Desperate for change, Detroit students pin hope on lawsuit against state
Claims of constitutional right to be educated
Jamarria Hall’s Detroit high school reminded him of a state prison: chains on the doors, disgusting food and dirty water, bathroom stalls without doors. No computers, tablets or SMART Boards. The few books he saw in the school were older than he was.
“‘Is this really a school? Like, this has to be a movie,’ ” Hall thought. “People were getting set up to fail.”
The 2017 graduate of Osborn High School in Detroit said he had the highest SAT score in his class: a 930, not high enough to get into college.
Desperate for change, students from five of Detroit’s worst-performing public schools – including Osborn – sued the state of Michigan in 2016, saying they had a constitutional right to be educated. Literacy, the argument goes, is necessary for voting, accessing the courts and serving in the military.
Their argument failed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, but they’re appealing. They feel they have no other choice.
When Hall was in high school, Detroit’s schools – essentially bankrupt – were run by state-appointed emergency managers as part of a bailout. The new superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, who is starting his second year, agrees with Hall’s assessment.
The school system wasn’t receiving enough money from the state, so teachers weren’t trained in how to teach to current education standards, Vitti said. The curriculum was inappropriate for each grade level and was outdated.
Only 10 percent of students are reading at grade level. The school district needs $500 million to update its crumbling schools, and the district’s financial structure post-bailout only allocated $25 million to spend on such endeavors.
That wouldn’t be allowed at suburban schools, Vitti said. In other words, he said, “racist” policies created the mess at Detroit’s public schools – a mess he’s trying to fix, although with a limited budget.
Hall knew other students had it better, even students in metro Detroit.
“Grosse Pointe is right across the city border line. Right across,” said Hall, describing a well-to-do suburb. “iPad, tablet, SMART Boards everywhere. Their floor is glossy. Glossy clean. There’s no metal detector, no security guard. And it’s right across the border line.”
He himself had experienced better schools, as a child growing up in California and at charter schools he had attended in the Detroit area. Hall and his classmates wrote letters to Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, at the suggestion of their teachers.
“We never heard a response,” Hall said. “It really makes me very angry. Why, like, why is this happening to us? They really just don’t care.”
Snyder and Michigan’s Department of Education declined to comment for this story. In court, they have argued the Constitution doesn’t guarantee a right to literacy.
The suit, they say, asks the court to “peer over the shoulder” of teachers and school administrators. By siding with students, the court would be “dictating educational policy in every school district and school building throughout the United States where an illiterate child may be found.”
The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that education is not an equal right under the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. But other U.S. Supreme Court cases have said states have the responsibility to provide some kind of education.