In the landmark Abbott v. Burke case, the New Jersey Supreme Court opened the funding floodgates for 30 such districts, including Camden and Trenton.

Since 1997, the New Jersey Department of Education has poured $22.4 billion into them. In testing, a handful of districts now have scores rivaling their once-wealthier counterparts'.

Abbott "represents the most comprehensive effort to improve the education of disadvantaged children in the nation," said David Sciarra, director of the Newark-based Education Law Center, which represented the state's children in the case.

At the same time, Abbott is no homage to the spirit of Brown, he said. It is, instead, the legal descendant of the 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the high court decided that railroads could put blacks in separate cars as long as accommodations were equal. In that ruling, which Brown overturned, are Abbott's roots, Sciarra said.

He added: "The idea we should be celebrating Brown v. Board of Education in New Jersey is, frankly, ridiculous."

Perhaps no more so than in Pennsylvania, though.

The state has not only one of the highest school-segregation rankings in the country, but also one of the lowest achievement levels for African American students and one of the least equitable education-funding systems.

"The courts acted on the worst excesses of segregation in the '60s, but after that did nothing about issues of real equality," said Michael Churchill, an attorney with the Public Interest Law Center of Pennsylvania.

The commonwealth has what once was the most powerful state agency in the country with the authority to impose desegregation orders. Six years after it was formed in 1961, in a court case involving the Chester City schools, the Human Relations Commission won the right to force student reassignment and busing, even if the segregation was deemed unintentional.

After that coup, it intervened in more than two dozen districts, including Philadelphia.

"Some developed plans, others developed insufficient plans, others ignored us," said Michael Hardiman, the commission's regional counsel.

From time to time, the legislature threatened to take away the commission's power to force reassignments - and finally did in 1996, after an unpopular busing order in the Pittsburgh area.

Since the 1990s, lawmakers have instead embraced privatization, charters and state takeovers - namely, of the Philadelphia and Chester Upland districts - as a way of dealing with low-achieving, often minority districts. None of those strategies has equalized funding.

Proposals to reform the state's property-tax system, which benefits wealthier districts and wallops the poorest, have gone nowhere in Harrisburg.

Gov. Rendell proposed raising the state income tax to increase Pennsylvania's share of public-school funding. Today, his plan to pump an extra $650 million into programs aimed largely at the state's youngest and poorest children has been pared to $224 million. The legislature has yet to approve even that.

"We take folks with the most problems and give them the least amount," said Sugrue, the Penn historian. "In education, to whom little is given, much is expected. . . . It's a perverse way of thinking about public policy."

For two years, the federal law known as No Child Left Behind has stirred both hope and fear.