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116 Yale L.J. 330 (2006-2007)
Education, Equality, and National Citizenship

handle is hein.journals/ylr116 and id is 346 raw text is: GOODWIN LIU Education, Equality, and National Citizenship A B ST R ACT. For disadvantaged children in substandard schools, the recent success of educational adequacy lawsuits in state courts is a welcome development. But the potential of this legal strategy to advance a national goal of equal educational opportunity is limited by a sobering and largely neglected fact: the most significant component of educational inequality across the nation is not within states but between states. Despite the persistence of this inequality and its disparate impact on poor and minority students, the problem draws little policy attention and has evaded our constitutional radar. This Article argues that the Fourteenth Amendment authorizes and obligates Congress to ensure a meaningful floor of educational opportunity throughout the nation. The argument focuses on the Amendment's opening words, the guarantee of national citizenship. This guarantee does more than designate a legal status. Together with Section 5, it obligates the national government to secure the full membership, effective participation, and equal dignity of all citizens in the national community. Through a novel historical account of major proposals for federal education aid between 1870 and 1890, I show that constitutional interpreters outside of the courts understood the Citizenship Clause to be a font of substantive guarantees that Congress has the power and duty to enforce. This history of legislative constitutionalism provides a robust instantiation of the social citizenship tradition in our constitutional heritage. It also leaves a rich legacy that informs the contemporary unmet duty of Congress to ensure educational adequacy for equal citizenship. A U T H O R. Assistant Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall). For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Kathy Abrams, David Caron, Jesse Choper, Anisha Dasgupta, Dan Farber, James Forman, Phil Frickey, Bruce Fuller, Robert Gordon, Carl Kaestle, Linda Krieger, Ian Haney-Lopez, Rachel Moran, Robert Post, Diane Ravitch, Rob Reich, Jim Ryan, Howard Shelanski, Reva Siegel, Steve Sugarman, and John Yoo. For opportunities to present and refine these ideas, I am indebted to the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, and the UCLA School of Law faculty workshop. For excellent research assistance, I thank Elizabeth Mazur, Deborah Slon, Blake Thompson, and Boalt Hall law librarian Marlene Harmon. I am especially grateful to my wife Ann O'Leary for her support and belief in this project. 330 Imaged with the Permission of Yale Law Journal

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