Fifty years after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the trajectory of school finance desegregation has shifted from expansive federal hopes to narrower state efforts. Attempts to address many of the disparities continue to be constrained by the complex and intersecting nature of the inequalities, rooted in compounding decades of discrimination. This article examines the legal historiography and politics of the Rodriguez decision, analyzing the path from Brown v. Board of Education to Rodriguez in the context of the scholarship around Rodriguez over the last fifty years as well as the wide body of work discussing state-based litigation efforts since the 1973 ruling.

How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a burgeoning field to show that historians of school finance have the potential to make racial dispossession a central tenet of their analyses. First, I lay out a longer timeline for the periodization of school finance history than most of the previous scholarship has adopted to recast school funding inequality within the racialized context of land and capital dispossession. Second, I situate school finance more explicitly in US political history, showing how the study of school funding policies can illuminate major historiographical debates such as the history of tax revolts, federalism, local governance, and the development of US capitalism. Finally, I chart some of the directions historians can follow to study a wider array of school finance policies beyond the surface of state school funding formulae to make the role of policymakers at all levels of education policy more visible, and to further ground school finance developments in their racial contexts.

In 1923, Los Angeles teachers protested the state’s biennial budget, a controversial document from newly elected governor Friend Richardson that significantly cut funding to government agencies. The budget was the culmination of more than a decade of fiscal policy reform that reflected a significant shift in anti-tax sentiment. The expansion of state governance in the early twentieth century required the development of fiscal policies to meet the needs of the modern state, and public debates about taxation reflected deep ideological differences about the structure and scope of government and implicated public schooling. This analysis demonstrates two features of fiscal policy reform in California. First, tax reform shaped and was shaped by the political context, demonstrating the dynamic relationship between fiscal policy and state formation. Second, debates about tax reform were ultimately about the scope of government. Anti-tax campaigns that sought a more limited government implicated schooling, the largest item in the state budget, and undermined efforts to achieve educational equity.

Contrary to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell’s majority opinion in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), Texas’s school finance system was the result of years of legislation and state-building that gave some areas the resources and capacity to provide more educational opportunities than others. As this article demonstrates, during the century leading up to the Rodriguez decision, Texas political leaders developed a public school funding system reliant on the highly unequal spatial distribution of property wealth across rural/urban, class, and racial lines. There was nothing inevitable about this. In fact, the history of Texas’s system reveals four pivotal eras when the state’s White leaders created and maintained a school finance system reliant on local property taxes and defined by rural/urban and racial differences that cemented deep inequalities. This case study traces those changes over time and brings part of the story to life through the example of Kirbyville, Texas, and its struggle to finance a new White high school. Returning to the historical roots of school financing in Texas reveals how rural/urban, racial, and wealth inequalities have been foundational to Texas’s public school finance system.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the San Antonio v. Rodriguez case, viewed by some as the worst decision in the US Supreme Court’s modern history. As legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky observed, the court essentially declared that “discrimination against the poor does not violate the Constitution and that education is not a fundamental right.”1 Five decades later, how does this case from the past continue to exert its influence on the present? And how might the present have looked different if the court had reached a different conclusion?

For this policy dialogue, the HEQ editors asked Bruce Baker and David Hinojosa to discuss the Rodriguez decision and its legacy, focusing particularly on how the case has shaped and constrained equity efforts in K-12 education. Bruce Baker is professor and chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami. A leading scholar on the financing of public elementary and secondary education systems, he is the author of Educational Inequality and School Finance (Harvard Education Press, 2018) and School Finance and Education Equity (Harvard Education Press, 2021). David Hinojosa is the director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where he spearheads the organization’s systemic racial justice work in guaranteeing that historically marginalized students of color receive equal and equitable educational opportunities in public schools and institutions of higher education. He is a leading litigator and advocate in civil rights, specializing in educational impact litigation and policy.

HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.