Chapter 5: California

California’s role in school funding has been infamous since the 1970s. The 1971 Serrano v. Priest¹ state supreme court decision placed California on the map in terms of school funding debates and constitutional supports. The Serrano decision shifted the focus of school finance reform from federal courts to state-level constitutional provisions, effectively proving that strict interpretation of state education articles could substitute for elusive federal protections. Indeed, the Serrano ruling launched a national reform wave that persists today, so that states’ school aid plans are typically first subjected to judicial scrutiny on the basis of strength of education article language, albeit still with varying outcomes. Under these conditions, California led the way in defining the tensions and disputes surrounding state responsibility for funding public schools, so much so that today’s legal arguments still echo the challenge that a child’s education may not depend on the accident of residence.²