Hi!
This week I want to discuss an issue in the Detroit community that is of interest to me because I am passionate about the state of educational inequality in this country. I have linked the article to the end of this blog post and strongly encourage everyone to read it and more reflective articles about the issue in addition to this particular case!
Essentially, a Federal District Court judge in Michigan recently dismissed a class-action lawsuit that was filed by 7 students from Detroit. They were suing Michigan’s current governor, Rick Snyder (R), on the grounds that they claimed the state is not providing a fundamental right to literacy for the students attempting to seek their education from the district. They are now taking this to the federal appeals court in Cincinnati.
The students’ lawyers outlined issues in the district that are leading to the failure to properly educate its students, many of which are related to the environment the students are in, and the state argued that there is not a fundamental right to literacy. Since this was the state’s argument, therefore they said it is not the state’s obligation to provide this right to the students in Detroit.
With this case having been dismissed, I fear that the outcome will have wide-reaching implications across the country, particularly for the provision of education among the poorest Americans. This dismissal has answered the question that we all had: what is the state’s role in providing equitable and valuable education to its students? Apparently, it does not have to have one.
This article peaks my interest because it is the summation of a dialogue about education in Detroit that I have been following for a long time. With this decision by the Michigan judge, students may or may not have a fundamental right to literacy, but regardless, state-funded public schools are not obligated to guarantee those rights. It is clear from statistical data that racial and socioeconomic segregation continues to persist nationwide in America’s public schools, and this decision will do absolutely nothing to combat that in Detroit or anywhere else if the decision cannot be appealed.
I completely agree when the students began their complaint by reflecting that literacy is “fundamental to participation in public and private life and is the core component in the American tradition of education.” Schooling is required by law for all children until they are 18, so one would assume that the value of that schooling is being guaranteed by their state. I believe the demands of quality education that resembles the more successful school districts outside of Detroit are supported by the U.S. Constitution.
This document that we founded our country with has been amended to expect that the state provide the same education for all students it serves. To bring a bit of history into it, in the Supreme Court case involving undocumented immigrant children’s right to education Plyler v. Doe, it was determined that, “the exclusion of a discrete group of children from the ability to attain literacy necessary to participate in college and career, and as citizens in our democracy, is incompatible with the guarantees of liberty and equality enshrined in the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
It made me angry to read this article and the Judge’s remarks about this case because the 14th amendment assures equal protection under the law. Considering the education system is such a fundamental pillar of our country, not to mention it is a government run institution, it is deplorable that it refuses to provide adequate service to our states’ most vulnerable population in the city of Detroit.
Unfortunately, I anticipated this would be the decision- that students in Detroit do not have a fundamental right to literacy- because the Governor’s office said earlier this year that that is what they believe. I can only hope that when the students and their lawyers try to get this appealed, there will be more publicity on the issue so it will be clearer to the public how the systematic racism in our country begins at such an early age, and how vital it is as a country to fight this injustice.
I am extremely frustrated that the blameless children in the Detroit public school district, who are “scoring lower in test scores for reading and math than all of the other 26 urban school districts”, are subjected to the bureaucratic dilemmas that the judge faced. Judge Murphy actually agreed that state officials (Governor Snyder!) are responsible in at least some part for the district’s quality of education.
Literacy is so important as it prepares a student for a life of actively voting, applying for a job or a house, filling out medical papers, and so many other vital parts of our society. Despite all of this, the politics getting in the way of Detroit children’s liberty is that “these points do not necessarily make access to literacy a fundamental right.”
My response to that is simple: if a skill that is required for a decent quality of life is being institutionally denied, it should be a violation of human rights.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/07/no-right-become-literate/564545/
Thank you so much for reading, please let me know your thoughts!
Kind regards,
Scarlett Bickerton
