PROPERTY AND EDUCATION - Columbia Law Review

* Professor of Law, Texas A&M University School of Law.
** Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. The authors collectively thank Erika K. Wilson, Rachel F. Moran, Nicole Stelle Garnett, Yuvraj Joshi, Peter K. Yu, Lange Luntao, and Michelle Wilde Anderson for their thoughtful contributions to this Symposium issue. They also thank Symposium Editor Alex Vasques and her colleagues on the Columbia Law Review for their tremendous efforts in bringing this issue to fruition. Finally, they express gratitude to Texas A&M School of Law and Columbia Law School for their financial support.

Education policy is today a flashpoint in public discourse at both the national and state levels. 1 Ashley Jochim, Melissa Kay Diliberti, Heather Schwartz, Katharine Destler & Paul Hill, Ctr. on Reinventing Pub. Educ., Navigating Political Tensions Over Schooling: Findings From the Fall 2022 American School District Panel Survey 2 (2023), https://crpe.org/wp-content/uploads/ASDP-_Navigating-Political-Brief_v6.pdf [https:// perma.cc/X8NB-QHTM]; Trip Gabriel, Education Issues Vault to Top of the G.O.P.’s Presidential Race, N.Y. Times (Feb. 6, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/politics/education-republicans-elections.html (on file with the Columbia Law Review); David A. Hopkins, Why America’s Schools Are Getting More Political, Wash. Post (Feb. 14, 2023), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-americas-schools-are-getting-more-political/2023/02/14/e82a5874-ac66-11ed-b0ba-9f4244c6e5da_story.html (on file with the ). This focus is for good reason. Public schools are highly segregated. 2 U.S. Gov’t Accountability Off., GAO-22-104737, K–12 EDUCATION: Student Population Has Significantly Diversified, But Many Schools Remain Divided Along Racial, Ethnic, and Economic Lines (2022), https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-104737.pdf [https://perma.cc/KVK2-LUJT] (reporting that in 2020–2021 “[m]ore than a third of students (about 18.5 million) attended a predominantly same-race/ethnicity school—where 75 percent or more of the student[s] [were] . . . of a single race/ethnicity” and “14 percent . . . attended schools where 90 percent or more of the students were of a single race/ethnicity”). School spending is stratified. 3 Students in the poorest schools receive only 71% of funding that would be needed to provide those students an adequate education. Sylvia Allegretto, Emma García & Elaine Weiss, Econ. Pol’y Inst., Public Education Funding in the U.S. Needs an Overhaul 8 fig.B (2022), https://files.epi.org/uploads/233143.pdf [https://perma.cc/F6NC-EYHV] (showing that the poorest schools would need $18,000 per student per year to provide an adequate education, but that those schools are only spending approximately $13,000 per student per year). Students in the most affluent schools receive 23% more funding than needed to provide those students an adequate education. Id. (showing that the most affluent schools would need $8,300 per student per year to provide an adequate education, but that those schools are spending approximately $10,200 per student per year); Ivy Morgan, Educ. Tr., Equal Is Not Good Enough 4 (2022), https://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Equal-Is-Not-Good-Enough-December-2022.pdf [https://perma.cc/PM3B-JKR6] (reporting that “[a]cross the country, districts with the most students of color on average receive substantially less (16%) state and local revenue than districts with the fewest students of color”). The need for infrastructural renovations is extensive and expanding. 4 Victoria Jackson & Nicholas Johnson, Ctr. on Budget & Pol’y Priorities, America’s School Infrastructure Needs a Major Investment of Federal Funds to Advance an Equitable Recovery 1 (2021), https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/5-17-21sfp.pdf [https:// perma.cc/8L7L-4Z2D] (“Due in part to longstanding federal inaction, the estimated cost of bringing all schools to good condition . . . reached nearly $200 billion by 2013 . . . . [N]eed for improvements is particularly acute in schools with high populations of students from low-income families and of Black, Indigenous, Latino, and other children of color.”). Student debt has reached historic highs. 5 See Brett Holzhauer, Student Loan Debt Hits Another Record High Despite Payment Forbearance, CNBC (May 10, 2022), https://www.cnbc.com/select/student-debt-hits-another-record-high-what-you-need-to-know/ [https://perma.cc/P23G-J7K5] (“Student debt hit another all-time high in the first quarter of 2022, reaching $1.59 trillion, according to data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York . . . .”). For-profit companies are exploiting school districts’ limited resources for everything from curricular content 6 For example, analysts have suggested that career and technical education, also known as CTE, is being captured by for-profit businesses who sell districts branded curricula. See Jeff Bryant, How Corporations Are Forcing Their Way Into America’s Public Schools, Salon (Feb. 11, 2020), https://www.salon.com/2020/02/11/how-corporations-are-forcing-their-way-into-americas-public-schools_partner/ [https://perma.cc/6THQ-NUEC] (“[C]orporations like these can use the rush to CTE to flood schools with new course offerings that require technology the schools have to buy.”). to lunch menus. 7 For example, PepsiCo provides school lunches to school districts nationwide. See K–12 Passion to Please, PepsiCo FoodService, https://pepsicoschoolsource.com/ [https://perma.cc/3Z7L-DYAH] (last visited Mar. 27, 2023); see also Jaden Urbi, How Big Brands Like Tyson and PepsiCo Profit From School Lunches (Nov. 14, 2018), https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/how-big-brands-like-tyson-and-pepsico-profit-from-school-lunches.html [https://perma.cc/V3MC-6YRN]. The list goes on.

This moment presents an opportunity to highlight a threshold issue on which it seems prudent for this discourse to direct greater attention: the interconnections between education and property law. Indeed, decisions surrounding property—crafting district-mapping formulae; devising zoning schemes; setting the baseline conditions for housing and mortgage loans; investing in infrastructure; facilitating teacher and other public employee unionization efforts; and the like—determine in considerable respects the very architecture of our educational system. Whether the extant connections between education and property should exist, and, if so, in what shape and form, is a complex question that implicates not only the traditional confines of education and property law but related elements of state and local government law, tax law, immigration law, constitutional law, human rights law, and more. This Symposium brings together a diverse collection of scholars from these and adjacent fields to grapple with this question from various perspectives and research methodologies.

In this Foreword, we classify the Essays in this Symposium issue into three thematic categories: “Educational Boundaries,” “Educational Justice,” and “Educational Resources.” The first features work by LaToya Baldwin Clark, Rachel Moran, and Erika Wilson; the second includes writings of Timothy M. Mulvaney, Nicole Stelle Garnett, and Yuvraj Joshi; and the third comprises scholarship by Peter Yu, Michele Wilde Anderson, and Lange Luntao. We introduce these authors’ Symposium contributions before offering a brief reflection on the intersections between and the role of these thematic categories in education discourse moving forward.