Michael Churchill, 83, has spent nearly his entire adult life working to build a more just world, from the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 onward.
Without a doubt, a highlight among those years of civil rights work came last week, he said, when a Commonwealth Court judge declared Pennsylvania’s system of funding public education unconstitutional. Churchill was a chief architect of the case, first filed in 2014 — but really, decades in the making.
When you ask Churchill an education-funding question, prepare to receive a master class. But he takes longer to answer why he’s spent his life the way he has.
“It was always just clear that if you really wanted to believe in the democratic values, you had to do something,” said Churchill. “You could not be a nation, a successful one, claiming one thing and then doing something else.”
Churchill’s involvement in questioning the fundamental fairness of Pennsylvania’s education funding system dates to 1991, when he represented community groups seeking to intervene in a school desegregation case: The Philadelphia School District suggested its plan to bus 14,000 students from racially isolated schools across the city to high-performing schools in the Northeast was an appropriate fix; Churchill and others disagreed.
“Why was the district not putting in sufficient resources in the racially isolated schools as compared to the others?” said Churchill, who led the Public Interest Law Center from 1976 to 2006 years and still serves as “of...
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