A comparative case study of the effectiveness of school finance litigation in Missouri and Kansas

Constitutional litigation on school finance equity has raged for decades with little clear understanding of its achievements. The role of the courts has been complex, and they have enjoyed mixed success in affecting school finance reform. Careful examination of court rulings and legislative responses, education revenue and expenditures, and the political, economic, and social context of reform in Missouri and Kansas, states with similar economic and political geographies and contrasting court experiences, shed light on the reasons for such different experiences.;Equity in the distribution of pupil-weighted current expenditures per pupil was calculated for Missouri and Kansas from 1989 to 1999. Equity was assessed by several statistical measures of dispersion to give a more complete picture: the coefficient of variation, federal range ratio, Gini coefficient, and McLoone index. Missouri made consistent, sustained, and significant improvement on all measures of student equity throughout the time period of observation, especially in the years after the 1994 passage of the Outstanding Schools Act, which was responding to the 1993 court ruling in Committee for Educational Equality v. Missouri. Equalization of tax rates was also improved, although to a lesser degree. Kansas made only slight improvements in lessening the range of variability of school expenditures for students across the state on all statistical measures of dispersion, and tax rates actually became more variable, but significantly reduced, after the 1992 passage of the School District Finance and Quality Performance Act, which was driven by the judge's 1991 opinion in advance of trial in Mock v. Kansas .;Multiple variables were analyzed to attempt to explain these different reform results, including the language and procedures of the courts themselves, the political cultures of the states, measures of state wealth and tax burden, and demographic components of the states' populations. The key difference between Missouri and Kansas was the level of court involvement itself and the initial expenditure and equity levels. The experiences of Missouri and Kansas with litigation-inspired school finance reform demonstrate that courts can and do have a significant impact on the equitable distribution of resources for students.