The Fourteenth Amendment mandates that “no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Section Five of this amendment assigns the responsibility of enforcing it to the Congress (LII, n.d.).  Liu (2006) argues, “If the citizenship guarantee means full membership, equal standing, and effective participation in the national polity, then it cannot be squared with a federal education policy that relegates schoolchildren to the uneven distribution of opportunity resulting from highly varied state effort and fiscal capacity”.  The Fourteenth Amendment elevates “national citizenship” over “state citizenship.” However our educational policies relegate children to being citizens of the state.  Full membership in a democratic society requires a person’s education to give them the ability to make informed decisions on voting, participate in community affairs and to be productively employed.

            Biddle and Berlinger (2002) report that few students in the United States attend public schools where funding is set at $15,000 or more per student, while some American schools make do with less than $4000 per student.  Disparities such as these are not tolerated in other developed countries where public schools are funded equally from national taxes.  The Netherlands uses a national funding system with allocates money to all schools based on the number of enrolled students, but for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child (Biddle). As illustrated in Appendix A, funding in the United States is the opposite, because lower-class and minority children typically receive less than middle-class white children.  This funding gap created an achievement gap between states.  Biddle and Berlinger discovered that students from well funded schools, when compared to students from other countries on the TIMSS report, performed as well as their peers in Hong Kong and Japan.  Students from underfunded schools, using the same report, performed at the same levels as students in Jordan and Iran.  Better funded schools attract teachers with higher levels of education, more experience, and higher scores on competency tests.  These teachers in turn generate better achievement scores among students (Biddle). 

In the 2006 report by Liu, he points out that the discrepancy between educational funding across states is not a new or unknown issue in Congress.  Congress considered a series of proposals to narrow these funding gaps during Reconstruction.  After each World War, Congress debated proposals on educational funding.  In 1972, President Nixon’s Commission on School Finance recommended that the federal government equalize resources among the States for elementary and secondary education.  In 1979, a committee of the National Academy of Education emphasized that reducing inequities in educational opportunity, should be a key priority for the federal government. Even though the issue of educational funding has been discussed many times in Congress little has ever been done to close this funding gap. 

Currently, federal spending on public elementary and secondary schools comprises 7.9% of total education revenue in 2001-02 (Liu, 2006). Teacher shortages are a common problem in the United States but rare in counties where teacher salaries are competitive with those in other professional occupations (Darling, 2005).  The United States has the resources to fund improve the quality of teaching in our schools.  However, some of the 92.1% of the federal education revenue will need to be redirected toward this end if America is to achieve its education goals.  The federal government cannot buy much equality when they only provide eight cents of every education dollar.