Center for Educational Equity Records

Michael A. Rebell is the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is also a professor of law and educational practice. In addition to teaching at Teachers College, he has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia law schools. 

Experienced in educational law, Michael Rebell has litigated several class action lawsuits, including Jose P. v. Mills. Jose P. v. Mills is a landmark New York State case filed by New York City schoolchildren with disabilities and their parents in 1979. The lawsuit aimed “to get the New York City Department of Education to obey federal laws that require appropriate evaluation, placement and services be provided to all students with disabilities” (Advocates for Children of New York). 

Continuing with his advocacy work in educational law, Michael Rebell co-founded the not-for-profit advocacy organization Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. (CFE) alongside Robert Jackson in 1993. CFE was founded to support “a group of parents and education advocates concerned about public school funding inadequacies in the State of New York” (Campaign for Fiscal Equity). This group “filed an unprecedented constitutional challenge claiming that the state's school finance system under-funded New York City public schools thereby denying its students their constitutional right to the opportunity for a sound basic education” (Campaign for Fiscal Equity). CFE litigated the case for 13 years, while also undertaking research and outreach efforts related to school funding, educational equity, and adequacy issues. 

Serving as co-counsel for the plaintiffs in CFE v. State, Rebell argued that New York City schools were inadequately funded and helped secure three major victories for CFE in the State of New York’s Court of Appeals, New York’s Highest Court. These victories established a right under the state constitution for the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York State and resulted in billions of dollars of additional funding for New York City public Schools and other underfunded districts throughout the state. 

In 2014, in a follow-up to CFE, Rebell and Morgan, Lewis and Bokius LLP represented NYSER, or New Yorkers for Students Educational Rights, a coalition of New York State education and advocacy groups. NYSER sought to compel New York State to fulfill its constitutional obligation to adequately fund public schools. The NYSER suit was tentatively settled in 2021. 

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Michael A. Rebell, alongside colleagues Molly Hunter and Jessica R. Wolff, undertook additional efforts to build advocacy networks and establish research initiatives that would support lawsuits like CFE v. State. This resulted in the creation of the National Advocacy Center for Children’s Educational Success with Standards (ACCESS) Campaign. ACCESS was a national outreach campaign that sought to promote and support educational equity efforts throughout the United States by collecting legal briefs, expert reports, court decisions, and other trial documents from across all 50 states. Rebell, Wolf, and Hunter carried this work onto the Campaign for Educational Equity, which later became the Center for Educational Equity run out of Teachers College. The ACCESS Campaign and its Advocacy Networks’ research initiatives have since transformed into SchoolFunding.Info.  

In 2005, Rebell founded the Center for Educational Equity, “a nonprofit policy and research center at Teachers College” (Center for Educational Equity). The Center for Educational Equity seeks to systemically enhance educational equity in the United States “through a dynamic approach that includes research, policy development, legal action, public engagement, and advocacy” (Center for Educational Equity). The Center builds upon Michael Rebell’s earlier work with education finance reforms. 

Michael Rebell is also the author of several books, including Educational Policy Making and the Courts: An Empirical Study of Judicial Activism (1982), Equality and Education: Federal Civil Rights Enforcement in the New York City School System (1985), Moving Every Child Ahead: from NCLB Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity (2008), Courts and Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity Through the State Courts (2009), NCLB at the Crossroads: Reexamining the Federal Effort to Close the Achievement Gap (2009), and Flunking Democracy: Schools, Courts and Civic Participation (2018), as well as dozens of articles on education issues in the United States.

Photograph of Michael Rebell, Courtesy of Center for Educational Equity