Opinion ID: 1789805
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Public School Funding Lawsuits

Text: The local nature of public schools has been at the heart of three waves of litigation that have occurred in the past 60 years. The first was racial desegregation, which included claims that education resources were distributed discriminatorily; the second wave was school-finance lawsuits aimed at achieving equity in financing between and among local districts; and the third, and current, wave expresses a right to an adequate education. To the extent gains have occurred in public education as a result of these waves of litigation, they are largely the result of legislative efforts, sometimes grudging, to do what seems needed to avoid constitutional conflicts between courts and legislatures, especially in the area of school finance. Such legislative action illustrates the importance of school finance challenges brought in state courts. [23] Since 1974, litigants have challenged the school finance structures in over 40 states, and nearly 20 state supreme courts have declared their states' funding schemes unconstitutional. [24] Successful challenges, however, have not resulted in equal funding in states where school funding schemes have been declared unconstitutional. [25] This is not surprising. To ensure that all school districts within a particular state have equal resources, the state's legislature would have to do one of two things: raise all district funding to the level of the district in the state with the greatest funding or reduce the funding of wealthier districts to a designated level by placing a cap on the funding local districts can raise. [26] Neither of these scenarios is realistic or attractive: Budgetary limitations make the first measure financially impossible, [27] and popular reaction to mandated school funding caps makes the second solution politically infeasible. [28] Without a workable way to equalize district funding, the disparities caused by differing property values seem inevitable. [29] Life, it often has been said, is unfair. Shifting away from an equality-based argument, litigants in more recent school funding cases have based their constitutional challenges on principles of adequacy. [30] Rather than arguing that states must provide equal resources to all districts, recent litigants, like the appellants in this case, argue that all students should receive the benefit of funds necessary to finance an adequate education. [31] Unlike an equality-based argument, an argument based on adequacy of school funding does not interfere very much with the perception that school resources are a local matter. [32]