prise itself: in teacher quality, curriculum, facilities, and so forth. In the 1990s, however, it appeared that the litigation era reaching back to Brown was drawing to a close and that federal desegregation cases might soon no longer serve as a primary tool for trying to improve educational opportunities for inner-city poor and minority youth. Advocates began to think that school finance litigation might be a promising substitute (Tatel, 1992). For needy children attending high-cost, urban schools, however, school finance litigation would be far more attractive if the definition of equity on which it was based was broader than the conventional approach of wealth discrimination.

The new approach to equity that seeks to address many of these new equity concerns concentrates attention on the adequacy of education rather than on the distribution of education resources. The next chapter continues our investigation into educational equity by exploring the promises and pitfalls of expanding equity to encompass adequacy.