What's Good Enough?

By now the list of a half-century of half-tried and discarded educational remedies seeking to honor the promise of Brown v. Board of Education fills volumes: attendance-zone redistricting, busing, magnet schools, compensatory education, bilingual education, ebonics, military schools, year-round schools, single-sex schools, Head Start and multiculturalism, plus scores of other curricular reforms. While gaps between the academic achievement of white and minority children were reduced in the first decades after the end of legal segregation, they were never eliminated. By almost any educational measure, the average black or Latino child continues to lag behind her white or Asian counterpart. In 1973, with its decision in San Antonio v. Rodriguez that public schooling was not a right guaranteed under the Constitution, the Supreme Court itself effectively gave up its cause.

That threw the issue back to the states, where it has remained ever since, but where, in an accumulation of crucial state Supreme Court decisions and associated legislative reforms, the drive for decent schools for poor and minority children has taken a new, unexpected--and perhaps encouraging--set of turns.

At the heart of those cases is the principle of adequacy, a legal idea, rooted in variously worded state constitutional provisions, that's as promising as it is awkward. Many state constitutions require the state to maintain "thorough and efficient" schools or (as in New York) "free common schools wherein all the children of this state may be educated," or (as in North Carolina) to establish the "right to the privilege of education."

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