Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality

8. High-Stakes Testing

Higher Education Financing 261 Court was imminent. It appears that the State’s possible loss of power highly motivated the defendants to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court (Richards v. LULAC, 1993).36 Although the Texas Legislature was not a named defendant in this higher education lawsuit, “state leaders began to fear that a court-mandated ‘equalization’ of Texas’ universities might result in the Legislature losing control of them” (Guerra, 2005, p. 1B). On October 6, 1993, the Texas Supreme Court delivered its opinion. In a crushing blow to the appellees, the Court reversed the ruling of the trial court and rendered judgment in favor of the appellants. In brief, the Court based its ruling on the following reasons: 1. Weak classification. The Texas Supreme Court noted that the trial court’s judgment rested on what appeared to be a primarily geographical “classification”—that is, the forty-one-county Border Region. The Court continued by finding that the plaintiffs created a class, not of all potential or actual Mexican American higher education students in Texas but only of those residing in a “carefully drawn region”—the Border Region.37 In its opinion, the Court commented that the use of the Border Region as a classification was incomplete because the plaintiff class omitted nearly one-half of all Mexican Americans in Texas, given that they reside outside the Border Region.38 As a case in point, the opinion noted that the plaintiff class excluded Mexican Americans in the Houston metropolitan area (which contains the largest number of Mexican Americans of any metropolitan area in Texas and has superior higher education resources).39 In the conclusion of this chapter, I draw from CRT to explain how the Court’s “weak classification” reason is baseless. Another finding by the Texas Supreme Court regarding plaintiffs’ questionable classification concerned case law. Quoting the U.S. Supreme Court in McGowan v. Maryland (1961), the Court noted that both state and federal guarantees of equality relate “equality between persons as such, rather than between areas, and . . . territorial uniformity is not a constitutional prerequisite.”40 In short, the Texas Supreme Court found that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate “both disproportionate impact and discriminatory intent.”41 More specifically, the opinion stated, There is no direct evidence in this case of an intent to discriminate against Mexican-Americans in the border area on the part of the defendants. Thus, if intent is required to establish a violation of the Texas equal rights clause, plaintiffs must show a sufficiently high level of disparate impact, either alone or in conjunction with other factors, to raise an inference of 262 Higher Education Financing intent. They have not done so here. Even if intent is not required under the Texas equal rights clause, the evidence of impact in this case simply does not rise to an adequate level to show discrimination. The inherent flaws that call into question the plaintiffs’ alleged classification also fatally weaken the evidence of impact. Whatever the effects of the Texas university system policies and practices, they fall upon the entire region and everyone in it, not just upon Mexican-Americans within the region. Conversely , they do not fall upon Mexican-Americans outside the region. The same decisions that plaintiffs allege show discrimination against Mexican Americans in the border area serve, at the same time, to afford greater benefits to the large number of Mexican Americans who live in metropolitan areas outside the border region.42 2. Higher education is not a right. In LULAC v. Clements, plaintiffs argued that higher education should be acknowledged as a “fundamental right” under the Texas Constitution.43 Article VII (“Education”), §1 (“Support and Maintenance of System of Public Free Schools”), reads, A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools. Although the trial court found that the Legislature (acting through the defendants) violated this constitutional provision by failing “to make suitable provision for the support or maintenance of an efficient system of public universities,”44 the Texas Supreme Court held that Article VII,§1, is not applicable to higher education.45 The Court reasoned, (a) Article VII does not stipulate the number of years of public schooling to be provided;46 (b) although the trial court found constitutional violations of other sections (i.e...