The concept of wealth was central to the constitutional development of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. 1 Wealth had become the focus of a crucial shift in the theory of lawsuits attacking disparities in interdistrict spending. Mclnnis v. Shapiro,2 which the plaintiffs lost, asked the court to compel the state to meet the educational needs of students. Serrano v. Priest,3 Rodriguez in the lower court,4 and other cases which the plaintiffs won,5 held only that the differences in school district wealth must not continue to influence spending. Most critics of Serrano and Rodriguez, including those whose most common objection is the departure from the needs-oriented objectives of Mclnnis, concede that the conservatism, intelligibility and manageability of the no-wealth standard was the difference between winning and losing.6 It was, therefore, especially painful to partisans of fiscal neutrality, as the no-wealth principle is called, that the majority opinion in Rodriguez declared as the first ground for reversal that there was no wealth discrimination in Texas' school finance system. Plaintiffs had shown discrimination on the basis of school district wealth but had failed, according to the Court, to show discrimination on the basis of personal wealth, more specifically on the basis of actual poverty. Unfortunately, the proper way to elucidate the distinctions between various sorts of wealth remained shrouded in remarkable confusion straight through the litigation. It was a confusion on all levels--conceptual, normative and empirical; a confusion not conspicuously reduced by a student note on the topic sent in galleys to the Court at the eleventh hour,7 and ultimately cited several times by the majority.8 Perhaps the speed with which the school finance litigation reached the Supreme Court made it difficult for all concerned to reach a coherent understanding of the issue. This article proposes a position on the legal issues and a method of presenting evidence which, it is hoped, provides the necessary elucidation. Confusion surrounding the various types of wealth stems from two broad sources. The first source of this confusion is the lack of information as to whether in fact poor people do tend to live more in poorer school districts rather than in richer ones. Part II of this article, using data compiled from the State of Illinois, presents a methodology for making this determination. Previous attempts to establish the correlation between family wealth and district wealth have suffered especially because the measure of fiscal capacity of school districts did not include family wealth, and similarly because studies did not reveal the average loss or gain in dollars per student for families of different incomes. The second broad source of confusion, which Part I examines, is the problem of standards for determining whether the discovery of any particular relationship between family wealth and district wealth should lead to a finding of constitutionally suspect wealth discrimination. Again, there are two subsidiary problems. First, the injured or burdened class and the suspect class are not coextensive; there may be situations in which many non-poor families are injured while many poor families are benefitted. And second, the existence of net injury to the poor, if any, is not self-evident from the manner in which school financing systems are constructed, this despite the fact that injury to all families living in poor school districts is self-evident. Such lack of self-evidence raises genuine problems in the area of legislative intent.
