3

EQUALITY PROMISED, EQUALITY DENIED

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here.

—SUPREME COURT JUSTICE JOHN MARSHALL HARLAN, DISSENTING OPINION, PLESSY V. FERGUSON, MAY 18, 1896

FEDERAL COURTS WERE CENTRAL TO THE FIGHT FOR DESEGREGATION. The judicial landmarks of the school desegregation cases also provided part of the basis for the movement toward school finance reform litigation and debates about the constitutionality of local finance systems. But what the courts did in Brown they were unable, or unwilling, to do in the fight to expand school funding equalization, another powerful method of ensuring educational opportunities for all. As we will see, despite hard-fought battles, the nation never realized the kind of progressive funding policies that many countries around the world currently enjoy, leaving the work of equalizing school funding to states, and sometimes districts. The uneven implementation that ensued provides evidence we can exploit to answer another critical and perennial question in education: Does funding matter? And when we say “matter,” we do not mean simply for test scores—we mean for people’s lives. To fully appreciate school funding reform, we must first understand the status quo and the efforts to undo it.¹

JOHN SERRANO JR. was born into an East Los Angeles working-class family in 1937. He got married, went to school for sociology, and had three children. Two of them were attending Eastman Avenue Elementary School when Serrano asked the principal what he could do for his precocious older son. The principal gave a simple but astonishing answer: “You’ve got a couple of very bright kids—get them out of East L.A. schools if you want to give them a chance.”²

It was a blunt assessment, but not an inaccurate one. East Los Angeles was then—and remains to this day—a hardscrabble area of immigrants who have little political leverage. Their children were the most in need of good schools, but also the least likely to have access to a high-quality public education. That lay on the other side of the I-5 freeway, in expensive, exclusive West Side neighborhoods like Santa Monica and Westwood.

Serrano followed the honest principal’s advice, moving his family out of East Los Angeles into the presumably superior school districts of Whittier and Hacienda Heights, near the suburban eastern edge of Los Angeles County. It was sometime after this move that a lawyer from the Western Center on Law and Poverty, having heard Serrano’s story at a party, decided to turn it into a legal crusade that would challenge California’s reliance on local property tax wealth as the sole determinant of school funding. Under that system—prevalent across the nation—a child in Beverly Hills attended far superior schools than a child in East Los Angeles simply because the houses in Beverly Hills were of much higher value.

The case, Serrano v. Priest, was filed in 1968, with Ivy Baker Priest, the California state treasurer, named as the defendant. That’s because, as the lawsuit argued, the state’s funding formula was creating the very kind of “inherently unequal” schooling opportunities that Brown v. Board of Education had struck down fourteen years before. The lawsuit charged that “the quality of education for school age children in California” was “a function of the wealth of the children’s parents and neighbors, as measured by the tax base of the school district in which said children reside,” as well as of “the geographical accident of the school district in which said children reside.”³

The case was led by Jack Coons, who had previously investigated schooling disparities in Chicago as part of the early research team that would later produce the famous Coleman Report (Equality of Educational Opportunity), the first large-scale national study of racial gaps in student achievement, under the leadership of the sociologist James Coleman. In the Los Angeles case, Coons was joined by his protégé Stephen Sugarman, who had completed his graduate degree at Northwestern University under Coons’s mentorship. Sugarman, who eventually also followed Coons to the University of California, Berkeley, and remains on the law school faculty there to this day, remembers that he and Coons believed the case could be argued as one of “wealth discrimination,” with children from more affluent districts effectively receiving access to higher quality schools than children from lower-income areas merely by virtue of being raised in wealthier neighborhoods.⁴

“The hook for legal purposes had to be discrimination on the basis of wealth,” Sugarman says. “What you had to do was eliminate wealth advantages somehow. And we offered several possible ways you could think about how to try to let the court know that we’re not saying that you have to do X, but stop doing this. Here are alternative ways they could potentially eliminate wealth discrimination by funding schools differently.

“We were trying to be conservative, because we didn’t think the court wanted to be too aggressive.… It was a big thing to get into. The other lawyers may have been more ambitious than us, but they were ambitious with things we thought were not officially practicable.”

Coons and Serrano decided to use wealth discrimination as the central argument of the case only after other legal avenues had been explored. Another lawyer had drafted documents using ten different legal theories to argue Serrano’s case when the notion of wealth discrimination came up. “We didn’t think any of [those theories were] going to make it,” Coons now says. It was the eleventh theory, wealth discrimination, which Coons and Serrano added, that ended up being the deciding factor.

