This summer, a federal district court decision in Michigan dealing with the fundamental right to education and literacy grabbed national news for more than a week. Onlookers were seemingly shocked at how bad educational opportunities are in places like Detroit and that a federal district court would hold that there is no right to literacy.
A somewhat related case in Connecticut has gone almost entirely unnoticed. Last week, a federal judge reached almost the same exact conclusions as the judge in Michigan. The Connecticut judge held there was no federal fundamental right to education. The Supreme Court had foreclosed such a right in San Antonio v. Rodriguez, reasoned the judge. But plaintiffs had argued that San Antonio had left open the possibility of a right to a minimally adequate education. The district court responded:
In Rodriguez, the Supreme Court did not leave the door open for federal courts to recognize a fundamental right to a minimally adequate education. To the contrary, the Court rejected the idea of a fundamental right to education, without parsing how effective or adequate the education might be, because such a right is not guaranteed in the Constitution. Moreover, in Plyler, the Court cited Rodriguez’s holding for that proposition.
On that score, I think the court is wrong and conflating the distinction between a fundamental right to education and a fundamental right to a minimally adequate education. A minimally adequate education raises a host of different questions and rationales. The district court did not address them. Scholars, however, have, and no Supreme Court cases has rejected those possibilities. To the contrary, it has left them open. My recent work, in painstaking detail, lays out the historical basis for recognizing such a right or something similar to it. But I warned that if the best argument plaintiffs had in these cases was "Rodriguez leaves open the issue," they would be in trouble. They need an affirmative explanation for courts to go out on a limb. I believe I offer that affirmative explanation. But that is another story.