Van Dusartz v. Hatfield, 334 F. Supp. 870 - Dist. Court, Minnesota 1971

The case is similar to cases in other states, such as California, Minnesota and Texas, where conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause was asserted recently

—a United States district court held that Minnesota' s school finance system, which made per-pupil spending a function of school district wealth, violated equal protection.

As one district court has observed, "rather than reposing in each school district the economic power to fix its own level of per pupil expenditure, the State has so arranged the structure as to guarantee that some districts will spend low (with high taxes) while others will spend high (with low taxes)."

Plainly put, the rule is that the level of spending for a child's education may not be a function of wealth other than the wealth of the state as a whole.

A] system of public school financing which makes spending per pupil a function of the school district's wealth violates the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment

Some cases concerned with constitutional issues of equal educational op portunity are pertinent in regard to discussing a minimum quality of education.

See A Summary of Statewide School Finance Cases (Washington, DC: Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under Law, 1974). 20.

US 1 (1973)(holding that Texas' s school financing plan met the requirements of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

While the correlation between expenditure per pupil and the quality of education may be open to argument, the court must assume that it is high.

In many subsequent cases, many courts followed the logic of the California Supreme Court in holding the local property tax system for financing education to be unconstitutional