The complaint used the example of Beverly Hills, a municipality of wealthy whites, and Baldwin Park, a middle-class community on the East Side of Los Angeles. Baldwin Park had property taxes that were twice as high as a percentage of assessed value as those of Beverly Hills, but the houses in Beverly Hills, home to Hollywood elites, were much more valuable. So while Beverly Hills could spend $1,232 per student, Baldwin Park could only afford $577. Circling back to the powerful argument of Brown, Serrano v. Priest made the case that the equal opportunity clause of the US Constitution promised to all children was being undermined by school financing formulas relying on local property taxes. They also argued that California’s state constitution provided the same right, which would prove critical later on.⁵

“We found it unbelievable, the relentless intentional discrimination,” Sugarman recalls. The complaint reflected the plaintiffs’ outrage at the status quo—at the disparities that had become intrinsic in American life. “A disproportionate number of school children who are black children, children with Spanish surnames, children belonging to other minority groups reside in school districts in which a relatively inferior educational opportunity is provided,” the lawsuit declared.⁶

Serrano v. Priest was filed when Lyndon B. Johnson was still president, though by 1968 his Great Society promises had been compromised by the nation’s bloody involvement in Vietnam. By the time the case was decided by the Supreme Court of California, Richard Nixon—a native of California who had attended the public schools in Whittier—was the president; meanwhile, the California governor, Ronald Reagan, was remaking the state’s welfare program (or at least claiming to). The social contract that had been in place since the New Deal was about to be diminished, if not quite demolished.

Coons explains how much of a factor race did—and didn’t—play in the case. “We looked as hard as we could for discrimination by race, but we couldn’t find it,” he remembers. “It was always hovering there somewhere, but we just could not find it for California in the way race had been so starkly a factor in our 1960s analyses of schools in Chicago.”

The 1971 ruling by the state’s highest court in Serrano v. Priest was a bold assertion of fairness at a time when “fiscal prudence” was increasingly the order of the day. Writing for the majority of the court, Justice Raymond L. Sullivan decreed that “the right to an education in our public schools is a fundamental interest which cannot be conditioned on wealth,” and that he and his fellow jurists could “discern no compelling state purpose necessitating the present method of financing.” As a result, “we have concluded… that such a system cannot withstand constitutional challenge and must fall before the equal protection clause.”⁷

The Fourteenth Amendment had won the day—but only in California. Soon enough, Texas would also have its say.

EDGEWOOD IS ON the western edge of San Antonio, an area of single-story houses covered in vinyl siding and ringed by chain-link fences. And although it is part of the River City, Edgewood maintains its own schools. Among those who sent their children there in the 1960s was Demetrio P. Rodriguez, a sheet-metal worker who had not graduated from high school. He had five children, all in Edgewood public schools.

The schools were not good, and everyone in his predominantly Latino community knew it. In 1968, they decided to do something about it. Many years later, the New York Times described what had happened on a “balmy March day”:

Students at Edgewood High School here decided they deserved better than tattered textbooks, busted typewriters and tin cans used as beakers in science labs.

Four hundred students, about a third of the school’s enrollment, walked out of classes after lunch. They marched several blocks, carrying placards and chanting for better schools, to the school district administration building where they presented their grievances.⁸

Sixteen families therefore joined in filing a lawsuit against the school district alleging a fundamental unfairness in public education. Their case eventually went to the US Supreme Court as San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, decided in 1973. And although, like Serrano, it bore a single family’s name, it also, like Serrano, did not represent a particular grievance confined to a single individual. It was a broader complaint about how American society was structured, how the fundamental fairness promised by the US Constitution was frequently subverted in practice.

Among those who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs, starting at the level of the US District Court for the Western District of Texas in 1971, was Jose Cardenas, the superintendent of the Englewood Public School District. He depicted a scenario strikingly similar to the one Serrano v. Priest had described in Los Angeles. That case had highlighted the disparities between Beverly Hills and Baldwin Park; Cardenas contrasted Edgewood with the neighboring North East Independent School District.

Edgewood was at such an inherent disadvantage, Cardenas said, that even the district’s relatively high rate of taxation could not allow it to catch up to North East, where the per pupil spending was $310 higher in 1968 (that would have been a difference of $2,140 in 2016, when adjusted for inflation). Students in North East had every advantage they could want: more space, more books. Its dropout rate was one-quarter of Edgewood’s. There was nothing Edgewood could do on its own to close these gaps. The kids there needed help.

