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The right to education

Introducing articles 28 and 29.

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The Right to an Education is one of the most important principles in becoming a Rights Respecting School.

Education is a key social and cultural right and plays an important role in reducing poverty and child labour. Furthermore, education promotes democracy, peace, tolerance, development and economic growth. There are a number of articles in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child  that focus on a child’s right to education.

Articles 28 and 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child

Articles 28 and 29 focus on a child’s right to an education and on the quality and content of education.  Article 28 says that “State Parties recognise the right of children to education” and “should take all appropriate measures to ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity.” Article 29 focuses on the aims of education and says that governments agree that “the education of the child shall be directed to:

• The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential.
• The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.
• The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate and for civilisations different from his or her own.
• The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin.
• The development of respect for the natural environment.

The 1990 World Declaration on Education for All  described education as consisting of essential learning tools such as literacy, numeracy and problem solving combined with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes required by human beings to survive, develop potential, to improve the quality of their lives, to make informed decisions and to continue learning.

General Comment on the aims of education

In 2001, the  Committee on the Rights of the Child , the body of experts that monitors the implementation of the Convention, published a paper (called a General Comment) that explained and elaborated on the right to education.

The General Comment 1 on the aims of education provides a very clear overview of what the right to education means in practice. It said that:

• Education must be child-centred and empowering. This applies to the curriculum as well as the educational processes, the pedagogical methods and the environment where education takes place.
• Education must be provided in a way that respects the inherent dignity of the child and enables the child to express his or her views in accordance with article 12 (1) and to participate in school life.
• Education must respect the strict limits on discipline reflected in article 28 and promote non-violence in school.
• Education must include not only literacy and numeracy but also life skills such as the ability to make well-balanced decisions; to resolve conflicts in a non‑violent manner; and to develop a healthy lifestyle, good social relationships and responsibility, critical thinking, creative talents, and other abilities which give children the tools needed to pursue their options in life.

It’s important to remember that the  Convention must be seen as a whole  and so articles 28 and 29 should not be looked at or considered in isolation. Particular regard should be paid to the General Principles and other closely related articles for example: article 16 : protection of privacy, article 24 health (including health education), article 31 rest, leisure, play, recreation and culture.

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Right to education handbook.

Education is a fundamental human right of every woman, man and child. In states’ efforts to meet their commitments to making the right to education a reality for all, most have made impressive progress in recent decades. With new laws and policies that remove fees in basic education, significant progress has been made in advancing free education. This has led to tens of millions of children enrolling for the first time and the number of out of school children and adolescents falling by almost half since 2000. Important steps have also been taken with regard to gender parity and states have made efforts to raise the quality of education through improved teacher policies and a growing emphasis on learning outcomes. 

Despite these efforts, breaches of the right to education persist worldwide, illustrated perhaps most starkly by the fact that 262 million primary and secondary-aged children and youth are still out of school. Girls, persons with disabilities, those from disadvantaged backgrounds or rural areas, indigenous persons, migrants and national minorities are among those who face the worst discrimination, affecting both their right to go to school and their rights within schools.

To respond to the challenges, the Right to Education Initiative (RTE) with UNESCO have developed this handbook to guide action on ensuring full compliance with the right to education. Its objective is not to present the right to education as an abstract, conceptual, or purely legal concept, but rather to be action-oriented. The handbook will also be an important reference for those working towards the achievement of SDG4, by offering guidance on how to leverage legal commitment to the right to education as a strategic way to achieve this goal. 

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Is Education a Fundamental Right?

By Jill Lepore

Before sunrise on a morning just after Labor Day, 1977, Humberto and Jackeline Alvarez, Felix Hernandez, Rosario and Jose Robles, and Lidia and Jose Lopez huddled together in the basement of the United States Courthouse in Tyler, Texas , the Rose City, to decide just how much they were willing to risk for the sake of their children, for the sake of other people’s children, and for the sake, really, of everyone. Among them, the Alvarezes, Hernandez, the Robleses, and the Lopezes had sixteen children who, the week before, had been barred from entering Tyler’s public schools by order of James Plyler, Tyler’s school superintendent. On the first day of school, Rosario Robles had walked her five children to Bonner Elementary, where she was met by the principal, who asked her for the children’s birth certificates, and, when she couldn’t provide them, put her and the kids in his car and drove them home.

