That’s what seven students in Detroit have done. Their class-action suit filed against the state of Michigan asserts that education is a basic right, and that they have been denied it.

Usually, such education-equity cases wend their way through state courts, as all 50 state constitutions mandate public-education systems, while the country’s guiding document doesn’t even include the word education. But this case, Gary B. v. Snyder, was filed in federal court, and thus seeks to invoke the Constitution. And as of this week, it’s headed to the federal appeals court in Cincinnati.

The lawyers filing the suit—from the pro bono Los Angeles firm Public Counsel—contend that the students (who attend five of Detroit’s lowest-performing schools) are receiving an education so inferior and underfunded that it’s as if they’re not attending school at all. The 100-page-plus complaint alleges that the state of Michigan (which has overseen Detroit’s public schools for nearly two decades) is depriving these children—97 percent of whom are students of color—of their constitutional rights to liberty and nondiscrimination by denying them access to basic literacy. Almost all the students at these schools perform well below grade level in reading and writing, and, the suit argues, those skills are necessary to function properly in society. It’s the first case to argue that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to become literate (and thus to be educated) because other rights in the Constitution necessarily require the ability to read.

The case is a long shot. Late last week, the district-court judge in Detroit, Stephen J. Murphy, dismissed it. (The plaintiffs are appealing that dismissal.) Murphy essentially stated that he needed guidance from the Supreme Court if he were to weigh in on whether the students’ abysmal proficiency levels and learning conditions amount to a violation of the Constitution. He also concluded that the suit makes too many hard-to-prove causal claims. Even though Michigan subjects the predominantly black Detroit students to conditions to which it doesn’t subject, say, the predominantly white students of nearby Grosse Pointe, Murphy wrote, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that the state is treating the former group differently because of their race and thus violating the equal-protection clause. Another obstacle: The federal judiciary has grown particularly restrained on educational-rights issues in recent decades, in part because of the backlash from parents and others opposed to integration efforts that followed the wave of school-desegregation rulings in the 1970s and ’80s.

The fact that a suit like Gary B. v. Snyder was even filed says a lot about the state of education in the United States today. The case is indicative of a new chapter in American education in which advocates, frustrated with persistent achievement gaps and glaring disparities in school quality despite efforts to combat those problems, are resorting to unconventional means to bring about change. Similar to the recent wave of teachers’ strikes , the lawyers behind Gary B. v. Snyder seek to interrupt what the plaintiffs and their supporters argue is a status quo of educational unfairness not only in Detroit, but also across the country.

The lawyers behind Gary B. v. Snyder sought recourse through the federal system, explained Kristi Bowman, an education-law scholar at Michigan State University who cowrote an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, because Michigan’s courts have generally refused to take on education-rights cases. That’s largely because the language on education in its constitution is even more vague and limited than that in the constitutions of many other states, some of whose courts have been very active in adjudicating suits about how schools are funded. States including Arkansas and Delaware, for example, constitutionally require the provision of “general” or “efficient” education, while states such as Colorado and Idaho stipulate that education be “thorough” or “uniform.” A few states, like Virginia, mention quality. And one state—Montana—guarantees “equality of educational opportunity” for all its residents. It also requires in its statutes that all schools provide a sound foundation for literacy in kids’ early years.

In Michigan, though, children’s right to education is simply about access—schools essentially only need to be in operation for that right to be fulfilled—rather than about “education of a particular level or quality,” said Bowman, who also serves as MSU’s vice dean for academic affairs. As Matthew Patrick Shaw, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, put it, Michigan’s constitution contains “no aspiration to high quality, no aspiration to efficiency.”

So, the plaintiffs in Gary B. v. Snyder decided to argue, as Bowman put it, that “what’s happening [in the Detroit schools] fell so far below any unacceptable level of education that it does violate the federal Constitution,” in the sense that, “If someone is functionally illiterate—unable to read at grade level—then how we can expect them to meaningfully engage in the rest of their explicit constitutional rights?” She went on, “How can we expect them to meaningfully participate in our government and exercise the right to vote and the right to free speech if their ability to obtain information and evaluate that information is so limited because the public schools that they attended did not even give them an opportunity to become literate?”

In his opinion explaining why he dismissed the case, Judge Murphy acknowledged that literacy is integral to one’s well-being—that, as the late Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan once wrote in his opinion on a related educational-access case, “illiteracy is an enduring disability.” Yet Murphy concluded in his analysis that the due-process guarantee to life, liberty, and property does not “demand that a state affirmatively provide each child with a defined, minimum level of education by which the child can attain literacy.” Without that clarity, he was reluctant to assert that the right to literacy exists—let alone that the state violated it.

