Since its inception, the American public education system has undergone various reforms, and fair and adequate funding has been a re-emerging issue in school finance. The challenge of providing fair and adequate funding for America's public schools was addressed as early as the mid-1800s. Horace Mann, the father of the common school, was influential in advocating the need for equity and adequacy in public schools. “However,” writes Baines (2006, p. 269), “perhaps his greatest contribution was the idea that American children should be provided with a free, nonselective, academically challenging, fair, and morally just school system. In his appeals to the public, he proposed schools as a way to unify and build diversity