This hadn’t been the principal’s idea, or even Plyler’s. In 1975, when Texas passed a law allowing public schools to bar undocumented immigrants, Plyler ignored it. “I guess I was soft-hearted and concerned about the kids,” he said. Also, there weren’t many of them. About sixteen thousand children went to the schools in the East Texas city of Tyler, which considered itself the rose-growing capital of America and was named for John Tyler, the President of the United States who had pushed for the annexation of Texas in 1844, which led to a war with Mexico in 1846. Of those sixteen thousand students, fewer than sixty were the children of parents who had, without anyone’s permission, entered the United States from Mexico by crossing a border established in 1848, when the war ended with a treaty that turned the top half of Mexico into the bottom third of the United States. Jose Robles worked in a pipe factory. Humberto Alvarez worked in a meatpacking plant. They paid rent. They owned cars. They paid taxes. They grew roses.

Nevertheless, in July of 1977 Tyler’s school board, worried that Tyler would become a haven for immigrants driven away from other towns, insisted that undocumented children be kicked out of the city’s schools unless their parents paid a thousand dollars a year, per child, which few of them could afford, not even the Robleses, who owned their own home. Turned away from Bonner Elementary, the Robleses sent some of their kids to a local Catholic school—Jose did yard work in exchange for tuition—but they were put in touch with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which sent an attorney, Peter Roos, who filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Eastern District Court of Texas. It was presided over by a judge whose name was Justice. “There were two judges in Tyler,” Roos liked to say. “You got Justice, or no justice.”

Participating in a lawsuit as an undocumented immigrant is a very risky proposition. In a closed-door meeting, Roos asked that the parents be allowed to testify in chambers and so avoid revealing their identities, which could lead to deportation. They had come to the courthouse knowing that, at any moment, they could be arrested, and driven to Mexico, without so much as a goodbye. Judge William Wayne Justice refused to grant the protective order. “I am a United States magistrate and if I learn of a violation of the law, it’s my sworn duty to disclose it to the authorities,” he said. Roos went down to the basement, near the holding cells, to inform the families and give them a chance to think it over. They decided to go ahead with the suit, come what may. Justice did make efforts to protect them from publicity, and from harassment, decreeing that the proceeding would start before dawn, to keep the press and the public at bay, and that the plaintiffs’ names would be withheld.

Roos filed a motion requesting that the children be allowed to attend school, without paying tuition, while the case unfolded, which was expected to take years. “An educated populace is the basis of our democratic institutions,” his brief argued, citing Brown v. Board of Education. “A denial of educational opportunities is repugnant to our notions that an informed and educated citizenry is necessary to our society.” The case was docketed as Doe v. Plyler. “This is one that’s headed for the United States Supreme Court,” Justice told his clerk. Five years later, the appeal, Plyler v. Doe , went to Washington.

Some Supreme Court decisions are famous. Some are infamous. Brown v. Board, Roe v. Wade. But Plyler v. Doe? It’s not any kind of famous. Outside the legal academy, where it is generally deemed to be of limited significance, the case is little known. (Earlier this year, during testimony before Congress, Betsy DeVos , the Secretary of Education, appeared not to have heard of it.) The obscurity of the case might end soon, though, not least because the Court’s opinion in Plyler v. Doe addressed questions that are central to ongoing debates about both education and immigration and that get to the heart of what schoolchildren and undocumented migrants have in common: vulnerability.

Plyler is arguably a controlling case in Gary B. v. Snyder, a lawsuit filed against the governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, by seven Detroit schoolchildren, for violating their constitutional right to an education. According to the complaint, “illiteracy is the norm” in the Detroit public schools; they are the most economically and racially segregated schools in the country and, in formal assessments of student proficiency, have been rated close to zero. In Brown, the Court had described an education as “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” But the Detroit plaintiffs also cite Plyler, in which the majority deemed illiteracy to be “an enduring disability,” identified the absolute denial of education as a violation of the equal-protection clause, and ruled that no state can “deny a discrete group of innocent children the free public education that it offers to other children residing within its borders.” Dismissed by a district court in June, the case is now headed to the Sixth Circuit on appeal.

