Right-to-Education Ruling Jolts Education-Advocacy World

Education Week reports:

A bold decision by a federal appeals court recognizing a right under the U.S. Constitution to a basic minimum education, in the form of access to literacy, has cheered education-equity advocates and may be felt far beyond the substandard Detroit schools that are the subject of the underlying lawsuit.

“This was a real breakthrough,” Michael A. Rebell, a professor and the director of the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, said in reference to the April 23 ruling by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati, that revived a lawsuit brought by a handful of Detroit schoolchildren against the state of Michigan alleging horrendous conditions in the city’s schools.

“This is the first indication [in more than four decades] that there may really be an opening for some kind of broad-based federal right to education,” said Rebell, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on the side of the Detroit children and is also spearheading a similar suit in Rhode Island.

The earlier ruling Rebell referred to was San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973 which rejected a 14th Amendment equal-protection clause challenge to Texas' school funding system by residents of a small, property-poor school district, the Edgewood Independent School District, which covers part of San Antonio.

The nearly half-century-old decision was long considered to have foreclosed efforts to use the federal courts for broad-based equity or adequacy lawsuits.

But in recent years, scholars and litigators have advanced a range of new arguments for recognizing education as a right, to some degree or another, under the U.S. Constitution or under federal statutory law.

Can you say higher taxes???