In the fifty years since Congress assumed the provision of financial assistance to schools in which students had "federal connection," such as American Indian students living on reservations or in public housing, this federal assistance came to be regarded as a replacement for state funding, not as supplemental funding. This study contends that the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Zuni v. Department of Education misinterpreted the statistical test imposed by Congress in 1976, and furthermore, that the test is minimally equitable and does not reflect any measure of fiscal adequacy. Effectively, the statistical measures used by the U.S. Department of Education allow state legislatures, by way of a misinterpretation of education finance statistical analysis, to ignore the real needs of impoverished children attending public schools. (Contains 4 endnotes.)