Plyler’s reach extends, too, to lawsuits filed this summer on behalf of immigrant children who were separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. In June, the Texas State Teachers Association called on the governor of the state to make provisions for the education of the detained children, before the beginning of the school year, but has so far received no reply. Thousands of children are being held in more than a hundred detention centers around the country, many run by for-profit contractors. Conditions vary, but, on the whole, instruction is limited and supplies are few. “The kids barely learn anything,” a former social worker reported from Arizona.

Court-watchers have tended to consider Plyler insignificant because the Court’s holding was narrow. But in “ The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind ” (Pantheon) Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago, argues that this view of Plyler is wrong. “Properly understood,” Driver writes, “it rests among the most egalitarian, momentous, and efficacious constitutional opinions that the Supreme Court has issued throughout its entire history.”

Driver is not alone in this view. In “ No Undocumented Child Left Behind ” (2012), the University of Houston law professor Michael A. Olivas called Plyler “the apex of the Court’s treatment of the undocumented.” In “ Immigration Outside the Law ” (2014), the U.C.L.A. law professor Hiroshi Motomura compared Plyler to Brown and described its influence as “fundamental, profound, and enduring.” Even people who think the case hasn’t been influential wish it had been. “Plyler v. Doe may be irrelevant in a strictly legal sense,” the legal journalist Linda Greenhouse wrote last year, “but there are strong reasons to resurrect its memory and ponder it today.” Because, for once, our tired, our poor, our huddled masses—the very littlest of them—breathed free.

Laura Alvarez, ten years old, rode in the family’s battered station wagon to the courthouse in Tyler, for a hearing held on September 9, 1977, at six in the morning. (During a related Texas case—later consolidated with Plyler—a nine-year-old girl spoke to the judge in chambers and told him that, since being barred from school, the only learning she was getting came from poring over the homework done by a younger sibling—an American citizen.) In Tyler, the assistant attorney general for the State of Texas showed up wearing bluejeans. She’d flown in late the night before, and had lost her luggage. After an attorney from the Carter Administration said that the Justice Department would not pursue the litigants while the trial proceeded, during which time the students would be able to attend school, Judge Justice issued the requested injunction.

Witnesses presented testimony about economies: educating these children cost the state money, particularly because they needed special English-language instruction, but not educating these children would be costly, too, in the long term, when they became legal residents but, uneducated, would be able to contribute very little to the tax base. The Judge had a policy preference: “The predictable effects of depriving an undocumented child of an education are clear and undisputed. Already disadvantaged as a result of poverty, lack of English-speaking ability, and undeniable racial prejudices, these children, without an education, will become permanently locked into the lowest socio-economic class.” But the question didn’t turn on anyone’s policy preferences; it turned on the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, guarantees certain rights to “citizens” and makes two promises to “persons”: it prohibits a state from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and prohibits a state from denying “any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Before Plyler, the Supreme Court had established that the due-process clause applied to undocumented immigrants, who are, plainly, “persons,” but it had not established that the equal-protection clause extended to them, and the State of Texas said that it didn’t, because undocumented immigrants were in the state illegally. Judge Justice disagreed. “People who have entered the United States, by whatever means, are ‘within its jurisdiction’ in that they are within the territory of the United States and subject to its laws,” he wrote.

But how to apply that clause? The courts bring a standard known as “strict scrutiny” to laws that abridge a “fundamental right,” like the right to life, liberty, and property, and to laws that discriminate against a particular class of people, a “suspect class,” like the freed slaves in whose interest the amendment was originally written—that is, any population burdened with disabilities “or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.”

Is education a fundamental right? The Constitution, drafted in the summer of 1787, does not mention a right to education, but the Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress that same summer, held that “religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” By 1868 the constitutions of twenty-eight of the thirty-two states in the Union had provided for free public education, open to all. Texas, in its 1869 constitution, provided for free public schooling for “all the inhabitants of this State,” a provision that was revised to exclude undocumented immigrants only in 1975.

