Education funding lawsuits like the one decided recently in Pennsylvania are common.

But state schools shouldn’t count on the state to immediately balance budgets or to provide so much additional money that buildings are full of new teachers when school opens in August. These things don’t work that way.

As the Associated Press reported last week, the state court’s ruling is no guarantee of swift, significant or longstanding change for the poorer school districts that sued in hopes of getting billions of dollars more for their budgets. First, an appeal is possible within 30 days. Even without an appeal, however, other states with successful education funding lawsuits have seen more money but not enough to meet the court’s decision of full funding.

The type of money the courts prescribe is one of the first casualties of an economic recession — as happened in New York in the late 2000s when Gov. Eliot Spitzer promised more education funding only to end up taking state aid from the state’s schools when the subprime mortgage crisis and the ensuing economic recession emptied the state’s bank account faster than a bachelor party in Las Vegas. In New York, not only have New York City schools not reached full funding some two decades after the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, but small cities have spent more than a decade fighting their own legal battle for additional funding.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has pledged record education funding in the state, but how that funding is secured in coming years is in doubt.

More importantly, it’s unclear that simply spending more money will mean a better education for students. The lawsuits make it seem as if the state simply writing bigger checks means students will bring home a report card full of “A’s” instead of a report card full of “C’s.”

But New York already spends the most on education on a per-pupil basis, and its school system traditionally ranks, at best, in the middle of the pack. The real question is how the money is spent, not the amount of money spent.

That’s something state schools and state lawmakers should keep in mind as they comply with the state court’s decision on education funding.