Although the current cases often refer back to Brown, they are to do with the far more complex issues of social class and educational excellence.Traditionally, American schools have been funded by local property taxes, which inevitably meant that richer areas ended up with more lavish schools.
Educated at a wide array of institutions (a convent, a girls' institute, a lavish private school, a tatty one in a rural village), shamed or befriended according to the family's current level of respectability or scandal, Weldon became resilient and resourceful while her sister had "a sadness and coldness growing inside her" that led to eventual tragedy.
That sum that may seem princely to the average American worker but, alas, doesn't buy much for a crowd used to Fifth Avenue triplexes, third and fourth homes, top-drawer health care and lavish private schools for their children.
What followed was a decade of lavish excess new schools boasting television and animation studios, a planetarium, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, even a zoo, a Cato Institute study found.
Months later, she arrives to be enrolled at Spence, a lavish English finishing school, "a ghost of a girl".
Going to a lower-tier bowl game usually costs schools money because the payout does not cover the lavish travel party schools usually organize.
That American high schools lavish more time and money on sports than on math is, I know, an old complaint.
It's delivered in a steady drumbeat throughout childhood, lavished during high school and university graduation ceremonies, and then suddenly gone, leaving only one's own dark inner soundtrack.
Elsewhere, the evidence has tended to show that lavish outlays for schools don't overcome the handicaps that a child faces coming from an extremely poor family.
So did schools, building lavish residence halls, recreational facilities and other amenities that contributed little to actual learning.