Justice skirted the questions of whether education is a fundamental right and whether undocumented immigrants are a suspect class. Instead of applying the standard of “strict scrutiny” to the Texas law, he applied the lowest level of scrutiny to the law, which is known as the “rational basis test.” He decided that the Texas law failed this test. The State of Texas had argued that the law was rational because undocumented children are expensive to educate—they often require bilingual education, free meals, and even free clothing. But, Justice noted, so are other children, including native-born children, and children who have immigrated legally, and their families are not asked to bear the cost of their special education. As to why Texas had even passed such a law, he had two explanations, both cynical: “Children of illegal aliens had never been explicitly afforded any judicial protection, and little political uproar was likely to be raised in their behalf.”

In September, 1978, Justice ruled in favor of the children. Not long afterward, a small bouquet arrived at his house, sent by three Mexican workers. Then came the hate mail. A man from Lubbock wrote, on the back of a postcard, “Why in the hell don’t you illegally move to mexico?”

“The Schoolhouse Gate” is the first book-length history of Supreme Court cases involving the constitutional rights of schoolchildren, a set of cases that, though often written about, have never before been written about all together, as if they constituted a distinct body of law. In Driver’s view, “the public school has served as the single most significant site of constitutional interpretation within the nation’s history.” Millions of Americans spend most of their days in public schools—miniature states—where liberty, equality, rights, and privileges are matters of daily struggle. Schools are also, not incidentally, where Americans learn about liberty, equality, rights, and privileges. “The schoolroom is the first opportunity most citizens have to experience the power of government,” Justice John Paul Stevens once wrote.

The Supreme Court paid relatively little attention to public schools until after the Second World War, but, since then, it has ruled on a slew of cases. Do students have First Amendment rights? In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the Court said yes. Three students had sued when they were suspended for wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. In a 7–2 opinion, the Court sided with the students, affirming that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” and that public schools, though not democracies, “may not be enclaves of totalitarianism,” either. Justice Hugo Black issued a heated dissent. “It may be that the Nation has outworn the old-fashioned slogan that ‘children are to be seen not heard,’ ” he wrote, but he hoped it was still true that we “send children to school on the premise that at their age they need to learn, not teach.” A still more strident version of Black’s position was taken by Justice Clarence Thomas, in Morse v. Frederick (2007), a case involving a student who, when a parade passed in front of the school, waved a banner that read “ BONG H i TS 4 JESUS .” Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts marked an exception to the free-speech rights established in Tinker: students are not free to endorse drug use, but Thomas, concurring, used the occasion to wax nostalgic: “In the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed.”

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Just because the courts have recognized students’ First Amendment rights, it doesn’t follow that students have other rights. Do students have Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures”? Do they have Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination? Do they have Eighth Amendment protections against “cruel and unusual punishment”? In Goss v. Lopez (1975), the Court ruled that students cannot be suspended or expelled without at least some form of due process, but, two years later, in Ingraham v. Wright , it said that schools could punish children, physically, and without any procedure at all. This shift took place amid a growing conservative reaction that viewed the Court’s schoolhouse opinions as an example of judicial overreach, as a violation of states’ rights, and as part of the rise of permissiveness and the decline of order. Lopez had extended to students a Fourteenth Amendment right to due process, partly on the back of the argument that granting students rights is a way of teaching them about citizenship, fairness, and decency. “To insist upon fair treatment before passing judgment against a student accused of wrongdoing is to demonstrate that society has high principles and the conviction to honor them,” the legal scholar William G. Buss wrote , in an influential law-review article in 1971.

Plenty of teachers and school administrators think that students don’t have any rights. “I am the Constitution,” Joe Clarke, the principal of a high school in Paterson, New Jersey, liked to say, roaming the hallways with a Willie Mays baseball bat in the nineteen-eighties. This was an era that Driver describes as marking a Reagan Justice Department campaign for “education law and order.” The era produced a 1985 decision, T.L.O. v. New Jersey , in which the Court ruled that schools require only reasonable suspicion, not probable cause, to search students and their backpacks and lockers and other belongings.

Together, the education law-and-order regime and the rise of school shootings, beginning with Columbine in 1999, have produced a new environment in the nation’s schools, more than half of which, as of 2007, are patrolled by police officers. It was a police officer’s closed-door questioning of a seventh grader, taken out of his social-studies class in Chapel Hill, that led to the Court’s 2011 decision, in J.D.B. v. North Carolina , establishing that only in certain circumstances do students have Fifth Amendment rights. Do students have Second Amendment rights? Not yet. But last year a Kentucky congressman introduced a Safe Students Act that would have repealed the 1990 Gun-Free School Zones Act, and allowed guns in schools. Meanwhile, more and more schools are surveilled by cameras, and bordered by metal detectors. If the schoolhouse is a mini-state, it has also become, in many places, a military state.

