ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the legal framework for financing public education in the United States from the early colonial days to the present. Each state’s constitution has language that forms the legal framework for organizing the state’s education function. All states except Hawaii delegate much of the responsibility and authority for education to local school boards, coordinated through the State Department of Education, also known as the State Education Agency. Taxing property to support education has precedent that goes back much further than Massachusetts’s’ Ye Olde Deluder Satan Act; it dates back to ancient Greece. In Athens, the Greeks taxed land and houses. Later, the Roman government taxed people and property. Each state constitution has language that frames how it will treat education. This language is generally known as the state’s education clause. In 1995, the Ohio state legislature enacted two educational assistance programs for parents of children in the struggling Cleveland Public Schools–tuition scholarships and tuition assistance grants.
