the particular American way of funding and delivering public primary and secondary education. All 50 states create public school systems that are generally organized into local school districts and rely heavily on financing from local property taxes. Property taxes in turn are based on property values that are unequally distributed across school districts and across states. Beginning at the turn of the century, the traditional policy response to inequities caused by unequal property tax bases has been to restructure state financing systems to mitigate the disequalizing effects within states while still maintaining the 50-state system.

Several key realities describe the challenge faced by Americans as they strive to provide opportunity through public education, all within the context of a federal system of state and local control. First, a well-accepted equity concept such as equal opportunity includes many specific, different definitions. Some of these differences, especially more recent ones, have their origin in whether student performance or resource access is the ultimate goal of a finance system. The different definitions then lead to different opinions among legislators, lawyers, advocates, and the public about specific goals they are trying to achieve. Second, unlike most other countries, in the United States the federal government provides a relatively small share of public primary and secondary education funding, around 7 percent. State and local governments share roughly equally the remaining 93 percent. Third, the reliance on individual states means that there are actually 50 separate and different public education systems with substantial variation in finance, governance, and instruction. Fourth, equity in education has been affected by litigation and court decisions, not at the federal level for broad-based equity concerns, but instead at the state level, largely based on state constitutions. Fifth, the popular press and journalists are active participants in the discourse about education equity.² While these factors have influenced school finance over the past century, the most recent changes since 1970 have been dramatic and important.

The 1970s mark the beginning of a significant period to examine school finance equity, comparable to other times when major events changed the direction of K-12 finance legislation or law.³ The early 1970s were watershed years, most dramatically marked by the California Supreme Court's decision against the state in Serrano v. Priest I. This landmark case declared that "the quality of education may not be a function of wealth other than the wealth of the state as a whole" and ushered in a series of court cases, academic studies, and legislative changes focused on the equity of state school financing systems (Guthrie et al., 1988:201).

This chapter provides a framework for other chapters in this volume written on more specific topics, such as the effects on school finance equity of litigation, politics, legislation, and new concepts such as adequacy. This chapter begins with an analysis of the development of major concepts of school finance equity from 1970 to the present, including definitions of each concept. Subsequent sections describe how the concepts have been shaped over time by the courts,