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⁸ Rothenberg, Randall, The Neo-Liberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 182. Kulick and Warren examine states that adopted MCTs and high school exit exams between 1976 and 1999. They define southern states as those that are members of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). Four of the sixteen states in the SREB, Arkansas, Delaware, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, did not adopt exit exams between 1976 and 1999. The inclusion of these states and ten northern and western states that adopted exit exams between 1987 and 1999, explains “why coefficients for being southern are in the expected directions but are not statistically significant.” They conclude that between 1976 and 1999 decisions to adopt high school exams arose “largely from efforts to educate racially/ethnically diverse populations.” See Robert Warren, John and Kulick, Rachael B., “Modeling States’ Enactment of High School Exit Exam Policies,” Social Forces 86, no. 1 (September 2007): 226–227. For a discussion of how MCTs were connected to the end of court supervised desegregation in Massachusetts, see Nelson, Adam R., The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston's Public Schools, 1950–1985 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).Google Scholar

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²⁶ Anderson v. Banks, 520 F. Supp. 472 (1981), 486, 501,503; Debra P. v. Turlington, 474 F. Supp. 244 (1979), 249, 252, 257, 265, 269. While school funding was not an issue and was not contested in Green, Anderson, or Debra P., there was a considerable amount of school finance litigation during this period. After the Supreme Court held that education was not a fundamental right, litigation shifted to the state courts, San Antonio v. Rodriquez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973). Equity advocates won victories in California and New Jersey, but during the late 1970s and early 1980s most court decisions did not declare state finance systems unconstitutional. See Yudof, Mark G., Kirp, David L., Levin, Betsy, and Moran, Rachel F., Educational Policy and the Law (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group, 2002), 800. Margaret Rose Westbrook has shown that between 1983 and 1989 “no state invalidated its funding scheme; school finance reform litigation was considered a dead issue.” See “School Finance Litigation,” North Carolina Law Review 73 (2004–5): 2129. After 1989, advocates began using a new adequacy theory to convince courts that states were constitutionally obligated to provide levels of funding required to achieve an educational result. For a discussion of adequacy arguments and court rulings during the 1990s, see Ryan, James E., Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and The Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).Google Scholar

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³³ Debra P. v. Turlington, 564 F. Supp. 177 (1983), 186, 188, 189; 730 F. 2d 1405 (1984), 1416. While Florida's remedial efforts helped persuade the courts to uphold the constitutionality of the state's MCT, the Debra P. rulings did not explicitly require states to provide remedial programs. The courts cited the existence of remedial efforts in decisions upholding MCTs in Williams v. Austin Independent School District, 796 F. Supp. 251 (1992); Rankins v. Louisiana Board of Education, 635 So. 2d 250 (1994), and Triplett v. Livingston County Board of Education, 967 S.W. 2d 25 (1998). School funding was not contested in these cases. In 1995, 7 of 18 states that required students to pass a high school competency test provided “funds directly for remediation.” Linda A. Bond and Diane King, State High School Graduation Testing: Status and Recommendations (Oak Brook, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1995), 6.Google Scholar

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