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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 Â鶹¾«Æ·â€™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