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SCHOOL DISTRICT, efc al., s. Appellants,. : v. DEMETRIO P. RODRIGUEZ, et al.,. Appellees. ... burden, tax rate, than the voters in Edgewood.
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In the
Li oftrt
SAN SCHOOL ANTONIO DISTRICT, INDEPENDENT et al., )) ) Appellants, ) ) vs. ) ) DEMETRIO P. RODRIGUEZ, et al., (^) ) ) Appellees. )
No. 71-
Pages 1 thru l? October 12 , 1972
Duplication by photographic, or copying electrostatic of this transcript or other facsimile order means form is prohibitedagreement. under the
HOOVER REPORTING COMPANY, INC. Washington,^ Official^ Reporters D. C. 546-
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
SAN ANTONIO INDEPENDENT s SCHOOL DISTRICT, efc al. , s Appellants, : v. DEMETRIO P. RODRIGUEZ , et al., Appellees.
No. 71-
The above entitled matter at 11:42 o'clock a.m.
Washington,Thursday, October D. C. 12, came cn for argument
1972
BEFORE : WARREN WILLIAM E. 0. BURGER,DOUGLAS, Chief Associate Justice Justice of the United States WILLIAM POTTER STEWART,J. BRENNAN, Associate JR., Associate Justice Justice BYRON R„. WHITE , Associate Justice HARRY A. BLACKMUN, Associate Justice LEWIS WILLIAM F. ii.POWELL, REHNQUIST, JR. , (^) AssociateAssociate JusticeJustice APPEARANCES: CHARLES ALAN WRIGHT, ESQ., 2500 Red River Street, Austin, Texas 78705, for the Appellants. ARTHUR GOCHMAN , 331 Travis Park West, San Antonio, Texas 78205, for the Appellees.
P E 9. 9. E E D I N G S MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGERs We will hear arguments next in 71-1332, San Antonio School District against Rodriguez. Mr. Wright, I think you can proceed whenever you are ready. ORAL ARGUMENT OF CHARLES ALAN WRIGHT, ESQ., ON BEHALF OF THE APPELLANTS MR. WRIGHT: Mr. Chief Justice,and may it please the Court: I would like to take as the text for my argument this morning a sentence from an article that Professor Coons and his collaborators, Sugarman and Clune, wrote last year. It is cited at page 44 of my initial brief. They said: "Of all public functions, education in its goals and methods is least understood and most in need of local variety, experimentation, and independence." That, I think, is wise counsel. I believe that is the argument for reversal in this case. In our view, the Texas system of school finance, imperfect as it is — we conceded its imperfections in our brief— the Texas system does allow for local variety, experimentation and independence; not as much as I would like it to, but that is its goal, that is its rationale, and for that reason there is a rational basis to it, and I will undertake, to develop
of course in a moment our view that the rational basis test is the appropriate test. The view^ % adopted by the district court that there is a rigid constitutional mandate that the quality of education may not be a function of wealth, except the wealth of the state as a whole, in my submission, is based on educational assumptions about matters that are today not understood and which educators are not ready to form firm judgments, and it would seriously inhibit, if it would not destroy altogether, the possibilities for local variety, experimentation and independence, of which Messrs. Coons, et al. , quite properly speak so warmly. Proposition One, the proposition adopted by the district court in this case, would impose a constitutional strait jacket on the public schools of 50 states. It would mean that hereafter and permanently, or at least until a new book is written and the Constitution changes again, that all measurements in terms of education, the public schools, must be in terms of per capita or per pupil student expenditures, even though there may be many other things that we ought to be worrying about in an effort to cure the problems of public education. It would not necessarily destroy all local control. There is the variation presented by Professor Coons and his associates described as district power equalising. If
support drastic reform and who support reform as a matter of constitutional judgment have said that the district \ power equalizing solution would itself be unconstitutional, because it would make the number of dollars spent on a child dependent on what friends and neighbors think. I must say that in view of what this— Q So, there would still be an equal import, there could be into that? MR , WRIGHT; There certainly could be. In fact, a whole reason for having district power equalizing would be to make unequal input possible. Q But under the Texas system it is impossible for some districts to have a sufficient input, even if they are willing to tax themselves more. MR. WRIGHT; To have a sufficient input? was that your word, Justice White? Q Yes. MR. WRIGHT; I would not agree with that, sir, no. Q Why is that? MR. WRIGHT; Because we believe that our state foundation program has assured to every district a sufficient, input for an adequate education, and that it has left every district to decide for itself what if anything more — Q So, you think this is really power equalization that you have now?
