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Abstract: Fifty years after the San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez decision, the fundamental reality of school finance inequity remains a central feature of American public schools. Local school funding is still based primarily on local property taxes and reflects large disparities in property values between wealthy and low-income communities. State aid to education is a significant source of additional funding, but it is particularly vulnerable to economic downturns and is not enough in many states to close these funding gaps. Finally, federal aid is explicitly designed to support low-income students, but its relative size is small: since at least the 1980s, it has remained less than ten percent of the funds that schools receive in most years.
The Rodriguez decision largely foreclosed the possibility of remedying school funding inequities through federal courts. The majority’s core holding was that education is not a fundamental right and therefore judicial scrutiny of these inequities is limited to rational basis. After the decision, many states faced litigation in state courts around inequities and inadequacies in school funding based on clauses in their state constitutions. These state court decisions contributed to narrowing the spending disparities within states in many cases, but these gains were difficult to sustain over time and did not address inequities across state lines or within local school districts. Many decades after the Rodriguez decision, fundamental inequities in school financing remain the norm.
Although the federal government’s major investments in elementary and secondary education pre-dated the Rodriguez decision, in the last two decades those funds have sought to leverage wide-ranging changes in American schooling. While these sometimes controversial interventions seem to have increased state investments in public education, the impact on school funding disparities has been more modest. This Essay will examine the efforts by the federal government to foster greater equity in school financing and assess several alternative approaches that might be more effective. After a brief overview of federal education funding, the Essay will analyze the legacy of the Rodriguez decision on school funding and examine the evolution of federal strategies to expand educational equity.
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