Few discussions of Plyler are more keenly sensitive to its ambiguities than Ana Raquel Minian’s “ Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration ” (Harvard), a revealing study that, because “undocumented lives” are nearly impossible to trace in the archives, relies on hundreds of oral histories. For Minian, Plyler, by its very casting of undocumented children as innocents, underscored the perception of undocumented adults as culpable—criminals to be arrested, detained, prosecuted, and deported.

As Texas appealed to the Fifth Circuit, Woodrow Seals, a district judge in Houston, ruled for the children in a related case. Seals didn’t agree that the undocumented children were a suspect class, but he didn’t need to, because he believed the Texas statute was not rational, and, in any case, he thought that absolute denial of an education was so severe a harm that, on its own terms, it required strict scrutiny. Public school is “the most important institution in this country,” Seals wrote, and “the Constitution does not permit the states to deny access to education to a discrete group of children within its border.” Seals handed down his opinion in July, 1980, just months before the Presidential election. He wrote in a letter, “I hate to think what will happen to my decision if Governor Reagan wins the election and appoints four new justices to the Supreme Court.”

Carter’s Justice Department had supported the plaintiffs. Reagan’s did not. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Plyler v. Doe on December 1, 1981. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund considered the case to be as important as Brown v. Board of Education, which, in 1954, Thurgood Marshall, then the head of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, had argued before the Court. Marshall had presented Brown as a Fourteenth Amendment, equal-protection case. The plaintiffs in Plyler were making, essentially, the same argument. Conceivably, their case could realize the promise of Brown by establishing a constitutional right to an education. They could even press the claim that undocumented immigrants were not only persons under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment but also, doctrinally, a suspect class. None of these objectives were politically within their reach, however, given the makeup of the bench.

During oral arguments, Marshall peppered John Hardy, representing Plyler, about what the State of Texas did and did not provide for undocumented immigrants:

M arshall : Could Texas deny them fire protection? H ardy : Deny them fire protection? M arshall : Yes, sir. F-i-r-e. H ardy : Okay. If their home is on fire, their home is going to be protected with the local fire services just— M arshall : Could Texas pass a law and say they cannot be protected? H ardy : —I don’t believe so. M arshall : Why not? If they could do this, why couldn’t they do that? H ardy : Because . . . I am going to take the position that it is an entitlement of the . . . Justice Marshall, let me think a second. You . . . that is . . . I don’t know. That’s a tough question. M arshall : Somebody’s house is more important than his child?

Later, Marshall came back at him, asking, “Could Texas pass a law denying admission to the schools of children of convicts?” Hardy said that they could, but that it wouldn’t be constitutional. Marshall’s reply: “We are dealing with children. I mean, here is a child that is the son of a murderer, but he can go to school, but the child that is the son of an unfortunate alien cannot?”

Three days later, the Justices held a conference. According to notes made by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Chief Justice Warren Burger said, “14A applies as they are persons but illegals are not entitled to E/P.” Marshall said, “Children are not illegals. . . . E/P means what it says.” Five Justices wanted to uphold the lower court’s opinion, four to reverse it. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., volunteered to write the majority opinion. He circulated a draft that called for strict scrutiny, deeming the children “a discrete and historically demeaned group.” Powell said that he couldn’t sign it.

Powell, appointed by Nixon in 1971, had been, for a decade, the chair of the school board of Richmond, Virginia. Sometimes known as “the education justice,” he was deeply committed to public schools. But, because he was also committed to judicial restraint, he was opposed to declaring education to be a constitutional right. “It is not the province of this Court to create substantive constitutional rights in the name of guaranteeing equal protection of the laws,” he had written in 1973, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez , a case that was widely seen as having shut the door on the idea. For Powell, establishing education as a fundamental right invited claims: are health care, food, and shelter fundamental rights, too?

