The

By Susan Tifft

, Residents of the Edgewood Independent school district, a poor, largely Hispanic area in west San Antonio, are willing to pay for good schools. Property taxes are high -- almost $1 per $100 of assessed valuation. But because the district encompasses part of a tax-exempt Air Force base and lacks tony subdivisions, the tax rate translates into $3,596 per student. In the Santa Gertrude school district, located on the oil-rich King Ranch in south Texas, property taxes are low -- only 8 cents per $100 of assessed valuation -- but the total spent per student is $12,000.

Disparities such as these prompted the Texas Supreme Court last week to declare the state's method of school finance unconstitutional. In a 9-to-0 decision, the court said the wide gaps between the richest and the poorest of Texas' 1,071 districts violate a provision of the state constitution requiring an "efficient" education. Funneling resources to poorer districts would reduce some of these differences. But money alone is not enough. What Texas schools need, said the court, is an overhaul. "A Band-Aid will not suffice," said Justice Oscar H. Mauzy. "The system itself must be changed."

The Texas decision, which affects the nation's second largest school system after California, is sure to breathe new life into the struggle for more uniform school financing around the country. But by calling for a basic shift in the way schools operate, the court changed the terms of the debate, emphasizing that inequities in funding are linked to inequities in the quality of education.

The decision came less than a week after President George Bush and the nation's Governors huddled in Charlottesville, Va., for an education summit that endorsed several of the same ideas -- radical restructuring of schools and creation of national performance goals. "The Texas ruling is consistent with the growing national expectations we are placing on schools," says Robert Berne, an associate dean at New York University.

The push for uniform goals is relatively recent, however, while the movement for uniform financing is more than two decades old. Since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that equal access to education is not a fundamental right under the federal Constitution, at least ten states have seen their school- financing systems overturned under state-constitution provisions. In June the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down that state's financing methods, ordering the legislature not only to equalize spending but also to reorganize "the whole gamut of the common-school system."

Such moves indicate that the once sacred principle of local control is rapidly going the way of McGuffey's Reader. "This nation was intensely committed to the idea that each district should be run by school boards unrelated to larger national purposes," says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. "Now we are moving toward the issue of how national interests can be served."

Besides addressing broader goals, smoothing out financial differences could make "choice" -- a policy permitting parents to move their children from schools they do not like to ones they do -- more palatable to critics. Until now, the chief complaint has been that choice encourages parents to abandon poor inner-city schools. If every school got roughly the same funding, parents could make judgments based on nonmonetary concerns, and failing schools would have the resources to improve.

At week's end Texas Governor Bill Clements and other state leaders were getting ready to appoint a special study group to prepare proposals for the legislature, which must come up with a new school-financing plan by May 1, 1990. Everything from a hike in state sales and tobacco taxes to a first-ever state income tax is expected to be on the table. Similar cases are pending in Alaska, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee and New Jersey. These efforts to equalize spending within states, however, may be just warm- ups for a far more radical notion: equalizing spending between states, a move some educators now consider inevitable.

With reporting by Priscilla Painton/New York and Richard Woodbury/Houston