Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education: Seeking equal opportunity at the local level

The Constitution requires that government resources must be distributed in a manner that treats all citizens equally unless there is a compelling state interest to differentiate among groups. The history of equal educational opportunity litigation has been the effort to define what constitutes equal and how resources should be allocated within states and school districts. This work addresses the question of whether teacher placement patterns in large, urban school districts can create an inequitable distribution of professional resources to such an extent that a district may be susceptible to lawsuits alleging denial of equal protection of the law. This work also considers the following three silos of educational research: (a) history of equal educational opportunity litigation, (b) nature of teacher-quality research, and (c) study of academic risk.; The earliest efforts to ensure equal educational opportunity sought to ensure that separate-but-equal schools were truly equal. Following Brown v. Board of Education, litigation began to focus on what constituted separate in relation to patterns of attendance and resource allocation. An overlooked area for potential litigation may be the definition of teacher quality as a distributable resource. In focusing on intradistrict patterns of schooling, litigants may be able to use official federal government findings to argue for an equitable distribution of resources as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Formal reports from the U.S. Department of Education officially declare that poor students are at risk of academic failure because they are more likely to receive instruction from underqualified teachers than are their wealthier peers.; This work analyzes the three silos of educational research and builds an illustrative case that demonstrates plaintiffs may be able to build a case that teacher placement patterns may show prima facie evidence of a denial of equal educational opportunity. Since local school districts control the hiring and placement of faculty, they may be the next legal battleground in equal educational opportunity litigation. The conclusion offers solutions for school administrators to prepare for such a challenge by ensuring that placement of teachers bears some relationship to student needs within a single school district.