Watch: Professor Jack Coons Reflects on the Historic School Funding Cases He Helped Litigate, and Why Families Deserve More Equitable Access to a Quality Education

A law professor by training, Jack Coons was a fixture on the education landscape in California for decades and — unbeknownst to most — an influential character for public education across the country. He litigated the three landmark Serrano v. Priest cases, which challenged California’s school funding structure, arguing that the state created a gross financial disparity between wealthy and poor districts due to its reliance on taxes on local real property. Andy Rotherham and The 74’s Emmeline Zhao traveled to Coons’s Berkeley, California, home to talk to him about the public school landscape’s past, present and future.

—Edited by James Fields