We offer these concluding thoughts, against the backdrop of the dissent. Courts are, of course, well suited to adjudicate civil and criminal cases and extrapolate legislative intent (dissent at 19). They are, however, also well suited to interpret and safeguard constitutional rights and review challenged acts of our co-equal branches of government -- not in order to make policy but in order to assure the protection of constitutional rights. That is what we have been called upon to do by litigants seeking to enforce the State Constitution's Education Article. The task began with Levittown's articulation of the constitutional right to a sound basic education - not at all a "catch-phrase for an inferred constitutional guarantee" (dissent at 3), but this Court's careful judgment 21 years ago as to what is meant by our State Constitution's promise in the Education Article. CFE built on our definition of the constitutional requirement, adding to the law a determination that the complaint stated a cause of action, and that -- if plaintiffs proved their assertions, as they have -- they would establish a violation. Nor is the Court's standard of a sound basic education, articulated both in Levittown and CFE, "illusory" for failing to fix the moment when a meaningful high school education is achieved (dissent at 2-12). As the dissent itself exemplifies by "of course" rejecting the eighth (or ninth) grade test of the Appellate Division and offering no other, a constitutional standard of sound basic education need not pinpoint a date with statutory precision, so long as it defines the contours of the requirement, against which the facts of a case may then be measured.[11] Indeed, a sound basic education back in 1894, when the Education Article was added, may well have consisted of an eighth or ninth grade education, which we unanimously reject. The definition of a sound basic education must serve the future as well as the case now before us. Finally, the remedy is hardly extraordinary or unprecedented (dissent at 18). It is, rather, an effort to learn from our national experience and fashion an outcome that will address the constitutional violation instead of inviting decades of litigation. A case in point is the experience of our neighbor, the New Jersey Supreme Court, which in its landmark education decision 30 years ago simply specified the constitutional deficiencies, beginning more than a dozen trips to the Court (dissent at 19, n 12), a process that led over time to more focused directives by that court ( compare Robinson v Cahill, 63 NJ 196, 198 [1973] with Abbott v Burke, 119 NJ 287, 385-391 [1990]). In other jurisdictions, the process has generated considerably less