ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the political economy of public schooling is to make sense of the mind numbing, confusing, and conflicting conditions and operating details characterizing contemporary education finance policy. It provides of governmental arrangements shaping public policy generally, with specific attention to education finance throughout the nation and the 50 states. The chapter describes the dramatic expansion of federal programs and the creative construction of a legal strategy intended by activist reformers to enhance educational equality. It explores the practical consequences and operational conditions accompanying federal expansion and judicial ascendance, both as to inter- and intra-state school spending equity and pupil achievement. Ascendance of the judiciary in the school finance education policy arena provides plentiful testimony to the potential for a scholar's pen to be as mighty as a politico's lawmaking power. Incremental change, such as the equal protection movement, is generally a function of what is known in political science as the "Iron Triangle".
