Not long ago, UC Berkeley law professor John E. Coons reflected on the history of one of the most important cases he ever argued and the impact it had on our nation’s public policy. The case was known as Serrano v. Priest, and it struck at the inequalities in school spending between rich districts and poor districts. Serrano questioned California law, but its plaintiffs had hoped that other state legislatures would recoil at the disparities in per-pupil expenditure that were determined largely by a school district’s wealth. In 1971, the California Supreme Court established as law the concept of “fiscal neutrality,” which recognized that the quality of a child’s education should not be a function of a district’s wealth or poverty. Although similar equity suits filed later in other states had mixed results, the Serrano decision did enough to convince lawmakers to equalize their states’ funding schemes to maintain the constitutional promise of equal protection.
Late last week, a federal judge in Kansas upheld that promise when he ruled against a group of suburban parents who wanted to raise more money for their public schools in the Shawnee Mission School District by raising their property taxes. Kansas caps the amount of money that districts can raise from property taxes so that school expenditures are relatively equal. U.S. District Judge John Lungstrum said the cap was critical to the state’s funding formula, which ensured that wealthy schools don’t have an unfair advantage over poor ones.
To some, the ruling has consequences that affect more than just our value of equal protection. Fordham fellow Peter Meyer wrote the day after the decision, “Will we allow the kind of inequity which allows for excellence? I predict a new Lake Wobegon, where all the children and their teachers are average.” That criticism, however, asks for more than a federal judge can deliver. It’s up to lawmakers in Kansas to establish a system of public education that recognizes the economic diversity in the state as it meets the learning needs of it students. Coons never sought to discourage educational innovations. Writing for the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties in 2008, he wrote, “When the ultimate cure is legislative, the trick is to force the lawmaker to confront the identified problem without preempting — or even threatening — his legitimate options. Under Serrano, every choice would remain to the legislature except the existing policy of discrimination by wealth.”
Ever since Serrano, Coons has been one of the most devoted advocates for school choice, which he argues “would maximize, equalize and dignify as no other remedy imaginable.” A commitment to family choice in education, he wrote in the Stanford Journal, empowers low-income families to pursue the education that meets the needs of their children while it achieves “the goal of justice in the financial support of education.”
Kansas is no utopia for school choice. The Shawnee Mission School District’s 2011 legislative platform, for instance, opposes any attempt to remove a local school board’s authority to approve charter schools: “Rather than strengthening the public schools through competition, charter schools reduce needed resources and, with few exceptions, have not demonstrated significant improvement in pupil achievement.” In such an environment, Meyer’s perverse “Lake Wobegon” prediction might play out, and it’s easy to see why the attorney representing Shawnee Mission parents believes that “it’s inconceivable that any state would prohibit a community from voluntarily raising taxes to improve their children’s education.” They have the money to do it, and they see any prohibition from the state as eroding the control of their local efforts.
Coons, who remains one of the most liberal voices defending parental choices in education, asked, “What exactly is ‘control’ in a district where the tax base is barely worth the cost of assessing it?” Coons devised many choice plans, always well-regulated and always with an eye toward empowering the low-income family:
Given the empowerment of individual families instead of districts, a statewide sameness could ironically be the instrument of new diversity and openness in a system grounded upon parental choice of school. By equalizing access of all families to all schools, a proper system of scholarships could extend the range of democratic expression even into the urban core.
