How Do You Get Better Schools? Take the State to Court, More Advocates Say
But their success, Mr. Cruz-Guzman said, flows partly from the fact that he and his wife fought for their children to attend racially integrated schools outside their neighborhood. Their two youngest children take a bus 30 minutes each way to Murray Middle School, where the student population is about one-third white, one-third black, 16 percent Asian and 9 percent Latino.
“I wanted to have my kids exposed to different cultures and learn from different people,” said Mr. Cruz-Guzman, who owns a small flooring company and is an immigrant from Mexico. When his two oldest children briefly attended a charter school that was close to 100 percent Latino, he said he had realized, “We are limiting our kids to one community.”
Now Mr. Cruz-Guzman is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit saying that Minnesota knowingly allowed towns and cities to set policies and zoning boundaries that led to segregated schools, lowering test scores and graduation rates for low-income and nonwhite children. Last month, the state’s Supreme Court ruled the suit could move forward, in a decision advocates across the country hailed as important.
The case is part of a wave of lawsuits over the quality of schools in more than a half-dozen states. The suits could serve as road maps for advocates in other states amid a nationwide teachers’ movement and a push in some state legislatures for more school funding.
The legal complaints have different areas of focus — from school funding to segregation to literacy — but all of them argue that the states are violating their constitutions by denying children a quality education.
Such lawsuits were filed in past decades, but the recent cases show a renewed energy for using the courts to fight for better education, and they may signal an end to a period when many courts, after the last recession, seemed unwilling to require states to spend more money on schools.
“The courthouse doors are in effect open again,” said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, which has argued school funding cases in New Jersey and has filed amicus briefs in several of the current cases. “What we’re seeing are the beginnings of a broader conversation about what the right to an education should look like.”
Advocates are focused on state courts because of roadblocks at the federal level: A 1973 Supreme Court decision found that unequal school funding was not a violation of the United States Constitution, which does not Continue Reading: How Do You Get Better Schools? Take the State to Court, More Advocates Say - The New York Times