Inhibiting Intrastate Inequalities: A Congressional Approach to Ensuring Equal Opportunity to Finance Public Education

The United States has exhibited a strong commitment to public education throughout its history. The local control of education long associated with the United States' federal system, however, has led to extreme inequalities in education finance within states. This reality, held constitutionally permissible by the Supreme Court in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, is a product of heavy reliance on local property taxation as a means to fund schools. Although levying property taxes is a permissible state action to promote local control of education, its unaltered use is archaic and ultimately detrimental due to the United States' growing income gap and corresponding wealth segregation in the housing markets. Because federal and state court litigation has produced an intractable and inequitable split in education policy that remains unsolved by current federal- and state-led initiatives, this Note argues that a conditional congressional grant of funds would serve as a new, more politically feasible solution to this problem. By making federal funding under the next reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act contingent on states' adoption of new school finance systems, particularly the Guaranteed Tax Base, Congress can encourage states to give all communities an equal opportunity to finance a high-quality education for their students, regardless of the value of their taxable property.INTRODUCTION"Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."1While this passage, unlike much of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, did not end up in the Bill of Rights,2 the United States nonetheless ascribes no small value to education: after all, there are more colleges and universities per capita in the United States than in any other developed nation.3 Yet our commitment to education is not reflected in the structure of our public school financing. Unlike many developed nations, the United States has a decentralized primary and secondary education system that has led to frag- mentation and inequality within and among states.4 Unfortunately, the structure of the U.S. government does little to help the situation, as it defers to the states to create school finance policies.The clash between federal and state education initiatives finds its roots in our federal system of government. The U.S. Constitution, via the Tenth Amendment, delegates the duty to regulate public education to the states.5 In fact, every state in the union guarantees the right to an education in its constitution, though the education clauses vary greatly in length and clarity.6Although states differ in their approaches to school finance, one source of funding has proved ubiquitous: local property taxation.7 This system pur- portedly maintains local control over education, but as the income gap con- tinues to grow,8 funding schools with local property taxes has created severe disparities in per-pupil funding between high-property-value school districts and low-property-value school districts.9 On its face, local property taxation seems to allow communities to fund their schools at whatever level they deem appropriate; even if a low-property-value district greatly values educa- tion and therefore imposes high taxes, however, the revenues of its higher property tax rate cannot match the revenues that many high-property-value districts can raise with lower tax rates.10States have taken conflicting approaches in attempting to solve the issue of disparate funding between school districts. Some state legislatures, like New Jersey's, have sought to enact laws aimed at creating parity between district funding-a true attempt at equal education for all of their stu- dents.11 Other states, however, have declared that education is not a funda- mental right and continue to use the local property tax schemes that cause such great inequalities. …