Parental and community supports are important factors for Latino student academic success. The purpose of this paper is to explore the parental and community activism surrounding the "San Antonio v. Rodriguez" school finance case in order to better understand how historic means of activism relate to the contemporary ways that Latino…

Background/Context: In the 1973 "Rodriguez" decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not guarantee a substantive federal right to education. So far, this holding has not been adequately contextualized with many other statements the Court has made concerning the nature of education in the constitutional order. For…

Empirical data show that the COVID-19 pandemic deepened and exacerbated social inequalities, to the detriment of low-income communities of color. Using the law as a conceptual framework and legal research methodology, this study examines education law against the exacerbated social inequalities low-income students of color faced during the…

Does the U.S. Constitution guarantee a right to education? The Supreme Court declared that it does not in "San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez," a 1973 case alleging that disparities in spending levels among Texas school districts violated students' constitutional rights. This issue's forum contains two essays. The first…

In this ambitious volume, leading legal and educational scholars examine "San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez" (1973), the landmark US Supreme Court decision that held that the Constitution does not guarantee equality of educational opportunity. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Kimberly Jenkins Robinson have brought…

This article discusses concerns about how Neil M. Gorsuch, a U.S. Supreme Court nominee, might influence decisions regarding cases involving the appropriate scope of services guaranteed by federal special-education law, government aid to religious institutions providing educational services, and how intellectual property law applies to sports…

Our current conceptions of educational adequacy emerged out of an era dominated by equity-based school resource litigation. During that time of transitioning between successful litigation strategies, legal opinions provided clues as to how future courts might view a norm-referenced approach to establishing an adequacy standard--an approach that…

Justice is often thought to require that students receive educations that are, in some important sense, equal. I lay out, and raise questions about, an argument that seems to support this conclusion. The questions I raise about the argument suggest that what justice requires is not equality, but adequacy, of education. More specifically, I contend…

Equity issues in public school finance have been discussed in terms of three waves. The first wave was a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court to provide equal education to all students as a fundamental right. After a ruling against the plaintiffs in "San Antonio v Rodriguez" (1973), the fight shifted to a second wave in the state courts.…

This article aims to "modernize" the current legal debate over inequitable public school funding at the state and local level. The 1973 Supreme Court case of "San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez" established precedent, allowing for property-tax based education funding programs at the state-level--a major source…

Since the separate-but-equal era, students attending schools with high concentrations of Black students have attempted to improve the quality of their educations through school finance litigation. Because of the negative effects of racial isolation, Black students might consider mounting school finance litigation to force states to explicitly…

Adequate funding for the nation's schools to meet the call for higher student achievement has been a litigious issue. Spending on schools is a political choice. The choices made by state legislatures, in some cases, have failed to fund schools adequately and have incited school finance lawsuits in almost all states. These proceedings are generally…

Southern California is facing a demographic transformation that will become characteristic of the nation as a whole in coming decades. In this research, we present a historical review of the region's attempt to address school inequity, recent enrollment and segregation trends, and an investigation of whether segregation still matters. Our results…

Congress's role in defining and promoting equality of educational opportunity has evolved over the past 55 years since "Brown v. Board of Education." Most recently, all three branches of the federal government have focused more on equality of educational opportunity for "individual" students rather than for protected classes.…

Raising academic standards and eliminating achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students are America's prime national educational goals. Current federal and state policies, however, largely ignore the fact that the childhood poverty rate in the United States is 21%, the highest in the industrialized world, and that poverty…