A court can achieve remedial equality only by ignoring how education actually works.

Evidence

State supreme courts dealt with this problem in various ways. The California Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution required the state to ensure that funding per student not depend on the wealth of the school district.’’ This ruling, along with Proposition 13—a subsequent anti-tax amendment to the California Constitution—produced a virtual equality of expenditures per student across the state. But the court avoided entanglement in the details of education policymaking only by ignoring the complexities of education policy, simply assuming that additional funding in poor districts would improve education. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3311

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates the Serrano/Proposition 13 story familiar from school finance litigation; pairs with the earlier discussion of judicial capacity in Chapter 9.