Powell was unwilling to sign Brennan’s first draft, not only because it went against his opinion in Rodriguez but also because the draft contained language “that will be read as indicating that all illegal aliens, adults as well as children, may be ‘discrete and insular minorities for which the Constitution offers a special solicitude.’ ” Brennan wrote a second draft; Powell once again asked him to narrow his opinion. But other Justices, who wanted to uphold the lower court’s decision, sought to move Brennan further to the left. After reading a draft of Burger’s dissent (“The Constitution does not provide a cure for every social ill,” the Chief Justice wrote, “nor does it vest judges with a mandate to try to remedy every social problem”), Justice Harry Blackmun circulated a proposal for issuing a different opinion, arguing that education has a special status because it’s foundational to all other political rights, being necessary “to preserve rights of expression and participation in the political process, and therefore to preserve individual rights generally.” Marshall, Brennan, and Stevens were prepared to join that opinion. But Blackmun needed Powell to make five. And Powell wouldn’t sign on. “As important as education has been in the life of my family for three generations,” he wrote to Blackmun, “I would hesitate before creating another heretofore unidentified right.”

In the end, Brennan crafted a compromise. Education is not a constitutional right, he wrote, “but neither is it merely some governmental ‘benefit.’ ” Undocumented migrants are not a suspect class, but their children are vulnerable, and laws that discriminate against them, while not subject to strict scrutiny, deserved “heightened scrutiny.” Powell wrote to Brennan after reading the draft, “Your final product is excellent and will be in every text and case book on Constitutional law.”

And yet its interpretation remains limited. “Powell wanted the case to be about the education of children, not the equal protection rights of immigrants, and so the decision was,” Linda Greenhouse remarked in a careful study of the Court’s deliberations, published a decade ago. For many legal scholars, Plyler looks like a dead end. It didn’t cut through any constitutional thickets; it opened no new road to equal rights for undocumented immigrants, and no new road to the right to an education. It simply meant that no state could pass a law barring undocumented children from public schools. But that is exactly why Driver thinks that Plyler was so significant: without it, states would have passed those laws, and millions of children would have been saddled with the disability of illiteracy.

In 1994, when Californians were contemplating Proposition 187, which would have denied services to undocumented immigrants, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times was able to track down thirteen of the original sixteen Plyler children. Ten had graduated from high school in Tyler. Two worked as teacher’s aides. Laura Alvarez and all six of her brothers and sisters stayed in Tyler after Judge Justice issued his opinion in Plyler. She became a legal resident of the United States under the terms of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, graduated in 1987 from John Tyler High School, and spent a decade working for the Tyler school district. “Without an education, I don’t know where I’d be right now,” she said.

“I’m glad we lost,” James Plyler said in an interview in 2007, when he was eighty-two, and long since retired, and enjoying his grandchildren, who are themselves of Mexican descent.

Lewis Powell retired from the Court in 1987. He was replaced by Anthony Kennedy. In another opinion, Powell had written that children should not be punished for the crimes of their parents. “Visiting this condemnation on the head of an infant is illogical and unjust,” because “legal burdens should bear some relationship to individual responsibility or wrongdoing.” It’s hard to know what Kennedy’s likely replacement, Brett Kavanaugh, would say about whether the Constitution guarantees undocumented migrant children the equal protection of the law. He’s never cited Plyler in his scholarship and, in opinions issued from the bench, has cited it only once. He hasn’t written much about equal protection, either, though he has said, in passing, that he finds the equal-protection clause ambiguous. As for undocumented migrant children, he has issued one important opinion, a dissent in Garza v. Hargan, last year, that, while not citing Plyler, described the plaintiff in the case, an undocumented immigrant minor in Texas, as particularly vulnerable.

“The minor is alone and without family or friends,” Kavanaugh wrote. “She is in a U.S. Government detention facility in a country that, for her, is foreign. She is 17 years old.” The reason for her vulnerability? “She is pregnant and has to make a major life decision.” She wanted to have an abortion; Kavanaugh had earlier joined a decision ruling that she must first leave detention and find a sponsoring foster family. When, in a further appeal, the D.C. court vacated that ruling, Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that the court had acted on “a constitutional principle as novel as it is wrong: a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. Government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.” Her name was kept out of the proceedings. She was another Doe. It is not clear whether she ever finished her education. ♦

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By Jonathan Blitzer

By Geraldo Cadava

Right to Education : Situation around the world

Situation of children’s right to education worldwide.

