ABSTRACT
In America, state constitutions all guarantee a state’s citizens the right to a free, public education, typically in Grades kindergarten through 12. Advocates seeking additional state funding for public schools often start their journey via a legislative route. But when those efforts fail, public school funding advocates and other parties have often chosen to further their efforts through the so-called school adequacy lawsuits, in which they claim that state funding for public schools is not sufficient to meet the state constitutional guarantee of a free public education. Such litigation efforts met decidedly mixed results in the early years but, in more recent years, legal and factual theories have changed. Courts in some states have been more welcoming of such lawsuits, establishing some significant victories for plaintiffs. The evidence presented by the parties in these lawsuits has also evolved greatly, and today one can expect to see extremely sophisticated social science studies presented often the products of examining very large pools of data that were neither available nor readily analyzed just a decade or so ago.
