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

AuthorArocho, Joshua

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."1

While 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.6

Although 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.10

States 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.12 For example, in Lake County, Illinois, there re- mains an enormous disparity in per-pupil funding: in 2010, Rondout Ele- mentary spent $24,244 per pupil, whereas Taft Elementary spent a mere $7,023.13

The assumption that schools that spend more money per pupil have parents who care more about education is invalid. The local control ideals behind property tax funding can give rise to the erroneous conclusion that the parents in Rondout's school district, for example, value education much more than the parents in Taft's school district. Proportionally, however, Rondout parents pay less in property taxes than do Taft parents.14 Given the increasing income gap in the United States,15 revenues raised via property taxation are no longer an accurate metric of a community's commitment to education. Perhaps this scheme accomplished its goal in the days where sin- gle-room schoolhouses were funded completely by homogenous communi- ties of farmers, blacksmiths, and carpenters. But today vast discrepancies in personal wealth allow richer communities to shower their schools with re- sources unimaginable to schools serving low-income students-and they can do it at a much lower property tax rate. Parents in low-property-value school districts simply do not have the resources to match those of their high-property-value counterparts.16 This antiquated funding scheme is no longer promoting local control over education; rather, it statutorily rein- forces poverty by providing children in low-income families with fewer edu- cational resources. As Cohen and Moffitt note, "[m]oney alone cannot cure [the] weak schools, but a chief source of academic weakness in these schools is the badly educated teachers and poor working conditions that inadequate revenues . . . underwrite."17

Several reform efforts have attempted-and failed-to address these disparities. The struggle to eliminate such funding inequities faced its biggest legal setback in 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez.18 The Court held that funding education through local property taxes, despite the resultant dispar- ities in per-pupil funding between neighboring school districts, did not vio- late the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because such funding was rationally related to the legitimate government interest of en- couraging local control over education.19 Rodriguez, though upholding the Texas law, left open the question of whether "some identifiable quantum of education is . . . constitutionally protected."20

Nine years later, in Plyler v. Doe, the Court answered this question in the affirmative by invalidating a statute that completely denied public education to children of undocumented immigrants.21 Writing for the majority, Justice Brennan (who wrote a bitter dissent in Rodriguez22) referred to these chil- dren as "victims" and argued that to deny them a basic education "imposes a lifetime hardship" and deprives them of the opportunity to "contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation."23 While this case was a much-needed victory in federal court for proponents of educational oppor- tunity, it set the standard for the right to education so low that it has proven unable to overcome the trend set by Rodriguez.

By largely foreclosing federal litigation as a means to secure greater edu- cational equity, Rodriguez and Plyler have forced some reformers to seek redress in state court litigation on the one hand and in federal and state legislative reforms on the other. After these federal equal protection claims (known as the "first wave" of school finance lawsuits),24 two new waves of litigation-equality challenges and adequacy challenges-surfaced in state courts.25 These challenges are referred to as the second and third waves of school finance litigation, respectively.26 Modern trends have shifted toward adequacy challenges, which argue that every student is entitled to a basic level of education. These challenges have generally been more successful than equality challenges, which aimed to secure equal funding for all schools.27 Such second and third wave cases have taken place in forty-five of fifty states, and their mixed results have left poor students in certain states at a severe competitive disadvantage.28 Looking to the future, some have pro- posed a "fourth wave" of education litigation comprising federal quality-of- education (adequacy) claims,29 but this is unlikely to produce meaningful results due to the amorphous character of educational quality. Put simply, courts lack the requisite expertise to prescribe standards for education.30 Without such knowledge, they can give only carte blanche authority to states to determine the meaning of "adequate education," which is the system under which we already operate.31

Perhaps noting the mixed results in seeking equity in inputs (i.e., school funding), the federal government has attempted to address educational ineq- uities in outputs (i.e., student performance) through initiatives like the No Child Left Behind Act ("NCLB"). Although NCLB continued to partially offset funding differences in high- versus low-income schools-as did its predecessor, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 ("ESEA")-poor schools already counted on these dollars to educate low- income students.32 And although the states have engaged in collective action to form the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which exerts more control over curricula than the federal government does with NCLB, the Common Core is minimally funded and thus has not and cannot address school finance issues.33

In light of these failed attempts at meaningful reform, this Note pro- poses a new federal legislative solution to cure the ailment of school finance inequity. History has made clear that Congress is the only remaining body with the authority and ability to correct the inequities in education funding caused by local-property-tax-based school finance schemes. By conditioning a percentage of federal education funding under the next reauthorization of NCLB on states' adopting more equitable school finance systems, Congress can encourage states to provide all communities an equal opportunity to finance a high-quality education for their students, regardless of the com- munities' respective taxable property values. Part I argues that appeals to the judiciary are counterproductive-federal litigation cannot be a vehicle for change given the existing jurisprudence, and state court litigation has led to an inequitable split in education policy. Part II contends that legislative re- form efforts have been largely ineffective: states have struggled to address school finance inequities through a patchwork of individual reform efforts, current federal reforms are ineffective, and state-led collaborative programs will fail because such initiatives lack the additional funding necessary to cure financial inequalities. Finally, Part III argues that congressional action is the only avenue available to address systemically school finance inequity, and this Part therefore offers a legislative proposal wherein Congress would use its spending powers to persuade states to create school finance schemes that offer equal opportunity for all school districts to collect funds to finance public education.

  1. RODRIGUEZ AND THE STATES'...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT