SAN ANTONIO INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT v. RODRIGUEZ 411 U.S. 1 (1973)

Rodriguez was the burger court's definitive statement on the subject of equal protection guarantees against wealth discrimination—and the statement was that the Court wanted the subject to go away.

Under Texas law, the financing of local school districts relies heavily on local property taxes. Thus a district rich in taxable property can levy taxes at low rates and still spend almost twice as much per pupil as a poor district can spend, even when the poor district taxes its property at high rates. A federal district court, relying on warren court precedents, concluded that wealth was a suspect classification, that education was a fundamental interest, and thus that strict judicial scrutiny of the state-imposed inequalities was required. The trial court also concluded that, even if the permissive rational basis standard of review were appropriate, the Texas school finance system lacked any reasonable basis. The Supreme Court reversed, 5–4, in an opinion by Justice lewis f. powell that was plainly designed as a comprehensive pronouncement about equal protection doctrine.

The opinion was definitive, as a coffin is definitive. Despite what the Court had said in brown v. board of education (1954) about education as the key to effective citizenship, here it said that education was not a fundamental interest in the sense that triggered strict scrutiny—at least not when some minimal level of education was being provided. Indeed, said the majority, the courts lacked power to create new substantive rights by defining interests as "fundamental," unless those interests were already guaranteed elsewhere in the Constitution. Here was formal recognition of the Burger Court's zero-population-growth policy for fundamental interests.

Nor was wealth a suspect classification. Decisions such as griffin v. illinois (1956) and douglas v. california (1963) had involved indigents "completely unable to pay" for the benefits at stake, who "sustained an absolute deprivation" of the benefits. Here, the deprivation was only relative; pupils in poor districts were receiving some education. Furthermore, although the trial court had found a significant correlation between district wealth and family wealth, the Supreme Court held the proof of that correlation insufficient; poor children, after all, might live in the shadows of a rich district's factories. In any case, Justice Powell concluded, the evidence was mixed on the question whether school spending affected the quality of education.

Because there was no occasion for strict scrutiny, the Court employed the rational basis standard of review. Contrary to the district court's conclusion, the Texas financing scheme was rationally designed to maintain local control over school spending and educational policy. Justice byron r. white, dissenting, attacked this asserted rationality. If "local control" flowed from control over the spending of money, then Texas, by relying heavily on the property tax and by drawing its district lines, had parceled out that choice in an irrationally selective way, to rich districts and not to poor ones.

Justice thurgood marshall's dissent was the most powerful equal protection opinion of the Burger Court era. He elaborated on his dandridge v. williams (1970) dissent, rejecting a two-tier system of standards of review in favor of a "sliding-scale" approach tying the level of judicial scrutiny to the importance of the interests at stake and the degree to which the state's classification bore on the powerless. Here, on both counts, judicial scrutiny should be heightened well above the level of requiring only minimal rationality. In any case, the Court had not, in the Griffin/Douglas line of cases, insisted on a showing of absolute deprivation as a condition of strict scrutiny of wealth discrimination; the problem in those cases was the adequacy of an appeal, as affected by a discrimination between rich and poor. The Texas scheme could not survive any heightened judicial scrutiny—as the majority itself had virtually conceded.

Justice Powell, a former school board president, surely feared judicial intrusion into the decisions of local school officials. Beyond that narrow concern, the majority undoubtedly worried about judicial intrusion into the allocation of state resources. These are legitimate concerns. The question was, and remains, what kinds of economic inequality, imposed by the state itself, can be tolerated in the face of a constitutional guarantee of the equal protection of the laws.

Kenneth L. Karst
(1986)

(see also: Education and the Constitution; Plyler v. Doe.)

Bibliography

Michelman, Frank I. 1969 The Supreme Court, 1968 Term—Foreword: On Protecting the Poor Through the Fourteenth Amendment. Harvard Law Review 83:7–59.