Framing Equal Opportunity: Law and the Politics of School Finance Reform [Hardcover]

In the struggle to ensure that schools receive their fair share of financial and educational resources, reformers translate policy goals into legal claims in a number of different ways. This enlightening new work uncovers the options reformers have in framing legal challenges and how the choices they make affect politics and policy beyond the courtroom.Focusing on two of the most controversial and far-reaching court decisions in the nation in school finance and education reform,Framing Equal Opportunityfollows lawyers and activists in New Jersey and Kentucky as they negotiate the complicated political terrain of educational change in their respective states. Unlike other books on law and reform, this work emphasizes the importance of legal translationthe process through which reformers transform their visions and goals into plausible legal claims. As it reveals, the kinds of arguments lawyers choose to make matter not only to their success in the courtroom, but also to the nature of the political fights they face in the community at large.This book reveals the important role lawyers, law, and courts play in struggles over educational resources, especially when it comes to the translation of policy goals into legal claims. This remarkable book reveals how law is political, not in a cynical or corrupt sense, but in the best sense of politics. Paris shows us how reform lawyers can create political options and opportunities through argument and the very language of law. The result opens up the black box of legal mobilization in a way that few studies do. Here is a robust new perspective on the relationship between law and politics. Michael Paris is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. In this exhaustively researched and admirably written book, Michael Paris demonstrates the intrinsic synergies between the political mobilization of law and American democracy. Through case studies comparing school lƒE