High school library service in Tennessee Rosenwald demonstration units

In August 2000, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of school children against the state of California. The suit, Williams v. State of California, alleged that the state failed to exercise its constitutional obligation to provide equal access to education for all students in the state by allowing deficient facilities, uncredentialed teachers, and inadequate or insufficient instructional materials. A successful outcome for the plaintiffs would entail expansion of current boundaries of entitlement to a new standard that would establish constitutional entitlement to specific resources and a standard of state responsibility for oversight. In this article I examine whether the relief that plaintiffs seek pushes the definition of entitlement to areas beyond judicially manageable and constitutionally defensible standards.