Today, education remains an inaccessible right for millions of children around the world. More than 72 million children of primary education age are not in school and 759 million adults are illiterate and do not have the awareness necessary to improve both their living conditions and those of their children.

Causes of lack of education

Marginalisation and poverty.

For many children who still do not have access to education, it is notable because of persisting inequality and marginalization.

In developing and developed countries alike, children do not have access to basic education because of inequalities that originate in sex, health and cultural identity (ethnic origin, language, religion). These children find themselves on the margins of the education system and do not benefit from learning that is vital to their intellectual and social development.

Undeniably, many children from disadvantaged backgrounds are forced to abandon their education due to health problems related to malnutrition or in order to work and provide support for the family.

Financial deficit of developing countries

Universal primary education is a major issue and a sizeable problem for many states.

Equally, a lack of financial resources has an effect on the quality of teaching. Teachers do not benefit from basic teacher training and schools, of which there are not enough, have oversized classes.

This overflow leads to classes where many different educational levels are forced together which does not allow each individual child to benefit from an education adapted to their needs and abilities. As a result, the drop-out rate and education failure remain high.

Overview of the right to education worldwide

Most affected regions..

As a result of poverty and marginalization, more than 72 million children around the world remain unschooled.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected area with over 32 million children of primary school age remaining uneducated. Central and Eastern Asia, as well as the Pacific, are also severely affected by this problem with more than 27 million uneducated children.

Additionally, these regions must also solve continuing problems of educational poverty (a child in education for less than 4 years) and extreme educational poverty (a child in education for less than 2 years).

Essentially this concerns Sub-Saharan Africa where more than half of children receive an education for less than 4 years. In certain countries, such as Somalia and Burkina Faso, more than 50% of children receive an education for a period less than 2 years.

The lack of schooling and poor education have negative effects on the population and country.  The children leave school without having acquired the basics, which greatly impedes the social and economic development of these countries.

Inequality between girls and boys: the education of girls in jeopardy

Today, it is girls who have the least access to education. They make up more than 54% of the non-schooled population in the world.

This problem occurs most frequently in the Arab States, in central Asia and in Southern and Western Asia and is principally explained by the cultural and traditional privileged treatment given to males. Girls are destined to work in the family home, whereas boys are entitled to receive an education.

In sub-Saharan Africa, over 12 million girls are at risk of never receiving an education. In Yemen, it is more than 80% of girls who will never have the opportunity to go to school. Even more alarming, certain countries such as Afghanistan or Somalia make no effort to reduce the gap between girls and boys with regard to education.

Although many developing countries may congratulate themselves on dramatically reducing inequality between girls and boys in education, a lot of effort is still needed in order to achieve a universal primary education.

• Understanding the right to Education
• Read more about the condition of children worldwide
• OHCHR, Special Rapporteur on the right to Education
• www.right-to-education.org
• Wikipedia, Education
• Education International
• UNESCO, Education
• UNESCO, Education for all: Reaching the marginalized
• HREA, Study guides: Right to education
• Unicef, State of the World’s Children 2010
• Unicef, State of the World’s Children 2004: Girls, Education & Development

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BE HEARD! Advocate for the protection of child rights by calling for an end to fires and deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest!

Your Right to Equality in Education

Getting an education isn’t just about books and grades – we’re also learning how to participate fully in the life of this nation. (We’re tomorrow’s leaders after all!)

But in order to really participate, we need to know our rights – otherwise we may lose them. The highest law in our land is the U.S. Constitution, which has some amendments, known as the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights guarantees that the government can never deprive people in the U.S. of certain fundamental rights including the right to freedom of religion and to free speech and the due process of law. Many federal and state laws give us additional rights, too.

The Bill of Rights applies to young people as well as adults. And what I’m going to do right here is tell you about EQUAL TREATMENT .

DO ALL KIDS HAVE THE RIGHT TO AN EQUAL EDUCATION?

Yes! All kids living in the United States have the right to a free public education. And the Constitution requires that all kids be given equal educational opportunity no matter what their race, ethnic background, religion, or sex, or whether they are rich or poor, citizen or non-citizen. Even if you are in this country illegally, you have the right to go to public school. The ACLU is fighting hard to make sure this right isn’t taken away.