MR. WRIGIITs No, 'I don't think that ours is power equalisation. I think that ours is a matter of local choice. Q You get the same result in the sense that anything over a minimum— a minimum is guaranteed and districts may make up their own mind. MR. WEIGHTs That's right, yes. I, of course, do not think that Proposition One appears in the small print of the 14th Amendment; so that if the Texas system in this respect resembles power equalizing, it does not bother me, but I would think that it should bother my friend Mr. Gochman and it should bother Professor Coons. Because I do not see how the unequal input of power equalising can be defended if the Constitution says you cannot have an equal input. Q Would you say it would violate the equal protection clause if in some way a court did decide what was a minimum level of education, it was found that many districts in Texas did not come up to that level and could not really under the formula because the property in tills particular district is just too limited and the state foundation program just does not bring it up to a minimum level? ME. WEIGHT: I think that would be a much harder constitutional case for me to defend, yes. I do not want to concede that I would necessarily lose it because it is not my case
mouths of my friends. But their pleading is not drawn on the theory that the foundation program does not give Edgewood enough. Their theory is that it does not give Edgewood as much as hlamo Heights and that there is the constitutional violation. And that is certainly the constitutional violation found by the district court. The district court raade no finding that we fall below whatever the constitutional minimum may be, Q One difference, though, between the power equalization and your system is that under power equalization if a district chose to tax itself at a higher rate, it could get more money even if it was poor in property? MR. WRIGHT: That is right. Q Not so under the Texas system now? MR. WRIGHT: That is right. Q Each district would have the same,row to hoe, so to speak, in raising that additional money under power equalization, which it does not have now? MR. WRIGHT: I ,would not want to accept that entirely, Justice Rehnquist, because power equalizing is always put in terms of^ * the taxable property par pupil. And it seems to me that in terms of what row you have to hoe in order to put a tax rate on yourself, it is really your inccxne, your ability to pay, that is important. In a wealthy district, the same rate would foe a much smaller proportion of
income. So that in that sense , in terms of the marginal utility of the dollar, it would still be easier for wealthy people to vote to spend more money than it would for poor people to do so. But, as Professor Coons says in his book, this is a point on which pragmatism must triumph over principle. Q Do you know of any case in this Court which Sias ever held that it would be unconstitutional for a state simply to get out of the business of public education bag and baggage? ME. WRIGHT: I know of no such case, and I would say there were certainly strong implications in the Prince Edward County case that a state could do exactly that if it — Q Then why do you say that a minimum education may be a constitutional requirement if a state could get out of it entirely?
safely concede it here, but I do not have to take on that argument in order to win this case? even if a minimum is constitutionally required, Texas wins here. I must say I am attracted, Justice Rehnquist, as a scholar to the argument that if might be, despite the intimations of your previous cases, that today the failure of a state to provide an education altogether would inhibit the First Amendment rights,
many decisions that say that county action is state action from the point of view of the 14th Amendment. MR. WRIGHT: Yes, for some purposes they are, But whether they are for purposes of the equal protectior.! clause in this kind of sense, there I would say your decisions are to the contrary. They say that to have things different in one county than it is in another county is not a violation of the equal protection clause. Those were not education cases in which that was being said. In one of them Maryland had different penalties in one county for a crime than it had in another county, and you upheld that and there is a consistent line of those cases, Justice Stewart. Q There are all sorts of local options in the Sunday closing cases involved. MR. WRIGHT: Sure. Q McGowan against Maryland. MR. WRIGHT: Yes, Q I am just curious. On district power equalisations,what about the percentage of ratings? Do they not differ in Teras? They seem to everywhere else. Some places assess at 30 percent and seme at eighty and some at a hundred. MR. WRIGHT: They differ very widely in Texas as they do in most states, Justice Brennan, and I think that if a state were to adopt district power equalizing, it as a
practical matter would have to adopt statewide assessing. I do not sea any other way in which the scheme would be feasible. Otherwise you simply use a favorable rate,, and you get more than you are entitled to. And I think that demonstrates the further incursion on local government that the ideas presented here by the Appellees represent, that very little is to be left of local government if the decision below is to be affirmed. We contend, of course, that if we are subject only to the rational basis tost, that this is not one of those eases in which we must demonstrate a compelling state interest in order to justify the results for which we argue, and justify the state plan. And we think that there are quite a number of very recent cases in this Court, some of them ignored by the lower court and some of them still more recent, that show exactly that and show that this Court is not going to impose a constitutional strait jacket on the states in difficult, intractable questions of social reform, welfare, ' economics, Dandridge, Lindsey, Jefferson v. Hackney, cases of that kind, and we think this is clearly in the area with which we are concerned. The appellees undertake to distinguish these and to suggest that in soma way the educational needs of the poor are fundamental, while their needs for food, for housing, are not. And, with respect, this is a distinction that X think simply is not a tenable one, that it is hard to
