Educational Equity

Luis F. Miron & Robert K. Wimpelberg

Three decades following the landmark Rodriguez decision in 1973, civil rights attorneys argued successfully on behalf of poor urban and rural school districts and found an opening for fiscal redress. The state supreme courts, for example New Jersey, Texas, and Kentucky, in the early and late 1990s ruled that all students are entitled to a “minimally adequate” education. In Abbott v. Burke and other landmark school finance cases, the courts, in issuing its findings, ruled that the special needs of inner city (and rural students) comprised a distinct class of plaintiffs. Now, with the advent of landmark federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, the administration has sought to institutionalize in everyday practice the notion of “equity” undergirding the flurry of state finance cases of the 1990s. Contextually, the difference is that accountability discourses now replace the notion of equity grounded in person rights with “excellence” as argued entitlement of property ...

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