Rhode Island lawsuit: Students sue for the right to learn civics – By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo (The Christian Science Monitor) / Dec 12 2019
Is access to education a right guaranteed by the Constitution? A federal case in Rhode Island, brought by parents and students, tests the ideals of equal opportunity and participatory democracy.
Last Thursday, the same morning that Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the U.S. House of Representatives would draft articles of impeachment, a federal judge began considering another matter with deep implications for the democracy: whether students have a constitutional right to an adequate public education to prepare them for civic life.
As lawyers argued over moving forward to trial, dozens of teenagers crammed the gallery of the U.S. District Court here, with lead plaintiff Aleita Cook, a recent graduate of a Providence high school, observing from one of the armchairs normally reserved for a jury.
Fourteen named plaintiffs – students and parents – filed the class-action lawsuit, Cook (A.C.) v. Raimondo, against Gov. Gina Raimondo and other state officials last year. It argues that Rhode Island violates students’ constitutional rights by leaving many of them without key skills and knowledge to exercise such basic civic responsibilities as voting or jury duty.
If they win, the case could go down in history as the Brown v. Board of Education for their generation.
It goes to the heart of the relationship between education and the success of the American experiment. Like other fights over educational fairness, the plaintiffs root it in the struggle for civil rights and the nation’s long reach toward ideals of equal opportunity and participatory democracy.
“What I’ve learned as far as civics is, I guess kind of the presidents,” Ms. Cook says after the hearing. “I didn’t learn my voting rights through school,” she says. Nor was she taught about the balancing roles of the three branches of government.
Continue to article: https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2019/1212/Rhode-Island-lawsuit-Students-sue-for-the-right-to-learn-civics
