Foreword to Symposium on School Finance Litigation: Emerging Trends or New Dead Ends?

Equality of educational opportunity is an elusive goal. Advocates for underprivileged students have pursued it relentlessly in the courts since the landmark decision fifty years ago in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet children across the United States still attend schools that are both separate and unequal. The United States contains approximately 15,000 school districts.

This fragmentation, along with the Supreme Court's decision in Milliken v. Bradley to prohibit mandatory busing across district lines, allows patterns of residential segregation to produce segregated schools. In 2000-01, seventy-two percent of African-American and seventy-six percent of Latino students attended predominantly minority schools. Thirty-seven percent of African- American and Latino students attended schools that were 90-100% minority. One-sixth of African-American and one-ninth of Latino students attended schools that were 99-100% minority.