AFTERNOON SESSION - 1:00 o'clock [Same appearances as heretofore noted, 3 MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGES: Mr. Wright, you may continue. You have 13 minutes remaining altogether. MR. WRIGHT; Thank you, Mr. Chief-Justice. In the time that remains to ms, I would like to turn for a moment to the factual assumptions that underlie the judgment below and the arguments of the appellees. And I would like to make perfectly clear what our position is with regard to those, because there is soma suggestion, particularly in some or the amicus briefs in support of the appellees, that Texas is asking this Court to resolve the very vexing questions on the relation of money to quality and education and on whether or not persons who are individually poor are likely to be found in school districts that are, in terms of taxable property, collectively poor. We , of course , are not asking you to settle those questions. Our submission is that these are intensely difficult questions on which no answers, in the present state of knowledge, are possible and that this Court should not undertake to resolve matters on which educators and social scientists cannot come up with any answers. We have felt it necessary to discuss the questions because, as we understand it, the position of our friends would require to resolve these issues.
The decision below , though it never discusses the issue f makes the implicit assumption that, in education money is quality. The assumption is explicit in the writings of Professor Coons and his associates and others who have written on that. The district court never spoke to it. But the district court, looked at figures about numbers of dollars spent and then announced a constitutional requirement that the quality of education cannot be allowed to vary except as a function of the wealth of the state as a whole and thus implicitly assumed what v/e think no court can safely assume, because in fact we are very skeptical that it is even true (^) « that beyond some minimum quality is money. The district court did explicitly find that there is a correlation between poor people and poor school districts. The finding of the district court in that regard is based on the reading of the extremes of the chart that was offered in evidence. Its determination in that regard has been criticized not only in our briefs and in our testimony at the trial but in the literature. In our brief we set out the discussion of the finding on that point by Professor Goldstein in his article in the Pennsylvania Lav/ Review, and in the issue of the Yale Lav? Journal that was published on Tuesday of this v/eak there is a lengthy student note that is again very critical of the finding in Rodriguez on that point that appears at page 1312, notes 40 and 41, of the Yale
inequality without regard to whether the particular plaintiffs were of Spanish ancestry or Anglo or what. But the issue is certainly there. We think that the issue is one that is fairly readily answered, that although it is of course quite true that in the Edgawood School District in Bexar County, Texas, the great majority of the students are of Spanish origin and not as much money is spent there as in other school districts. But we doubt that this would be found to be true as a general matter. But the poor school districts are not that congruent with racial distributions, that it is, in other words, a happenstance. We have a case in which we have particular plaintiffs who are Mexican-Ameriean and who live in a district with low taxable resources, Again, on these factual statistical problems, we think that the state of the literature simply does net permit the conclusions that are essential to the position of my friend; and that even if their conclusions were sound, we still think that our legal argument would have great merit. But if their conclusions are not demonstrable at the present fc5,me because they are the essential premises of the results for which they argue, we think that the inability to demonstrate the accuracy of these assumptions is fatal to their case. Q 1 assume you use the term "state of the
literature" in the broader sense of state of the human knowledge on this? MR, WRIGHT: Ye3, yes. That is exactly the sense in which I use it, Mr. Chief Justice. 1 think, with the Court's permission, I will reserve my remaining time for rebuttal. MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER: Very well. Mr. Gochman. ORAL ARGUMENT OF ARTHUR GOCHMAN , ESQ. , ON BEHALF OF THE APPELLEES Mr. Gochman. Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: The court below he3.d the Texas system unconstitu tional because it distributes educational benefits on the basis of district wealth. The court said, as might be expected, those districts most rich in property also have the highest median family income and the lowest percentage of minority pupils, while the poorer districts are poorer in income and predominantly minority in composition. And the court cites one of the exhibits. Another one is on page 98 of the Appendix, Plaintiffs' Exhibit 3, which shows that the correlation is not only on a district basis of minority discrimination but on statewide, on a statewide basis. The court further found that there was no rational or compelling reason that could be offered for this