Rodriguez sought the same thing as Serrano: a recognition that basing funding on property taxes was fundamentally unfair because it tended to reward wealthy, landowning whites at the expense of less-well-off minority groups. At the same time, the proposed remedy—redistribution—brought the unwelcome specter of socialism to mind for many whites at a time when the Cold War was still going strong. One account said that Cardenas’s deposition before the trial “ended abruptly” when “Cardenas advocated an egalitarian model for school financing”: “The Assistant Attorney General replied somewhat dramatically: ‘There is a name for that. I have no further questions.’”⁹

At the district court level, Rodriguez was decided in favor of the plaintiffs—that is, the Edgewood parents—by a three-judge panel. The judges concluded that the way Texas funded its schools made “education a function of the local property tax base,” and that this method had “adverse effects” that had been “vividly demonstrated at trial.” In the opinion of the court, this was a “defect.” In its ruling, the court cited both Serrano v. Priest and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which had also been the foundation of Brown.¹⁰

The victory, however, was not a lasting one. The decision was appealed to the US Supreme Court, where the defendants won in 1973. The majority opinion was read by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., whom Nixon had recently appointed to the Court. Although he would in time become a centrist on a rightward-moving court, Powell had been born in Virginia, and his roots were in the segregated South of the early twentieth century. He had been “shocked” by the 1954 Brown decision, writing, “I am not in favor of, and will never favor compulsory integration.”¹¹

In the Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision, Powell showed his conservative side, writing that “the Texas system [did] not operate to the peculiar disadvantage of any suspect class,” because poverty of the kind that infected Edgewood did not explicitly demand governmental redress. “The Constitution does not provide judicial remedies for every social and economic ill,” Powell wrote. And, although education was important, the court held, it was not a fundamental right: “Though education is one of the most important services performed by the State, it is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution.”¹²

Sugarman remembers how Rodriguez dashed his hopes of a wider school funding reform movement. “We had a vision that we could win not only in California but that we could win everywhere,” he remembers thinking after the Serrano victory. But that would not be the case.

“Later on,” Sugarman says, “we learned it was sort of hopeless from the start.”

And so the journey from Serrano to Rodriguez would live on to represent the failed fight for a federal constitutional right to education unencumbered by wealth disparities.

GIVEN THE STRIKINGLY different outcomes of Rodriguez and Serrano, one might expect that California spends much more than Texas on education. Somewhat startlingly, that is not the case. Texas is, indeed, one of the lowest-spending states in the nation, thirty-eighth by one measure. But even more astonishing is California’s rank, which is forty-sixth in one ranking and forty-first in another. (Other rankings put California in the mid-twenties; the disparity is a reflection of how hard it is to determine student spending in a way that makes sense for every state and takes account of differing definitions for seemingly straightforward words like “spending” and “resources.”)

On the face it, this makes no sense whatsoever. California has the fifth-largest economy in the entire world, and is powered by Silicon Valley, the fertile plains of the Central Valley, and, of course, Hollywood. As of 2015, it had the ninth-highest average income of any state, at $64,500. That same year, WalletHub ranked the relative wealth of American cities, finding that nine of the top ten were in the Golden State. There are more billionaires in California (131) than there are in any other nation on earth (except for the United States, of course, and China).

Not only that, but it is probably the country’s most socially progressive state, closer in outlook (if not weather) to Scandinavia than to South Carolina. On issues like gun ownership and LGBTQ protections, California is well to the left of the rest of the nation. It is not only a progressive state but an educated one. The University of California is a jewel of American higher education, with Berkeley deemed by many as the finest public university in the world. In other words, the state has the money, the human capital, and the political inclination to foster great public schools.

And yet the public schools are a “lesson in mediocrity” (The Economist) if not “among the worst” in the nation (LA Weekly), tough judgments backed up by sound statistics.¹³

So what happened?

