CURMUDGUCATION: MI: Court Says Students Deserve Actual Education

CURMUDGUCATION: MI: Court Says Students Deserve Actual Education

MI: Court Says Students Deserve Actual Education

Periodically the courts get involved in the question of what states are actually supposed to provide. Back in 2017 a case went all the way to the Supremes that was designed (no case gets before SCOTUS without being carefully prepared and selected and curated by a bunch of Major Players) to get at the question of how hard a district had to work on that whole IEP thing-- how much education is "enough"? SCOTUS rejected a low bar for students with disabilities, a decision that shored up IDEA (and which may be weighing on some minds as schools try to solve the problems of crisis education at a distance).

But Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District was about IEPs in Colorado. Other cases have been less encouraging.

Way back in 2014, the court of appeals in Michigan ruled that the state's obligation to educate students didn't mean that the state had to, you know, actually educate anybody. As long as they spent some number of dollars on something called education, that was good enough. That suit involved the Highland Park school district, a part of greater Detroit's school system, and in 2012 it was handed over to the Leona Group to operate as a charter. The charter operator's promptly ran up a deficit and were taken to court to answer for doing a lousy job of educating students. It was at that point that the court said, "Nah, as long as they are running a building called a 'school' and offering 'classes' in it, it doesn't matter if they suck." So much for charter school accountability in Michigan. The state supreme court refused to hear the case.

In 2016, some Detroit students tried again, and that started out poorly, with the state (under CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: MI: Court Says Students Deserve Actual Education