Rhode Islanders can’t exercise their constitutional rights because they’ve been denied an adequate education, according to a federal class-action lawsuit filed this week.
“The 14 plaintiffs in Cook v. Raimondo, all public-school students or parents on behalf of their children, accuse the state of Rhode Island of providing an education so inferior that the state has failed to fulfill its duties under the U.S. Constitution,” reports Alia Wong in The Atlantic.
“There is no explicit guarantee of education in the Constitution,” notes Wong. In the 1973 Rodriguez case, the U.S. Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote, ruled that “the equal-protection clause couldn’t be used to challenge school-financing formulas.”
Michael Rebell, the lead counsel on the Rhode Island case and an education-law professor at Columbia’s Teachers College, told Wong why he thinks a federal case can succeed.
. . . lawyers for the plaintiffs identified in Rhode Island’s education system a perfect case study for the modern-day challenges dogging public schools across the country—significant socioeconomic inequality and wide achievement gaps, for example, and a steadily growing population of immigrants, many of them Latino. (The number of Latinos in the state has tripled since 1990; they’re expected to make up 14 percent of the population by 2032.) Rhode Island has some of the worst segregation in the country: One in five schools is at least 90 percent white, while more than one in 10 is at least 90 percent students of color. The way Rebell describes it, the state has failed to support the needs of students who are learning English as a second language, a failure that he argues prevents them from exercising their constitutional rights.
“It occurred to me that you really need the basics of being able to speak English,” Rebell told me earlier this year, “and that [in a place like Rhode Island], you have a long ways to go if you want to say you’re preparing all kids for capable citizenship.”
The lawsuit also stresses the state’s failure to teach civics, writes Wong. “Like many states, Rhode Island’s social-studies policy is vague; there is neither a required civics course nor a required American-history curriculum.”
The Rhode Island lawsuit potentially affects more students than Gary B. v. Snyder, which “accuses the state of Michigan of violating the Constitution by denying students in Detroit the opportunity to become literate,” writes Wong.