In short, the answer is Proposition 13, the “taxpayers’ revolt” that Californians voted into law in 1978. The ballot measure effectively capped property taxes, cutting off the stream of funds that flowed to schools. School spending would now be centralized in the state capital, Sacramento, and would have to draw from additional forms of revenue rather than relying on property taxes alone.¹⁴

Prop 13 was, in part, a reaction to climbing taxes—and the way those taxes were being distributed because of decisions like Serrano v. Priest. The mastermind behind the initiative, Howard Jarvis, explained his rationale thusly: “The most important thing in this country is not the school system, nor the police department, nor the fire department. The right to preserve, the right to have property in this country, the right to have a home in this country—that’s important.” The idea was pitched as a kind of populist statement of values, a principled stand by taxpayers against rapacious tax collectors. It was a starkly individualist sentiment, with which 64.8 percent of voting Californians agreed.¹⁵

What they probably didn’t realize was that most of the benefits of Prop 13 would redound to businesses, while most of its ill effects would fall on the infrastructure of public life. Education was an obvious victim, losing one-third of its $9 billion in state funds, which had, in turn, come from taxes. Prop 13 may have padded some bank accounts, but that wasn’t going to do much for schools. Quality has suffered, too. According to Education Week, which issues an annual report card on school quality in each state, California gets a C–for the quality of its schools. Texas has exactly the same grade.¹⁶

But does school funding even matter? California’s fall from grace since the passage of Prop 13 would seem like suggestive evidence that it does, but ironically, this is precisely the type of simple analysis of aggregate trends that we show can be highly misleading. Some believe that the role of money in education has been exaggerated. They point to a number of allegedly failed school funding reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s as the main evidence for their argument. To them, more money spent on schools is more money wasted.¹⁷

Since the release of the Coleman Report more than half a century ago, researchers have questioned whether increased school spending actually improves student outcomes. Published in 1966, James Coleman’s groundbreaking report painted a dire portrait of the racial disparities in American public education:

For most minority groups, then, and most particularly the Negro, schools provide little opportunity for them to overcome this initial deficiency; in fact, they fall farther behind the white majority in the development of several skills which are critical to making a living and participating fully in modern society. Whatever may be the combination of non-school factors—poverty, community attitudes, low educational level of parents—which put minority children at a disadvantage in verbal and nonverbal skills when they enter the first grade, the fact is the schools have not overcome it.¹⁸

Notably, school spending was found to be unrelated to student achievement. But did the interpretation of these findings paint an accurate portrait in its broad-brush conclusions that money doesn’t matter? In the decades following the release of the Coleman Report, the effect of school spending on student academic performance has been studied extensively, and Coleman’s conclusion has been widely upheld.

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, a leading education scholar, is among the foremost proponents of the view that increases in school spending over the past two decades have not been an effective cure. In 2009, he authored an influential paper that looks at court decisions that, like Serrano, declared that school funding formulas were unfair. The most notable of these was the 1989 decision by the Supreme Court of Kentucky in Rose v. Council for Better Education. Rose was John A. Rose, the president of the Kentucky Senate, and the Council for Better Education was a group started in 1984—and still at work in 2017—advocating for better public education in one of the nation’s poorest states.¹⁹

Rose was an unequivocal victory for the proponents of school funding reform. Chief Justice Robert F. Stephens wrote the majority opinion for the Kentucky court, in which he sharply criticized the state’s political leaders for failing the state’s children, saying, “It is crystal clear that the General Assembly has fallen short of its duty to enact legislation to provide for an efficient system of common schools throughout the state. In a word, the present system of common schools in Kentucky is not an ‘efficient’ one in our view of the clear mandate of Section 183. The common school system in Kentucky is constitutionally deficient.”²⁰

The Rose ruling became the blueprint for plaintiffs around the country seeking to attack unequal funding schemes in their local contexts. The decision “heralded in the golden age of successful adequacy litigation, lasting from 1990 to 2004,” as Hanushek and his coauthor, Alfred Lindseth, wrote in their 2009 analysis. According to their calculation, “over twenty states” participated in the push to equalize school funding formulas, as Serrano v. Priest had done in California many years before. The authors did not cheer these reforms, for, in their estimation, “the plaudits showered on the Kentucky remedy relate mostly to the structural changes it brought about and not to success in improving the achievement of students.” In other words, they believe these were merely cosmetic changes that did not fundamentally ameliorate the inequalities at work in Kentucky’s education system. They found, for example, that between 1992 and 2007, although the test scores of white students in Kentucky improved, they remained below the national average, and the scores of black students did not improve. To them, this was an obvious sign of failure.²¹

