Education: The New Big Tabacco?

I spoke too soon. Within two weeks of my complaining that conservatives are paying no attention to the runaway judiciary in Kansas, NRO has not one, but two editorials on the subject. From the second one:

But, in the end, Kansans were as unsuccessful restraining the judiciary as everyone else, and as a result, the state’s taxpayers will be made to do what citizens in 45 of the 50 states in the nation have already been asked to do: pay a tax imposed on them by a judge seeking to fund state education in a way he or she finds agreeable, usually as a consequence of a ruling in an “equity” lawsuit. There are dozens of these lawsuits going on at any given time, often involving hundreds of millions of dollars. For lawyers, education is the new tobacco, and business is smoking.

We know all about that here in Kansas City, where the school levy was doubled by court order after city voters had rejected a levy increase 3 times in one year ('86?). Yet, while still under court supervision, the KC School District still lost its state accreditation in 1999. But hey, we've got some nice $500 million buildings in which to not educate the students, so it was all worth it.