Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance Issues and Perspectives (1999) / Chapter Skim
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2 School Finance Litigation in the Name of Educational Equity: Its Evolution, Impact, and Future
2 School Finance Litigation in the Name of Educational Equity: Its Evolution, Impact, and Future
Pages 34-71
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From page 34... ...
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~.
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In these cases, challengers have relied on equal protection clauses) and/or education clauses2 contained in state constitutions.
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From page 36... ...
Based on the school desegregation cases, Wise argued that public education was a "fundamental interest" for equal protection purposes and thus could not be distributed unequally within any state absent a "compelling state interest" for doing so (and, he argued, there was no such compelling interest) .3 Drawing on the "one man-one vote" principle of the reapportionment cases,4 Wise advanced a similar standard for public school finance: one scholar-one dollar.
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From page 37... ...
Both McInnis and Burrus were appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where they were affirmed without comment. Advocates would have to wait several years for the nation's highest court to opine on the merits of school finance challenges.
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From page 38... ...
Coons and his colleagues emphasized this remedy because they recognized the traditional importance of local control over education and anticipated the reluctance of the federal judiciary to override that control. Significantly, under the Coons team's theory, the objectionable discrimination on the basis of poverty was based on school district poverty, rather than personal poverty, and was measured by the assessed value of property per pupil that a district could tax.
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From page 39... ...
In line with the Coons team's theory, they claimed that the Texas school finance system's reliance on local property taxation unfairly favored more affluent districts, creating substantial inter-district disparities that violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiffs asserted and the lower court agreed that, as a matter of federal constitutional law, education was a "fundamental interest" and wealth was a "suspect classification," thus requiring the application of "strict judicial scrutiny" to the state's wealth-based school finance scheme.
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From page 40... ...
A fourth, Justice White, dissented on narrower grounds, concluding that the Texas school finance system effectively denied local control to poor districts and thus was irrational. As he saw it, property-poor school districts did not have control over their inability to raise revenues for education, and in fact were often forced to tax their meager resources at rates much higher than the wealthier districts.
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From page 41... ...
Rodriguez abruptly cut off efforts to reform unequal state school finance systems through federal litigation based on the United States Constitution,9 but it certainly did not end the school finance litigation reform effort. TURNING TO STATE CONSTITUTIONS Overview With the door to federal courts closed by Rodriguez, and faced with the persistence of large disparities in the availability of educational resources and opportunities, advocates turned to state courts for relief.
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From page 42... ...
Burke 1990, 1994, 1997, 1998 North Carolina Leandro v. North Carolina 1997 Supreme Court overturned dismissal and remanded for trial on merits Ohio DeRolph v.
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From page 43... ...
Many other state courts have relied in whole or in part on state constitutional provisions specific to education in deciding school finance cases. Some of those decisions use the state constitution's education clause to buttress the equal protection analysis, relying in part on the presence and content of the education clause to support treating education as a fundamental right (Enrich, 1995~.
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From page 44... ...
Many state constitution education clauses provide that the state shall provide for a "thorough and efficient" system of public schools, others merely require "efficient," still others call for "ample," and so on. Moreover, beyond its words, each state constitution has its own political history and its own prior history of judicial interpretational Hence, while some scholars (McUsic, 1991; Thro, 1993)
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Minnesota 1993 Win for plaintiffs at district court on motion to dismiss NAACP v. Minnesota Filed 1996 St.
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From page 46... ...
Plaintiffs in a traditional state constitutional school finance equity casewhether grounded in the equal protection clause, the education clause, or bothtypically allege that a state's method for funding public schools is inequitable because the amount of resources available to local school districts is a function of the property wealth located in that district. This reflects the predominance gained by the Coons team's theory described above.
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From page 47... ...
These cases are focused on ensuring that all students in a state have equitable access to adequate educational opportunities that are reasonably designed to allow them to achieve expected educational outcomes.~4 Such cases rely primarily on a state constitution's education clause, with the plaintiffs' evidence typically focusing on the inadequacy of educational opportunities offered in one or more school districts in a state as demonstrated in part by the inability of students in that district to meet state or other contemporary education standards. An "adequacy" claim does not complain about disparities in funding among school districts per se, but instead alleges that one or more districts lack the resources necessary to provide students with adequate educational opportunities.
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From page 48... ...
Later, in its 1976 decision evaluating the sufficiency of the legislature's response to Serrano I, the California Supreme Court explicitly held that the federal equal protection analysis it had advanced in Serrano I was equally applicable to the California constitution's equal protection clause (Serrano II, 1976:951~. The United States Supreme Court, of course, had decided Rodriguez during the time between the first and second Serrano decisions.
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From page 49... ...
MINORINI AND STEPHEN D SUGARMAN 49 wider and independent view of the California constitution, the California Supreme Court was able to hold firm to its prior decision.
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Exactly what, for example, makes a system "thorough and efficient"? Initially, this difference in the choice of relevant state constitutional provisions was not self-evidently important, because the New Jersey court in Robinson I seemed to treat the education clause as imposing the same equity norms that the California Supreme Court found in its state equal protection clause.
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From page 51... ...
dominated the school finance literature and the scholarly and policy debates of the early 1970s, two other state court decisions moved toward a different notion of equity during this same period. This notion might be called equity in access to adequate educational opportunities.
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From page 52... ...
They contended that the state school finance system's reliance on "special excess levy funding" by local school systems which required voter approval and had failed in the last two local elections deprived the city school district of the funds necessary to provide students with educational opportunities in compliance with state statutes and regulations. In 1979, the West Virginia Supreme Court expanded the notion of equal and adequate educational opportunities (Pauley v.