Murphy’s opinion may be right in a narrow sense, but some legal scholars I talked to said that he could have approached the subject more broadly. Murphy concluded that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the state treated the given Detroit schools differently than it did others. But given that the students lack access to qualified teachers, to tolerable facilities, and to materials that support their learning—conditions that are far less common in predominantly white districts in the state—Murphy ignored the “strong racialized component, some of which has been engineered by the state,” that has contributed to these disparities, said Vanderbilt’s Shaw, who’s also an assistant professor of law. He added, “It has ignored the role that the states have played in creating these very systems,” noting that more prosperous school districts don’t need special assistance now because their neighborhoods were allowed by the government to develop differently.

“The court’s premise … ignores everything we all know about how endemic racism is—and has always been—in metro Detroit’s housing and employment patterns, and the role the state has had in allowing school districts to assign, hire, fund, and operate in reliance on these patterns,” Shaw argued. The decision to dismiss the case, he went on, “does not incorporate this very relevant history in any meaningful way, articulating instead a set of seemingly ‘neutral’ criteria to evaluate what it knows to be a very non-neutral, complex, and context-rich set of educational-rights questions.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36377875)

The horror of an algebra textbook from 1996.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36382224)

you tell me

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36382366)

He also wore (what appeared to be) the same shirt every day and apparently stopped publishing immediately upon being granted tenure in the 70s.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36384905)

We are pulling more fake rights out of thin air!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36382234)

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-henderson-hopkins-20170322-story.html

News Opinion Editorial

The hard lessons of Henderson-Hopkins

Henderson-Hopkins school's challenging start

Parent Crystal Jordan talks about the challenges Henderson-Hopkins has faced since opening in 2014. (Baltimore Sun video by Lloyd Fox)

The parents who believe things would be different at the Henderson-Hopkins school if it were in Roland Park rather than East Baltimore are absolutely right. It would have been much easier to achieve the model of economic and racial integration the school's founders were aiming for if it were located in an affluent neighborhood rather than a poor one — for evidence, look no further than the actual school in Roland Park, which is both among the most diverse in the city in terms of race and socio-economics and among its top performers academically.

The idea behind Henderson-Hopkins — a joint effort of Johns Hopkins University and Morgan State University — was to create a truly integrated school in the East Baltimore Development Initiative footprint that would serve both the children of area residents and of Hopkins staff. The benefits of that kind of diversity are well documented, helping children from poorer families and wealthier ones alike and erasing the gaps in achievement between the two groups. The new school was designed to offer innovative architecture and models of instruction to provide the best opportunities for all.

But, as The Sun's Liz Bowie documents in the second part of the paper's series on segregation in Baltimore's schools, those good intentions ran up against some hard realities. It's not that Hopkins staff members didn't want to send their kids to the school. They did. It's that parents in the community wanted it more.

A groundswell of need

It's not unusual for families who live near a new Baltimore school not to be able to send their kids there. Charter schools are almost universally filled by city-wide lotteries. But Henderson-Hopkins is different; it's technically a contract school, not a charter, and so it is allowed to set a priority system for admittance that includes both families from the immediate neighborhood, those who work in the area (whether for Hopkins or some other employer), and those who live in a larger catchment zone.

Struggles of new East Baltimore school show challenges of integration

But whether it was because of the beautiful new building in a poor neighborhood or the promise of innovative educational models and small class sizes, the notion that parents who live only a few blocks away can't send their kids to Henderson-Hopkins was a political non-starter, particularly for an institution like Hopkins that has historically had a fraught relationship with the communities around the hospital. A larger percentage of students than anticipated came from the surrounding communities, and the Hopkins staff members who chose to send their kids there and made it through the lottery tended to be lower-wage workers. Consequently, the school is about 90 percent African-American and poor. Rather than serving as a model, it has struggled with both academic performance and discipline, and officials at Hopkins and Morgan are in the midst of a restructuring effort that, in a best case scenario, will take several years to succeed.

Had Hopkins built a school near its Homewood campus, serving a base of middle class families that live in that part of the city and adding children from disadvantaged backgrounds who live other communities, it might more easily have achieved the kind of integration it sought. That things worked out differently in East Baltimore is not Hopkins' fault, nor that of the parents from surrounding neighborhoods who clamored to get their kids into the school. It's the fault of decades of racial segregation that robbed generations of poor, black Baltimore residents of the opportunities others take for granted. Even an effort as well resourced as this one was swamped by the magnitude of Baltimore's concentrated poverty.

The lesson here is not that the Hopkins-Morgan effort was foolish but that it cannot succeed in isolation. In order to work, it must be part of a comprehensive effort to improve educational opportunities for all city students and to erase the legacy of the segregated communities in which too many of us still live. There is at least some reason for optimism on both fronts.

