[1] The majority opinion, reversing the District Court, stated that the appellees did not sufficiently prove a textual basis, within the U.S. Constitution, supporting the principle that education is a fundamental right.

Urging that the school financing system led to wealth-based discrimination, the plaintiffs had argued that the fundamental right to education should be applied to the States, through the Fourteenth Amendment.

Powell led the narrow majority in deciding that the right to be educated (as a child of school age or an uneducated adult), was neither 'explicitly or implicitly' textually found anywhere in the U.S. Constitution.

"[2] In a 2015 TIME interview of over 50 legal scholars, University of California, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Cornell Law Professor Steven Shiffrin both named Rodriguez the "worst Supreme Court decision since 1960," with Chemerinsky noting that the decision has "played a major role in creating the separate and unequal schools that exist today.

[5] In April 2020 a three judge panel of the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2–1 in Gary B. v. Whitmer to recognize that children have a US constitutional right to basic literacy education.

The panel decision distinguished San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which did not address the fundamental right to basic education.