Education Law Commons^™

Transcending Equality Versus Adequacy, Joshua Weishart

Law Faculty Scholarship

A debate about whether all children are entitled to an "equal" or an "adequate" education has been waged at the forefront of school finance policy for decades. In an era of budget deficits and harsh cuts in public education, I submit that it is time to move on.

Equality of educational opportunity has been thought to require equal spending per pupil or spending adjusted to the needs of differently situated children. Adequacy has been understood to require a level of spending sufficient to satisfy some absolute, rather than relative, educational threshold In practice, however, many courts interpreting their states' constitutional …