# ‘access To Literacy’ Is Not A Constitutional Right, Judge In Detroit Rules



## Crackers Phinn (Sep 10, 2018)

* ‘Access to Literacy’ Is Not a Constitutional Right, Judge in Detroit Rules*
Do students at poorly performing schools have a constitutional right to a better education?

On Friday, a Federal District Court judge in Michigan decided that they did not when he dismissed a class-action lawsuit filed by students at troubled schools in Detroit.

The suit, filed in September 2016, argued that students at some of the city’s most underperforming schools — serving mostly racial minorities — had been denied “access to literacy” because of underfunding, mismanagement and discrimination.

The complaint described schools that were overcrowded with students but lacking in teachers; courses without basic resources like books and pencils; and classrooms that were bitingly cold in the winter, stiflingly hot in the summer and infested with rats and insects.

Conditions like those, the lawsuit said, contributed to dismal test scores and left students woefully underprepared for life after high school.

“The abysmal conditions and appalling outcomes in plaintiffs’ schools are unprecedented,” the complaint said. “And they would be unthinkable in schools serving predominantly white, affluent student populations.”

The lawsuit, which a lawyer for the plaintiffs said was the first of its kind at the federal level, named Michigan officials including Gov. Rick Snyder as defendants because the state had played an outsize role in managing Detroit’s schools while the school district, and the city, struggled with a lack of resources.
In his decision on Friday dismissing the suit, Judge Stephen J. Murphy III said that “*access to literacy” — which he also referred to as a “minimally adequate education” — was not a fundamental right*. And he said the lawsuit had failed to show that the state had practiced overt racial discrimination.

But he conceded that the conditions at some Detroit schools were “nothing short of devastating.”

Full story here
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/education/detroit-public-schools-education.html


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## UmSumayyah (Sep 10, 2018)

*sigh*


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## MzRhonda (Sep 10, 2018)

Going back to pre Brown vs Board of Ed ..... we have the schools but not the same and quality tools.


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## Everything Zen (Sep 10, 2018)

As I feel my blood pressure rise all I can say is- Elections have consequences.


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## Everything Zen (Sep 11, 2018)

Then that same judge will be calling these kids animals and savages blaming them when they’re illiterate, unemployable and complaining when they become “a drain on society” and engage in self-destructive behavior bc they can’t access opportunities to better themselves.


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## ItsMeLilLucky (Sep 11, 2018)

He must be yt or lost.


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## brownb83 (Sep 11, 2018)

Nothing will change in Detroit until they push all the blacks out and it’s a white city again. 

I graduated from Redford ( now a meijer) and every person I graduated with ( that went to the same college as me) had to take basic classes the first year of college. 

A”s in a Detroit public school is a C everywhere else. Now the question is what is a C or below?

It’s frustrating. Meanwhile whites are moving in so fast in Downtown the city can’t keep up.


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## RoundEyedGirl504 (Sep 11, 2018)

Well the erosion of public education along with the widening gap between the haves and have nots has been in the pipeline, now they are just laying the legal foundation to keep the momentum going.


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## MzRhonda (Sep 11, 2018)

Everything Zen said:


> Then that same judge will be calling these kids animals and savages blaming them when they’re illiterate, unemployable and complaining when they become “a drain on society” and engage in self-destructive behavior bc they can’t access opportunities to better themselves.


and sentencing them to long jail terms.


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