On Equal Terms

Since Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation battles of the 1960s and 1970s, the legal pursuit of educational opportunity in the United States has been framed largely around race. But for nearly 30 years now, a less-noticed but controversial legal campaign has been afoot to equalize or improve the resources of poorly funded schools. This book examines both the consequences of efforts to use state constitutional provisions to reduce the "resource segregation" of American schools and the politics of the opposition to these decisions. The work compares the relative success of school finance lawsuits to the project of school desegregation and explores how race and class present sharply different obstacles to courts. Since a 1973 US Supreme Court decision that effectively deferred to the states in the matter of educational equity, about a third of state judiciaries have mandated reform of state-level educational funding systems. Douglas Reed analyzes both the rhetoric of reform and the varying effects of these controversial decisions while critiquing the courts' failure to more clearly define educational equity.The book concludes with a policy proposal that acknowledges obst

"Ambitious... An important contribution to our knowledge of politics, the quandaries, and the outcomes of school finance litigation."--Timothy J. O'Neill, Law and Politics Book Review "Reed puts a human face of educational reform and clearly demonstrates that the struggle is neither for the fainthearted nor for the impatient... A 'must read.'"--Frederick J. Brigham, American School Board Journal

Douglas S. Reed is Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University.