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Reviewed by:
  • School Money Trials: The Legal Pursuit of Educational Adequacy
  • Michael F. Addonizio, Professor of Education Policy
Review of School Money Trials: The Legal Pursuit of Educational Adequacy, 2007 Edited by Martin R. West & Paul E. Peterson

School Money Trials is an edited volume of 13 papers with, for the most part, a singular point of view. All except for one of these papers were originally presented at an October 2005 conference, "Adequacy Lawsuits: Their Growing Impact on American Education," at Harvard University. The conference, sponsored by the Kennedy School of Government's Program on Education Policy and Governance, was prompted by concerns over the proliferation of so-called "adequacy" lawsuits filed by plaintiffs alleging that their state constitutions obliges the legislature to provide all students with an education of a prescribed level of quality and, more to the point, a judicially-determined level of funding. This strategy, which dates to the late 1970s, proved to be a winning one. The editors note that adequacy plaintiffs won victories in 25 states, including 10 of the 14 cases decided between 2003 and 2005. This success rate exceeds by a considerable margin the winning percentage compiled by plaintiffs in the earlier "equity" lawsuits dating from the landmark 1971 Serrano decision of the California Supreme Court.

The editors and authors express concern over this movement for two reasons. First, they believe these rulings constitute a judicial intrusion into educational and fiscal policymaking, an undertaking for which the courts are clearly unqualified. Second, and more fundamentally, these judicial excursions into political and policy matters violate basic principals of separation of powers. That is, these court decisions are not merely bad public policy-they undermine our representative form of government by smuggling appropriations past the legislative and executive branches into the public square. The book, however, is no simple manifesto. On the contrary, this collection of papers examines school finance litigation from legal, economic, political, and historical perspectives. Some papers employ tools of econometrics or more general quantitative analysis, while others take qualitative approaches. In order to reflect this diversity of [End Page 85] methods, if not of conclusions, this review will briefly discuss each paper before offering some general commentary.

Part I, "Rationale," includes two chapters on constitutional law. In "Adding Adequacy to Equity," Richard Briffault provides an alternative to past summaries of school finance litigation that characterize this history as consisting of more or less distinct epochs or waves.1 Briffault sees the history of state court rulings as more evolution than revolution. That is, while the 1989 decisions in Montana, Texas, and, particularly, Kentucky are generally viewed as shifting the constitutional basis for reform from a theory of equity to a theory of adequacy, Briffault asserts that this demarcation is overstated and that adequacy theory guided earlier decisions-notably West Virginia's 1979 Pauley v. Kelly and Washington's 1978 Seattle District No. 1 v. Washington. Conversely, Briffault sees recent adequacy cases as incorporating equity concerns, "A number of courts that have focused on the education articles of state constitutions have found an egalitarian principle, rather than or in addition to the principle of adequacy, implicit in the 'thorough' or 'uniform' requirements."

Briffault interprets this blurring of adequacy and equity claims as evidence of courts struggling with arguments and issues that are shifting and confused. Strictly speaking, equity and adequacy are distinct legal theories, presumably calling for different remedies. Equity remedies would appear relatively straightforward, involving equalization of local tax capacity or per-pupil spending. The problem for plaintiffs, of course, is that such remedies can be implemented without raising, and even lowering, school appropriations. Adequacy remedies, on the other hand, are far more complex and speculative, encompassing matters of school governance and education policy as well as school finance. They are intended, however, to avoid the "leveling down" outcome seen in California and elsewhere.

The author develops this notion of adequacy as derivative of equity into a useful framework, too nuanced for summary here, for sorting and understanding specific cases. And while he remains more neutral that most of these authors in the normative debate about the direction of adequacy litigation, he sees success of this movement for plaintiffs as...

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