Local control and financing of education: a perspective from the American state judiciary

Throughout the course of American history, the idea that governance of education is and should be local has retained a prominent position in American culture. In fact, however, the degree to which education is actually controlled locally has eroded steadily throughout the 20th century. Thus local control of education in the United States today is more myth than reality. Nevertheless, the American judiciary continues to justify its decisions concerning educational governance on the grounds of local control. In recent years, many American states have become embroiled in controversy concerning the financing of school systems. Most states fund education through a combination of local, state and Federal taxes. Yet state and Federal aid is seldom sufficient to overcome disparities in wealth between rich and poor districts, with the result that wealthy districts are able to provide better educational programs at lower cost to taxpayers than their less fortunate counterparts. In 1973, the United States Supreme Court addressed the school financing issue in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. In Rodriguez, the Court rejected a challenge to the Texas school financing system. Plaintiffs had charged that the Texas system violated the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment by permitting inter-district disparities in wealth and educational programs. The Court's rejection of this argument was based largely on its observation of the importance of local control in educational governance. In the nearly two decades since the Rodriguez decision, lawsuits involving school financing have been decided by the supreme courts of more than half of the States. Each state-level decisions is based on interpretation of the appropriate state constitution and because each state constitution differs from the others, different courts obtained different results. Many of the decisions hinged on the local control issue, although both the definition and the interpretation of local control differed widely from state to state. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the state court decisions involving local control in school financing, with the intent of developing a more comprehensive interpretation of how local control arguments are used as justification by the judiciary to uphold state policy.