When Parents Sue the Government for Their Children's Right to Learn
When Parents Sue the Government for Their Children's Right to Learn
Across the United States, parents and students are walking into federal courtrooms and making a radical claim: that the Constitution, however silent on education explicitly, cannot be faithfully upheld while leaving their children without access to a basic, equitable, and meaningful public education. Three recent federal lawsuits make this argument with particular urgency, and their stories reveal something important about the state of American democracy and who gets to participate in it.
The Problem: States Are Failing, and Federal Law Is Silent
Under the Tenth Amendment, education has always been a state responsibility. But what happens when states fail systematically, deliberately, and over generations to provide children with even the most basic educational resources? That was the question at the heart of Gary B. v. Whitmer in Michigan, A.C. by Waithe v. McKee in Rhode Island, and Haymer/Williams et al. v. Reeves in Mississippi. In each case, parents and students turned to the federal courts after exhausting other options. They came not as legal strategists testing a theory, but as moral agents who knew, with clarity and conviction, that what was happening to their children was wrong and that someone with authority needed to say so.
Detroit students, the majority African American, were sitting in schools without textbooks, with crumbling infrastructure, and teacher vacancy rates that left classrooms unstaffed for weeks. Rhode Island students were graduating without the civic knowledge needed to vote, serve on a jury, or understand the laws that governed their lives. Mississippi students, most of them African American and low-income, were attending schools so under-resourced that one parent described the building as needing to be torn down, the same building the mother had attended as a child decades earlier.
Although Michigan's lawsuit ended in a $94.4 million settlement in 2020, Rhode Island's claims were dismissed on constitutional grounds and in 2022 Rhode Island agreed to improve the quality of civics education, and Mississippi's case has stalled under the weight of sovereign immunity and jurisdictional constraints, the educational injustices that compelled these families into federal court have not been resolved, and in many communities, they have only deepened.
What the Research Reveals
First, parents and students in all three cases entered federal courts with a deep moral conviction that the Constitution guarantees their children the right to an education, even where the law has not yet caught up with that conviction. Second, the educational harms documented in these cases are not recent failures or isolated policy mistakes. They are the result of deliberate, structurally embedded exclusions compounded across historical and policy contexts. For example, in Mississippi's case, the educational harms could be traced directly to the state's 1890 constitutional convention, convened explicitly to disenfranchise African Americans. Third, in all three cases, parents and students looked to federal courts not as a last resort but as a constitutional expectation, the institution charged with holding states accountable when they fail their most vulnerable students. And fourth, at the center of every case is a recurring tension that American education law has never resolved: when states govern education inequitably, does the federal Constitution require intervention? The courts have consistently declined to say yes, and that silence has consequences.
The Stakes
Judge William Smith, who dismissed the Rhode Island case on constitutional grounds, did not leave quietly. In his ruling, he described the students' lawsuit not as a legal overreach but as "a cry for help from a generation of young people" and added his own voice to their plea, calling on those with the power to act to respond. That a federal judge dismissed a case while simultaneously endorsing its underlying moral argument captures the core problem these lawsuits expose: the gap between what parents and students know their children deserve and what the law currently compels anyone to provide.
None of these cases produced a definitive legal victory. But together they have elevated national conversations about literacy, civic education, and the constitutional limits of state power over public education, conversations that policymakers can no longer afford to treat as abstract.
What Can We Advocate For
The legal record is clear: when states are left as the sole arbiters of educational equity, too many children, disproportionately African American and low-income, are left behind. My research points to four priority actions. Federal recognition of education as a constitutionally protected right would establish a baseline that no state could fall below. Strengthened Title I funding and oversight by the Office of Civil Rights would give that baseline teeth. State constitutional amendments explicitly guaranteeing equitable and adequate education would create enforceable protections at the state level. And accessible legal pathways for communities to challenge inequitable education policies would ensure that accountability does not depend solely on expensive, uncertain federal litigation.
The parents and students in these three cases did not give up on American democracy; they went to court to defend it. The least policymakers can do is meet them there.
Do American Students Have a Right to Education? Implications for Black Students and Their Right to Learn
Drawing on federal lawsuits brought by families in Michigan, Mississippi, and Rhode Island, this brief examines state accountability and the fight for a constitutional right to learn, offering actionable policy recommendations for federal and state leaders.
Behind the Brief with Dr. Rhodesia McMillian
In this short video, Dr. McMillian examines three federal lawsuits brought largely by Black families and students in Michigan, Rhode Island, and Mississippi. Dr. McMillian identifies what these cases reveal about trust, accountability, and the future of American students’ right to learn.
About the Series
From Possibility to Praxis: Reclaiming the Power of Reflection and Action in Black Education. This series features the work of our inaugural cohort of BERC Research Fellows - a distinguished cadre of mid-career educational leadership and policy scholars from across the country dedicated to strengthening Black education through relevant research and policy advocacy.
About the Author
Rhodesia McMillian, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Education Policy at The Ohio State University's College of Education and Human Ecology, where her scholarship sits at the intersection of education law, policy discourse, and the constitutional dimensions of schooling for African American students. Drawing on her original theoretical framework, Discursive Violence Analysis (DVA), Dr. McMillian examines how federal, state, and local education policies deploy language and legal structures to legitimize racial and institutional harm in K–12 public education.
Her current work centers on constitutional right-to-education litigation across U.S. circuit courts, interrogating how judicial and legislative discourse constructs and forecloses educational access for African American students and students with disabilities. This work is supported by a Spencer Foundation Equity Grant.
Dr. McMillian earned her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri–Columbia and brings distinguished practitioner experience as a former autism specialist and school psychologist. She is an Education Law Association (ELA) Early Career Scholar, a Policy Research Fellow at the Black Education Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a faculty fellow in OSU's College of Education and Human Ecology Qualitative Lab (QualLab).