Public education in the United States in a post-Brown era: the antinomies of equal protection doctrine

Abstract

In the United States, public schools are primarily financed by local tax on property. This property-tax-based system of finance is advantageous for people living in wealthy districts, as they benefit from greater educational funding resources. Residents of poorer districts, however, have the disadvantage of higher taxation that is needed to balance the deficit created by the lower value of property in these areas in order to finance local services. Through the use of local exclusionary planning and zoning powers, local governments can ensure that residents contribute a minimum amount of taxation to fund local services and to zone out â expensive studentsâ who need more funds than their wealthier peers while their families contribute less to the local tax pool. In a society with a history of racial discrimination, this system has led to the creation of structural segregation in education that follows a pattern of residential segregation. Society's adoption of equal opportunity rhetoric since the successful challenge of legal segregation in Brown has masked this reality and made it more difficult for depressed minorities to explain their condition. The injustice is produced by the interplay between historical subordination and a vague suspicion that equality has been achieved when formal barriers were removed. The potential for change was both created and limited by engaging the rights discourse because the emphasis on formalism and colorblindness since Brown has rendered the achievement of formal equality an end in itself. This makes it very difficult to redress the lasting material disadvantage that resulted from a discriminatory past because the dominant theory of equal protection that is infused with an â anti-differentiationâ understanding of the law often rules out remedial policies that use race-based classifications.