Reasons for optimism

When Henderson-Hopkins opened, it was the first new school to be built in East Baltimore in more than two decades. Subsequently, a coalition of city officials, the ACLU and other advocates successfully persuaded the state to adopt a landmark, $1.1 billion plan to build or renovate more than two dozen schools city-wide.

Meanwhile, the city and state governments and the school system are working to end the cycle of perpetual budget shortfalls the district has faced in recent years. Key local and state officials have adopted the goal of providing the system with a bridge to the new state funding formula that is expected to be adopted in the next three years, which advocates hope will better account for the costs of educating children from disadvantaged backgrounds. That isn't yet a certainty, but it has been heartening to see the middle class parents across the city who have increasingly chosen to send their children to neighborhood schools in recent years engaging in the debate rather than perusing real estate listings in the suburbs.

As for racial segregation, the issue today is less about integrating majority-white neighborhoods, which have become more racially diverse over the years, than about socio-economic integration, regardless of race, in the inner city neighborhoods of East and West Baltimore. Hopkins is making progress in the area around the hospital. After a disappointingly slow start, the new housing in the EBDI area is starting to take off. Hopkins has provided generous incentives for its employees to move there, and new neighborhood amenities, including a bank, a pharmacy, a Starbucks and even a new fast-casual version of the Helmand, are helping draw new interest from home buyers. When a bloc of homes in the EBDI area went on the market, Hopkins bumped up its usual incentives for employees, and more than 50 sold in a matter of hours for prices ranging from $235,000-$300,000. The buyers were about equally mixed between blacks, whites and Asians. As more new housing comes on line in the area and the neighborhood itself diversifies, so too will the school.

Baltimore has had some success in helping residents impoverished inner-city neighborhoods to move to more affluent communities. The Baltimore Housing Mobility Program has helped thousands of families relocate, mainly to the suburbs, by offering higher-value vouchers and extensive counseling. But it stopped taking applicants this year as demand far outstripped the supply of its vouchers. The chance of an infusion of new cash looks slim under the Trump administration; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson (ironically enough, a former star neurosurgeon at Hopkins) has vocally opposed the agency's previous efforts to help end segregation.

But there is some hope in the form of legislation that passed the House of Delegates Monday that would prohibit landlords from discriminating against federal housing voucher holders. That won't solve the problem by itself, but it would at least make it possible for parents to move to neighborhoods where they (and especially their children) would have access to more opportunities. We urge the Senate to pass the legislation and Gov. Larry Hogan to sign it into law.

In the end, it shouldn't be surprising that Henderson-Hopkins didn't immediately succeed. It took decades of concerted effort by powerful political and economic interests to create the segregated landscape we know today, and it will take an equally concerted effort to reverse it. To their credit, officials at Hopkins and Morgan aren't walking away from the challenge, and neither should the rest of us.

Henderson-Hopkins

Pruitt leaves, but the environment gets no break

Copyright © 2018, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Place an Ad

Baltimore Housing

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36382240)

“At school, Gruwell intercepts a racist drawing by one of her high school students and utilizes it to teach them about the Holocaust, most of whom have no knowledge of. She gradually begins to earn their trust and buys them composition books to record their diaries, in which they talk about their experiences of being abused, seeing their friends die, and being evicted. Determined to reform her high school students, Gruwell takes on two part-time jobs to pay for more books and spends a lot more time at school, much to the disappointment of her husband (Patrick Dempsey). Her students start to behave with respect and discover a lot more. A transformation is specifically visible in one student, Marcus (Jason Finn). Gruwell invites various Jewish Holocaust survivors to talk with her class about their experiences and requires the students to attend a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36385894)

lol

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36390111)

Until these kids parents show exactly what they are doing with the kids every day for their lives up to this point, I refuse to accept mo money fo dem programs as the andwer.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36384923)

I know how much my kids teachers get paid. Every single one could get an extra $5 grand by switching to public school. They don't.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36385283)

Teacher turnover is a massive problem that leads to shortages. Many of the people graduating with teacher training won't teach for more than 2 years. Rich white districts have no problem finding great, qualified teachers to staff their classrooms. Poor minority districts do.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36384156)

libs: that's racist!

===

libs' pleading: our urban public school is sps and churns out illiterate grads!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36382329)

https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/detroit-schools-spend-more-educate-less-than-other-us-urban-districts

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36384089)

http://gesu.com/tuition/

This one charges $3,000, plus fees.

http://holyredeemer-school.net/admissionsandenrollment.html

Just imagine what hellholes they must be.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4019617&forum_id=2#36389755)