Can't beat'em? Sue'em! What liberal lawyers love about Bush's education plan.

• Author: Gorman, Siobhan

GEORGE W. BUSH LOVES TO GIVE people nicknames, often with a bit of an edge to them. Were Bush to meet attorney and activist Michael Rebell, it's a good bet he'd choose something along the lines of "Pointy-Headed Liberal." Rebell's colleagues use "Tortoise" to describe the balding and slightly nerdy self-described "child of the '60s," who has spent three decades fighting to improve inner-city education in a way that conservatives loathe: Rebell's favorite weapon is the lawsuit.

When it comes to school reform, President Bush backs high standards and high-stakes tests, which form the core of the education plans currently before Congress. By contrast, Rebell believes in "throwing money" at schools, an objective that he's discovered can sometimes be accomplished by suing states to force them to spend more money on urban school districts, where per-pupil spending tends to lag far behind that of suburban schools. He's just won a victory in New York, and has set up a network of lawyers, professors, and politicians to press this case nationwide.

So it may seem odd that Rebell is excited about Bush's education plan. It's not that he favors Bush's policies so much as what they'll produce: detailed test scores that measure student learning. Or, in his eyes, a potential bonanza for lawsuits. He's probably right. Difficult as it may be for supporters of accountability to accept, the tests are likely to provide lawyers like Rebell the motherlode of evidence they need to sue states (and possibly the federal government itself) to release the flood of new money for urban schools for which liberals have long thirsted.

Back in the late 1960s, when Rebell was still studying at Yale Law School, liberals were becoming frustrated with the slow pace of change following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. They began to argue that in order to guarantee Brown's endorsement of equal access, the federal government needed to ensure equitable education funding for all children. They tested this strategy in a lawsuit, which charged that underfunding of the school system in San Antonio, Texas, violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection. But the argument failed to persuade the Supreme Court, which ruled in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, in 1973, that education was not a "fundamental right" under the Constitution, stressing that Rodriguez's lawyers had failed to provide a mechanism to asses relative differences in the quality of education and their connection to spending.

Following Rodriguez, liberal lawyers turned their sights on the states, arguing that unequal school financing violated the equal-protection clauses in state constitutions. This strategy worked for a while in such states as California, New Jersey, Arkansas...