Education: Equality in Hawaii

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"Education, of course, is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our federal Constitution." With those chilly words by Justice Lewis F.

Powell, a 5-to-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court last March struck down a Texas lawsuit that aimed at greater equality of spending in education. Although it may be unjust for wealthy school districts to have more money to spend on education, the court said, these inequities in local taxes* should be solved by the states and local communities themselves. Since then, a number of them have been trying to do just that.

State legislatures in Kansas, North Dakota and Utah have already approved increases in the state share of school funding (example: up from 28% to 49% in Kansas); those in Florida and Illinois are expected to take similar action later this year. Meanwhile, the battle is continuing in the courts, for despite the Supreme Court's ruling, a number of state constitutions require equality of educational opportunity. In New Jersey, the state supreme court used those grounds to throw out the school funding system based on widely varying local property taxes.

Led by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, attorneys and school finance experts are pursuing a common strategy for court suits now pending in about 30 states. Says Stephen Browning, a member of the committee: "We're going to have to prove conclusively in each state that unequal resources create unequal educational opportunities, which in turn lead to unequal achievement by the students."

Such a connection may prove difficult to demonstrate. A number of experts—including Sociologists James S. Coleman of Johns Hopkins and Christopher S. Jencks of Harvard—argue that more spending does little to improve a child's achievement in school, and that the school itself is less important in his development than the home.

The only state in the Union that has no autonomous local districts—and thus treats all pupils the same—is Hawaii. Money for education is raised principally through income and excise taxes and portioned out at roughly $930 per student. The schools' physical facilities are of equal quality, they have about the same pupil-teacher ratio (26 to 1) and even the same menus at the cafeterias. Slightly more money is spent in low-income areas because of federal programs intended to help the poor.

Pidgin English. Nonetheless, this Utopia of equality produces results that are similar to those on the mainland. Honolulu's Kahala Elementary School and Palolo Elementary School, for instance, have similar buildings (concrete blocks, carpeted floors), employ similarly skilled teachers, and use the same curriculum. Yet on uniform tests, the children in Kahala score roughly twice as high as Palolo's students.