most vulnerable students, in other words, gets more points for effort than for results?

There is sympathy, but no lifeline, for those students left behind. ''The plaintiffs' frustration with the slow, sometimes painfully slow, pace of educational reform in the focus districts is understandable," Marshall said. ''I am cognizant that, for the student whose special needs go unaddressed, for the student who sits in an overcrowded classroom or an ill-equipped school library, and for their parents or guardians, the prospect of 'better things to come' in public education comes too late."

So, the message to a student in Lowell is to cross your fingers that things will be better for your grandchildren?

Laced through Marshall's decision are repeated nods to the separation of powers, references that make the reader wonder whether opponents of gay marriage have not struck a nerve with their insistence that the court usurped the prerogative of the Legislature when it legalized same-sex marriage. Chastising the dissenting justices in this case for recommending ''policy choices that are properly the Legislature's domain," Marshall wrote: ''Each choice embodies a value judgment; each carries a cost, in real, immediate tax dollars; and each choice is fundamentally political. Courts are not well positioned to make such decisions."

Justice Judith Cowin went further in marginalizing the role of the judiciary in educational policy-making. In a concurring opinion, Cowin questioned not only the legitimacy of the court's ruling in McDuffy v. Secretary of the Executive Office of Education, which sparked education reform in 1993, but the right to a public education, as well. ''Even if the education clause [of the state Constitution] is to be interpreted as imposing some duty upon the Commonwealth to maintain a public school establishment, a conclusion which is by no means apparent, our Constitution requires that the duty be fulfilled by the legislative and executive branches, without oversight or intrusion by the judiciary."

So much for those overheated fears about activist judges running amok.

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.