Adequacy vc. Equity Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Adequacy vc. Equity - Research Paper Example re sufficient to achieve such envisaged goals, and which agencies and institutions could be and should be attributed the responsibility to furnish resources for these purposes (Marzano & Kendall, 1999). School funding is a topic that has achieved the immense attention of parents, tax payers and policy makers across the length and breadth of the United States (Marzano & Kendall, 1999). Since the 70s, there has been a deluge of the law suits filed in the law courts of almost all the states of America. Therefore, equity versus adequacy debate is of apt relevance in this context. The equity issue in the sphere of school funding came into light with the filing of Serrano vs. Priest case in California in 1971 (Odden & Picus, 1999, p. 129). In 1976, the California State Supreme Court extended the judgment that California school funding arrangements violated the guarantee to equal protection under law enshrined in the United States Constitution. The equity concept highlighted by this case professed that all the school districts in a state should have access to same and equal resources to extend education to their students (Odden & Picus, 1999, p. 131). In the domain of educational finance, equity means the placement of provisions to assure equality in the distribution of educational resources by a state across districts, and to put in place a system for fairness, so far as the allocation of available resources for funding school education are concerned. The equity principle has its advantages in the sense that it allows for the placement of uniformly enforceable educational standards across a state. However, the big problem with the equity principle is that it does not take into consideration the variegated nature of American demography. There are some sections of the American society that have been traditionally marginalized and sidelined, and hence need access to more than average resources for educational purposes. Equity principle simply ignores the different costs