The court battle over public school funding in Texas turned twenty-five this year. The issue was first raised in January 1968 when the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) took up the case of Demetrio Rodriguez and all who were similarly situated. The plaintiffs claimed that the system of financing public education in Texas discriminated against them on the basis of wealth by permitting citizens of affluent districts to provide a higher-quality education for their children, while paying lower taxes. According to MALDEF, this situation denied the poorer children equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case, styled Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District, was found to have merit (and the system was found to be unconstitutional) in 1971 by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1973, however, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the panel's ruling, pronouncing that no such right existed under the federal Constitution. The Supreme Court stated in Rodriguez that the existence of "some inequality" in the manner in which the State's rationale [of local control] is achieved is not alone a sufficient basis for striking down the entire system. . . .
. . . If local taxation for local expenditures were an unconstitutional method of providing for education then it might be an equally impermissible means of providing other necessary services customarily financed largely from local property taxes, including local police and fire protection, public health and hospitals, and public utility facilities of various kinds. We perceive no justification for such a severe denigration of local property taxation and control as would follow from [these] contentions.
A decade later, MALDEF turned its legal attention instead to the Texas constitution. Unlike the federal Constitution, it specifically granted a right to an "efficient system of public free schools."
MALDEF claimed the present system of Texas school funding was not "efficient" under the Texas constitution because it lacked equity. Suit was filed in May 1984. Thus began the strange odyssey of the Texas case, Edgewood Independent School District v. Kirby. In 1987, a district court in Austin found the system unconstitutional, but in 1988, a three-judge panel in Austin reversed and vacated. In 1989, the case reached the Texas Supreme Court for the first time. That court agreed with the district court, finding the current financing system unconstitutional under the state constitution, and tossed the issue to the state legislature to come up with a constitutional system by May 1, 1990. The court then extended the time to allow the legislature to come up with a constitutional bill.
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