School Finance Litigation in the Name of Educational Equity: Its Evolution, Impact, and Future

Paul A. Minorini and Stephen D. Sugarman

Introduction
Since the 1960s in America, individuals and groups seeking an increased level or share of valued public benefits have often turned to courts for assistance, hoping thereby to achieve their goals outside the traditional political process. Courts have been especially receptive to these pleas when they are made by the politically powerless and deal with matters of fundamental importance.

As this new judicial activism started taking hold, lawyers and scholarly advocates turned their attention to the financing of our public schools. They focused on the way in which most states have historically relied on local property taxes as a substantial source of funding public education (Enrich, 1995). Those early advocates (and many subsequent legal scholars) viewed equity as an essential component of the principle of basic fairness. Yet, traditional school finance arrangements, they argued, created grave inequities for children in the availability of educational resources and opportunities. In light of the enormous importance of education, it is not surprising, therefore, that those inequities have been the subject of intense litigation.

What is surprising, however, is the predominantly state law and state court character of this litigation. Federal courts and federal law have played the central role in lawsuits concerning other aspects of public education such as school desegregation, student rights to free expression, and the needs of the disabled and pupils with limited English proficiency. But the federal constitutional challenges to school finance inequalities that were brought in the late 1960s and early 1970s were ultimately unsuccessful.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6166&page=34