Foreword: Property and Education

Abstract

Education policy is today a flashpoint in public discourse at both the national and state levels. This focus is for good reason. Public schools are highly segregated. School spending is stratified. The need for infrastructural renovations is extensive and expanding. Student debt has reached historic highs. For-profit companies are exploiting school districts’ limited resources for everything from curricular content to lunch menus. 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.

Keywords: education policy, public schools, segregation, infrastructure, student debt, property law