Only one fourth-grader at a school in California can read at grade
level; now a lawsuit claiming the state is violating students’ ‘constitutional
right to literacy’ is on verge of moving to trial
LA
School Report: 7.18.2018
by Esmeralda Fabián Romero
Can
a school in California where only one fourth-grader is able to read at grade
level be violating students’ constitutional guarantee to a basic education?
A
lawsuit could get the green light within days to move forward with its claim
that the state’s Department of Education is depriving low-income students equal
access to learn to read and write. The suit claims to be the
first in the United States to seek recognition of the constitutional
right to literacy.
Superior
Court Judge Yvette Palazuelos will rule by next Tuesday on the state’s petition
to dismiss the lawsuit. She heard both parties’ arguments last week in Los
Angeles.
A
similar suit in Michigan was dismissed earlier
this month by a federal judge who ruled that access to literacy is not a
fundamental right.
Ella
T. v. The State of California was
filed in Los Angeles in December 2017 on behalf of 10 students — mostly
low-income and students of color — attending three schools in three districts:
LA Unified’s La Salle Avenue Elementary, Van Buren Elementary School in the
Stockton Unified School District, and Children of Promise Preparatory Academy,
a charter school authorized by Inglewood Unified. Two advocacy organizations
are also plaintiffs: Los Angeles-based CADRE, a community-based
organization in South Los Angeles led by African-American and Latino parents of
children attending LA Unified schools, and Fathers & Families of San Joaquin in
Stockton.
The
lawsuit names as defendants the State of California, the State Board of
Education, the California Department of Education, and state Superintendent of
Public Instruction Tom Torlakson. READ
MORE >>
Should an Adequate Education Be a Fundamental Right?
EdWeek: 7.18.2018 by Robert Rothman
In
late June, a federal district court judge in Michigan dismissed a lawsuit
filed by Detroit parents that had charged that the decrepit conditions in
Detroit schools--overwhelmingly attended by students of color--violated
students' constitutional rights by denying them "access to literacy."
In their suit, lawyers for the parents argued that literacy is necessary to
function in higher education, the workforce, and democratic citizenship, but
that the state denied them the opportunity to develop those necessary skills by
maintaining schools that were "schools in name only, characterized by
slum-like conditions and lacking the most basic educational opportunities that
children elsewhere in Michigan and throughout the nation take for
granted." READ
MORE >>
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