Charles Scott Benson; Did Landmark Studies of School Financing

Charles Scott Benson, 72, a UC Berkeley professor and expert on education who provided information for the state’s landmark Serrano litigation. A native of Atlanta, Benson was educated at Princeton and Columbia universities and taught educational administration at Berkeley for three decades. He was a principal investigator at the Berkeley-based National Center for Research in Vocational Education, which studied relationships between education and work. His studies in education finance were major evidence in the Serrano case in which the California Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the practice of financing schools from local property taxes. Benson’s work indicated that such financing created serious inequality of education among the state’s public schools. On July 2 in Carlsbad, Calif.