Chapter 8: School Finance Litigation: One Strategy to Address Inequities in School Infrastructure Funding

The overall lesson of this chapter is that school finance litigation has been an effective strategy for addressing inequities—a strategy that promises additional success when steadily and longitudinally applied to school infrastructure funding. At the same time, litigation is an incomplete strategy and should never be relied upon exclusively because society and its courts are not yet leading on this issue, even though significant progress has occurred and the signs of establishment of a permanent change in social acceptance of this issue is increasingly visible. Although the physical environment in schools would be much worse without the existing legislative mechanisms that provide infrastructure aid to education in many states, the magnitude of unmet funding need leaves little hope for fully redressing schools’ needs under entirely amicable conditions. As a result, the force of adversarial litigation takes on even more attractiveness to those who perceive the true depth of the nation’s extant dilemma.