Are schools that fail to teach children to read violating their Constitutional rights?

The 14th Amendment has been used to secure civil rights for a multitude of groups. But does it give children a constitutional right to literacy? Is it the government’s responsibility to adequately fund schools, so students learn what they need to reach appropriate reading levels?

In the Detroit public school system, it was recently found that only 7 percent of its 8th grade students were proficient in reading. So in 2016, a group of lawyers filed a federal civil rights claim against the city’s school system. In this episode of Asked and Answered, the ABA Journal’s Stephanie Francis Ward discusses the lawsuit with Carter Phillips, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs.

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