Lifting All Boats? Finance Litigation, Education Resources, and Student Needs in the Post-Rose Era

Rose v. Council for Better Education (1989) is often considered a transition point in education finance litigation, heralding an era of increasing concern for measurable adequacy of education across a broad spectrum of student needs. Prior research suggests that post-Rose lawsuits had less effect on the distribution of school spending than older litigation. This article suggests that this focus on the raw resource distribution masks the important effect of contemporary lawsuits in redistributing money to districts with greater student needs. My findings suggest that a successful lawsuit does raise revenues to a variety of districts but provides more money to those districts with higher plausible indications of student needs.