The Kalamazoo School Case That Defined American Public Education

In eighteen fifty-eight, the school board of Kalamazoo did something that no one had ever tested in a Michigan court: they used tax money to build and operate a public high school. Elementary education was already publicly funded. But high school was different. High school was considered, by many property owners, an amenity rather than a right, and amenities should be paid for by those who chose to use them, not by everyone.

For fifteen years, the Kalamazoo high school ran without legal challenge. Then, in eighteen seventy-three, three property owners filed suit. Charles Stuart, a former United States Senator from Michigan, joined with two other prominent citizens to argue that levying taxes for high school instruction was unlawful without a vote of the taxpayers. Their position had legal weight. The boundary between compulsory public education and optional advanced schooling was genuinely unclear.

A circuit court ruled against them in eighteen seventy-four, and the plaintiffs appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court. Justice Thomas M. Cooley, one of the most respected jurists in the country, wrote the opinion that summer. His conclusion was sweeping: the state had the right to levy taxes for a complete system of public education, from the elementary grades through the university. The legislature was not obligated to stop at any particular rung of the educational ladder.

Justice Cooley's prestige was such that his opinion traveled far beyond Michigan. Courts in states across the country cited it when similar cases arose. The number of high schools in Michigan grew sharply in the years that followed. The legal right to a free public high school, now so fundamental that most Americans have never heard it argued, was established in a Kalamazoo courtroom.