Brown vs. the Board of education was a court case that affected school funding in both subtle and dramatic ways. The landmark court case, centered on suspect classification, provided a venue for funding to be restructured and redistributed for many states. The case was based on the Constitutions direct exclusion of government actions that affect individuals differently in respect to their race or their national origin. Race was not a concern before this case on a federal level. The case decided that separate but equal schools, which was the educational model in several southern states, was unconstitutional (Odden and Picus, 2004).

The decision had no immediate affect on school funding but did set in motion a series of other cases that forced equality in pay for black teachers teaching in black school. This would require school districts to restructure funding to not only provide for the increase in salaries but also to integrate schools by both black students and staff. The cost of busing students to schools outside of their district to uphold the equity rule put many districts in a dire financial situation that forced them to make cuts in programs and in jobs. (Finkelman, 2009).

Ashenfelter, Collins, and Yoon (2005) argue that the funding issues only affected black male teachers and not black females. This, they explained, was the reason for an increase in the hiring of more black female teachers because the school districts could hire them at a lower salary. Also in their study they found that black students achieved better after the court decision because of the increased funding and not because they were schooled with white students. According to the authors, female and male financial equality in African Americans did not come around until the 1990s.

Patterson (2001) reported that school finance models changed after the Brown decision because as blacks were using the courts to gain more equality, whites moved from the inner city to the suburbs. The suburbs were a place where the white parents could send their children to school with fewer or no black students attending with them. Though Brown v. Board of Education forced a ruling, it was the state and districts responsibility to find funding and the funding models that would truly bring about equality in funding, salary, and equal education.

The NAACP legal defense website reminds that ‘nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is there an explicit right to a free, quality, public education. This lays the burden of proof of inequities of funding to lawyers that have to prove racial or ethnic discrimination and not fiscal need. They contend that the Brown vs. The Board of Education decision is the only permissible path for cases involving the quality of education provided to children whose parents have low income. They further argue that when a court rules against a funding system, the court has little power to enforce the ruling and the issue is sent back to legislature who originally conceived the unequal funding issues (NAACP, n.d).

Though Brown v. the Board of Education is seen as the platform to the discussion of funding issues in the educational system of the United States, there are many other court cases following that uses the decision based on race as a decision base of equity and adequacy.

Reference:

Ashernfelter,O., Colllins, W., and Yoon, A. (2005) Evaluating the role of Brown v. Board of Education in social equalization, desegregation, and the income of African Americans. Retrieved on May 7, 2009 from http://www.ers.princeton.edu

Finkelman, P. (2009). Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka. Microsoft Encarta Online. Retrieved on May 7, 2009 from http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia

NAACP n.d. n.a. Unequal education fifty years after Brown v. The Board of Education. Retrieved on May 8, 2009 from http://www.naacpldf.org/content.aspx?article=572