Hanushek and Lindseth also looked at Wyoming’s school funding reform, which they said had been “perhaps the most dramatic court intervention” in the nation to date. In 1995, that state’s Supreme Court “decreed that the legislature provide whatever funds necessary to make education in the state the ‘best,’” in the authors’ words. There, too, Hanushek and Lindseth saw little evidence to suggest the money made much of a difference in educational outcomes, at least as those were measured by test scores. “Despite these unprecedented increases in school funding,” they wrote, “the achievement of Wyoming’s students has largely failed to keep up with the nation or even with its much lower-funded, although demographically similar, neighboring states.”²²

New Jersey left them similarly unimpressed. Only in Massachusetts did they see evidence of school funding reform doing what it was intended to. “Simply spending more on the existing system, whether brought about by court order or legislative action, has not yielded results,” they wrote in the conclusion of the study.²³

To some, this conclusion makes visceral sense, in particular older Americans who went to public schools without cutting-edge computer labs or science teachers with degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the Cold War, the American public school system was the pride of the world, this argument goes (conveniently ignoring segregation and other ills). Now, we spend a collective $634 billion on education, more than the entire gross domestic product of Argentina. And yet, on a recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, American fifteen-year-olds placed thirty-eighth out of seventy-one test-taking nations in math and twenty-fourth on science. This, from the nation that cured polio and placed a human being on the moon. Something must be wrong.²⁴

ONE OF THE themes of this book is patience. Education reform often proceeds by a kind of punctuated equilibrium. We implement some new whiz-bang reform, let it run its course for a little while, but then become impatient because things haven’t improved as much we wanted them to: test scores haven’t jumped, for example. Studies are published to confirm that, yes, indeed, X reform failed to achieve Y effect. The studies suggest a new reform, one that in large part reverses the previous one. New fixes are tried, reversed, and then new fixes are tried again.

And so we continue on. What is often confirmed, however, is not the futility of public education but the lack of the kind of perseverance this work requires if it is to be done properly. Too often, we take the pan out of the oven far too early, only to find the result woefully undercooked.

In 2015, we published a study that examined the long-term impacts of school spending induced by school finance reforms in this country. Others, like Hanushek and Lindseth, had taken snapshots of school funding reform efforts. Those snapshots may have provided some clarity, but only about a strictly limited period of time. Our study sought to take something closer to a time-lapsed video, looking at the effect of school funding reform over decades.²⁵

We did so by avoiding the easy allure of relying on test scores, since they are imperfect measures of learning and may be rather weakly linked to adult earnings and success in life. Indeed, recent studies have documented that effects on long-term outcomes may go undetected by test scores. We decided to focus instead on the effect of school spending on life outcomes such as educational attainment and earnings.

To investigate whether the first wave of school funding reforms worked, we focused on children born between 1955 and 1985, whose school-age years straddled the period in which reforms were implemented. We assembled data that detailed exactly where court-ordered educational reform had taken place and how such decisions had altered school funding formulas. We used “geodata” from the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)—the vast life outcome database that is a gold mine for social scientists—to compare such outcomes for students who did and did not experience the increased spending resulting from school funding reforms. If education is the work of generations, this approach would allow us to determine whether there were long-term benefits to school funding reform that had not been visible before in more blinkered analyses.

School finance reforms have sprung up in pockets around the country over the past several decades, but their timing and the exact types of reform implemented have been uneven across states and districts. This uneven spread may seem familiar—it is exactly what we exploited to study the effects of desegregation (and it is how we will examine the effects of Head Start spending in the next chapter). But it is these very geographic differences in the timing of reforms that we will use to assess the impact of school finance reforms. Although others have tried to answer this question before us, we think they got it wrong—methods matter.

To reach our conclusions, we analyzed data that surveyed 15,353 people (two-thirds of them from disadvantaged backgrounds) for a total of 93,022 data points about their lives. The research encompassed 1,409 school districts in 1,031 counties in every state in the land. It accounted for other differences in school environment and family background in such a way that any change to per-student spending the respondents faced had to have come from court-ordered reform, not some other source. The study then compared the outcomes for exposed and unexposed children, along with the spending dosage of court-ordered reform.²⁶

In contrast to Hanushek and Lindseth (and other funding-reform skeptics), we did not look at test scores, but at what happens long after tests are taken. It helped that we had valid wage observations for about 95 percent of the sample.

We found that there were small effects for children from affluent families. However, for low-income children, a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all twelve years of public schooling was associated with 0.46 additional years of completed education, 9.6 percent higher earnings, and a reduction of 6.1 percentage points in the annual incidence of adult poverty. Perhaps most important of all, our study found that a 25 percent increase in per-pupil spending throughout one’s school years could eliminate the average attainment gaps between children from low-income and non-poor families.