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From page 53... ...
That separation-of-powers concern was echoed in many decisions rejecting school funding equity challenges in the 1980s and 1990s. The Idaho court also expressed some doubt as to whether equal funding had a significant relationship to educational quality: Assuming, arguendo, that the Idaho Constitution requires that our public school students receive equal educational opportunities, we cannot adopt the ultimate conclusion advanced by respondents, i.e., that unless a substantially equal amount of funds are expended per-pupil throughout the state, subject only to natural variations such as sparsity of population, students in those districts receiving less than that district with the greatest expenditure per student are denied equal educational opportunities (`Thompson, 1975:341-42~.
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From page 54... ...
, the City School District of Philadelphia alleged that the state's heavy reliance on locally generated revenues to fund schools, and the city school district's inability to raise such revenues, had led to a budget crisis in the school district requiring dramatic cutbacks in the educational programs offered to students.~9 The plaintiffs contended that the finance system violated the Pennsylvania constitution's education clause, which required the state to provide for the "maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth" (Pa. Const.
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From page 55... ...
Several criticized plaintiffs for failing to demonstrate that, merely by having less money spent on them, students in property-poor school districts were denied their constitutional rights.22 Nonetheless, decisions rejecting finance equity claims often left the door open to possible future cases alleging that the state was failing to afford districts sufficient resources to provide students with the basic, minimum, or adequate educational opportunity required by state's education clause (Verstegen, 1995; Enrich, 1995~.23 As a result, despite initial school finance litigation failures in Maryland, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, plaintiffs in
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From page 56... ...
The Texas Supreme Court agreed that the wealth-based disparities in funding for public schools were illegal and had to be corrected by the state legislature. Hence, the poor Texas school districts were able to achieve through state law what they had earlier failed to achieve in Rodriguez.
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From page 57... ...
Just as the New Jersey case returned to court several times during the 1970s, the Texas case appeared before the state supreme court four times in the 1990s, with the court repeatedly having to judge the constitutionality of the legislature's revised school finance plans. Finally, in 1995, the court found that the legislature had devised a constitutionally "efficient" plan, and ended the long-standing litigation battle (Edgewood, 1995 WE 36074, 1995~.
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In 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court found that the entire Kentucky system of education violated the mandates of the state constitution's education clause (see Minorini and Sugarman, Chapter 6 in this volume)
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From page 59... ...
Since 1989, courts in Alabama and Massachusetts have directly followed the Kentucky precedent. They have declared their education systems to be constitutionally inadequate under state law and have specifically relied on the Kentucky Supreme Court's definition of an adequate education when providing guidance to the state legislatures as they craft remedies (Alabama Coalition for Equity v.
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From page 60... ...
In Illinois, where the state constitution's education clause explicitly requires the state to "provide for an efficient system of high quality public educational institutions and services," the Illinois Supreme Court rejected attempts by plaintiffs to involve the judiciary in determining whether the quality of education offered in the plaintiff districts met the constitutional standard. According to the court, "questions relating to the quality of education are solely for the legislative branch to answer" (Committee for Educational Rights v.
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From page 61... ...
In its 1997 decision, the Vermont Supreme Court found that such disparities in resource availability, and the consequent disparities in educational opportunities throughout the state, violated the state constitution's equal protection clause (Brigham, No.
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In the 1970s, an Ohio Supreme Court decision had squarely rejected a traditional equity challenge to the state's school finance system. In 1991, however, a coalition of plaintiffs filed suit claiming that the education provided in their schools was constitutionally inadequate.
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MINORINI AND STEPHEN D SUGARMAN 63 SUMMING UP: THE FUTURE OF SCHOOL FINANCE LITIGATION As we have seen, most of the early legal theories attacking school funding arrangements emphasized equality in a way that implied either a dramatic raising up of the wealth and/or spending level of poor, low-spending districts or a leveling down of the advantaged districts (or a combination of both)
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From page 64... ...
Therefore, by their demands that their state provide enhanced financial backing for school districts that are unfairly disadvantaged, it is safer for the present to see those judges adopting adequacy theories as still acting in the school equity tradition. In these newer cases the courts seem to be bolder in describing what constitutes an unfair disadvantage, and this unwillingness gives adequacy and equity different legal meanings.
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From page 65... ...
For example, no one has been able to show that the narrowed spending differentials achieved by successful school finance equity cases in the 1970s and 1980s directly led to a narrowing of educational achievement differentials. Yet advocates for judicial intervention continue to believe not only that school finance reform is required by the norm of basic fairness, but also that reform is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for improving the educational attainment of those now served poorly by our public schools.
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From page 66... ...
State education clauses are collected in an appendix to Hubsch (1992~. A number of them require state legislatures to provide for a "thorough and efficient system" of public schools.
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15. Note also that the Connecticut Supreme Court embraced the Coons team's theory in a 1977 decision, Horton v.
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From page 68... ...
1993) (the education clause required the state to provide enough funds to ensure that each student receives an adequate education, but the plaintiff school districts before the court conceded that they were providing such an education to their students with existing resources)
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From page 69... ...
By our count, the following 10 states may perhaps be said to have had successful school finance litigation an appreciable time in advance of the GAO data collection date, with the date noted representing the date of the first successful high court decision: Arkansas (1983) , California (1971)
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From page 70... ...
Thro, W.E. 1993 The role of language of the state education clause in school finance litigation.
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From page 71... ...
1985 Equality guarantees in state constitutions. Texas Law Review 63:1195-1224.
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