It's been more than thirty years since Jack Coons and Steve Sugarman, two University of California law professors, devised the legal theory for challenging the unequal financing schemes that appeared to lock so many poor and minority children into inferior schools. In the case that led to the landmark 1970s Serrano v. Priest decisions in California, and in similar cases in Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and a dozen other states, the courts have ruled that when states promise free public schooling to all children, they also have a responsibility to make certain that funding for those schools is relatively equal for each child, regardless of the local property-tax base and other economic circumstances of the communities where those children live.

At the time, the equity theory seemed as promising as it was novel. If a town was too poor to fund schools on a par with more affluent communities, it was up to the state to equalize the funding, which in turn was supposed to close the gap in achievement. Of course, it rarely did that. What those decisions did do, however, was to transform what had been, for the most part, a decentralized, property-tax-based school structure into a statewide apparatus. That led in turn to the increased control that the states now exercise over curriculums, standards and testing.

But in the past few years, courts--in Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Wyoming--have embraced a far more sweeping, radical and ultimately unpredictable idea: that regardless of equity, the state is responsible for providing schooling that is adequate to twenty-first-century educational demands, even if that means providing extra resources to children at risk of failing. Not surprisingly, there are no certain measures of adequacy--they can be based on resources, on student outcomes or on some combination of the two--but in general, as the Wisconsin Supreme Court recently defined it, it means schooling "that will equip students for their roles as citizens and enable them to succeed economically and personally."

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