Overall, there is a clear pattern of improved outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to greater “doses” of spending. Indeed, the longer students are treated for the symptoms of poorly funded education, and the higher the doses of school funding reform they are administered, the better their outcomes are bound to be.

The results suggest that a significant portion of this improvement took place because increased funding led to reductions in class sizes and went to hiring better teachers. For example, when a district increases school spending by $100 due to reforms, spending on instruction increases by about $70, spending on support services increases by roughly $40, and spending on school buildings increases by about $10, on average, while at the same time there are reductions in other kinds of school spending. Instructional spending makes up about 60 percent of all spending and accounts for about 70 percent of the marginal increase. In other words, superior instruction leads to superior adult outcomes. This conclusion agrees with other studies that have highlighted the importance of good teaching.

We also found that schools in these districts had fewer students per school counselor and fewer students per administrator, factors that have also been found to improve student outcomes. Overall, these positive effects are driven, at least in part, by some combination of reductions in class size, improvements in adult-to-student ratios, increases in instructional time, and increases in teacher salaries, which can help to attract and retain a more highly qualified teaching workforce.

School funding reform does not happen in a vacuum. If anything, external social stimuli explain why there isn’t an even greater benefit from increased spending in public education. Some of the countervailing forces include persistent residential segregation, the crack epidemic of the mid-1980s, and the mass incarceration of young men of color, which had frequently left families without fathers. It is therefore likely that any positive school spending effects were offset by deteriorating conditions for low-income children in other dimensions.²⁷

Something was wrong—in other words, is wrong. But it isn’t because we’ve “wasted money” on making our schools more fair. Our findings indicate that state school finance reform policies can improve student outcomes and help reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty. It stops the spread of the virus called inequality.

Money alone may not be sufficient, but provision of adequate funding may be a necessary condition. And how the money is spent is especially important. As such, to be most effective spending increases should be coupled with systems that help to ensure that the money is allocated toward the most productive uses.²⁸

THE DESCRIPTION OF Spring Garden School is painful and poignant: “The school lacks central air conditioning, and the electrical circuit is not able to support multiple window AC units running simultaneously.… There is no auditorium that can seat all students.… The school does not have working bathrooms on every floor.… [T]here is no music teacher, only an itinerant string teacher who comes to the school for a half-day every other week. The school has only a half-time librarian.”²⁹

Those words come from a lawsuit, William Penn School District v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, that was originally filed in 2014 and is still wending its way through the courts today on behalf of Pennsylvania parents who say the state unfairly allocates funds for public schools. The suit powerfully echoes Serrano v. Priest and San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. In doing so, it harkens back—as do those two lawsuits—to Brown, and to two crucial words in the Fourteenth Amendment: “equal protection.”

Pennsylvania had the largest spending disparities between rich and poor districts of any state in 2012. As shown in Figure 3.1, per-pupil spending in the poorest school districts is 33 percent lower than per-pupil spending in the wealthiest school districts in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania lawsuit charges that “rather than equip children to meet [state academic standards] and participate meaningfully in the economic, civic, and social life of their communities,” state and municipal education officials had “adopted an irrational and inequitable school financing arrangement that… discriminates against children on the basis of the taxable property and household incomes in their districts.”³⁰

This is the same argument that has been made about Los Angeles, San Antonio, and so many other places across the nation: the more prestigious your zip code, the better your schools are bound to be. If it is your poor luck to have been born in a destitute district, you can expect subpar schools that will, in all likelihood, keep you in the state of poverty into which you have been born.

Pennsylvania is especially egregious in this respect. It has what the Washington Post called in 2015, after the William Penn suit was filed, “the nation’s most inequitable” schools, with a wealthy district like Bryn Athyn spending $26,675 per student and a poor one like Mount Carmel spending about a third of that ($8,860).³¹

Pennsylvania, at the time the suit was brought to court, was one of three states in the country without a school funding formula that would at the very least attempt to equalize such disparities. As the state’s Education Law Center wrote in 2013, “most states use data-driven, cost-based education funding formulas to meet these goals. Most of these formulas use accurate student data, account for differences among school districts, direct funding to address those differences, and do so with a goal of ensuring all students have adequate funding to meet state standards.”³²