Like the Energizer Bunny, radical egalitarians just keep on going and going no matter how futile their utopian schemes and all the wasted money. This is particularly true in education where levelers are convinced that they can coerce government to ensure that everybody — regardless of race, sex, ethnicity or whatever — can be all (and equally) academically proficient.
This misguided passion has existed for decades, but for the last forty years it has entailed going to court to demand judges direct schools with large disadvantaged population to dramatically up spending to achieve the equality supposedly required by the state’s constitution. An organization called the Education Law Center (ELC), for example, has a national network of lawyers to sue states plus workshops to bring lawyers together to promote their egalitarian agenda. They have been active in every state, and while the ELC may have had notable legal victories, whether these legal wins have accomplished much beyond bloating educational budgets is debatable.
One would think that in today’s troubled time when governments struggle to provide basic services, these egalitarians would go on vacation and wait for a more plentiful era to launch their utopian schemes. In fact, it is estimated that as a result of the virus, states will cut some $57 billion in aid for local school budgets, a staggering amount considering how cities themselves are hurting financially.
The egalitarian passion was recently illustrated in Michigan, where plaintiffs (technically a group of students) revived an ongoing class-action lawsuit (Gary B. v. Whitmer) in which they claimed that Detroit’s dreadful schools (see here for grim details) had denied them a “minimum education” and this denial violated their constitutional right to literacy. In particular, their schools provided inadequate teaching in unsafe, vermin-infested buildings. Happily for these students, the Sixth Circuit of Appeals agreed that they had, indeed, been denied a “fundamental right.” But this one decision hardly ends it — the case now returns to the federal district court to be relitigated. Yes, Detroit may be unable to pay its bills, but rest assured, if these students eventually win, city employees may lose their jobs and the city will continue to deteriorate, but Detroit’s disadvantaged youngster’s students will, supposedly, be academically proficient.