In addition to this constitutional guarantee of an equal education, many federal, state and local laws also protect students against discrimination in education based on sexual orientation or disability, including pregnancy and HIV status.

In fact, even though some kids may complain about having to go to school, the right to an equal educational opportunity is one of the most valuable rights you have. The Supreme Court said this in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case when it struck down race segregation in the public schools.

If you believe you or someone you know is being discriminated against in school, speak up! Talk to a teacher, the principal, the head of a community organization or a lawyer so they can investigate the situation and help you take legal action if necessary.

ARE TRACKING SYSTEMS LEGAL?

Yes, as long as they really do separate students on the basis of learning ability and as long as they give students the same basic education.

Many studies show, however, that the standards and tests school officials use in deciding on track placements are often based on racial and class prejudices and stereotypes instead of on real ability and learning potential. That means it’s often the white, middle-class kids who end up in the college prep classes, while poor and non-white students, and kids whose first language isn’t English, end up on “slow” tracks and in vocational-training classes. And often, the lower the track you’re on, the less you’re expected to learn – and the less you’re taught.

Even if you have low grades or nobody in your family ever went to college, if you want to go to college, you should demand the type of education you need to realize your dreams. And your guidance counselor should help you get it! Your local ACLU can tell you the details of how to go about challenging your track placement.

CAN STUDENTS BE TREATED DIFFERENTLY IN PUBLIC SCHOOL BASED ON THEIR SEX?

Almost never. Public schools may not have academic courses that are just for boys – like shop – or just for girls – like home economics. Both the Constitution and federal law require that boys and girls also be provided with equal athletic opportunities. Many courts have held, however, that separate teams for boys and girls are allowed as long as the school provides students of both sexes the chance to participate in the particular sport. Some courts have also held that boys and girls may always be separated in contact sports. The law is different in different states; you can call your local ACLU affiliate for information.

CAN GIRLS BE KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL IF THEY GET PREGNANT?

No. Federal law prohibits schools from discriminating against pregnant students or students who are married or have children. So, if you are pregnant, school officials can’t keep you from attending classes, graduation ceremonies, extracurricular activities or any other school activity except maybe a strenuous sport. Some schools have special classes for pregnant girls, but they cannot make you attend these if you would prefer to be in your regular classes.

CAN SCHOOLS DISCRIMINATE AGAINST GAY STUDENTS?

School officials shouldn’t be able to violate your rights just because they don’t like your sexual orientation. However, even though a few states and cities have passed laws against sexual orientation discrimination, public high schools have been slow to establish their own anti-bias codes – and they’re slow to respond to incidents of harassment and discrimination. So while in theory, you can take a same-sex date to the prom, join or help form a gay group at school or write an article about lesbian/gay issues for the school paper, in practice gay students often have to fight hard to have their rights respected.

WHAT ABOUT STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES?

Although students with disabilities may not be capable of having exactly the same educational experiences as other students, federal law requires that they be provided with an education that is appropriate for them. What is an appropriate education must be worked out individually for each student. For example, a deaf student might be entitled to be provided with a sign language interpreter.

In addition to requiring that schools identify students with disabilities so that they can receive the special education they need in order to learn, federal law also provides procedures to make sure that students are not placed in special education classes when they are not disabled. If you believe you’re not receiving an appropriate education, either because you are not in special classes when you need to be, or because you are in special classes when you don’t need to be, call the ACLU!

And thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), students who are HIV positive have the same rights as every other student. People with HIV are protected against discrimination , not only in school but in many other public places such as stores, museums and hotels.

People with HIV aren’t a threat to anyone else’s health, because the AIDS virus can’t be spread through casual contact. That’s just a medical fact. Your local ACLU can provide information on how to fight discrimination against people with HIV.

CAN I GO TO PUBLIC SCHOOL IF I DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH?

Yes. It is the job of the public schools to teach you to speak English and to provide you with a good education in other subjects while you are learning. Students who do not speak English have the right to require the school district to provide them with bilingual education or English language instruction or both.

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” –Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972

We spend a big part of our life in school, and our voices count. Join the student government! Attend school meetings! Petition your school administration! Talk about your rights with your friends! Let’s make a difference!

Produced by the ACLU Department of Public Education. 125 Broad Street, NY NY 10004. For more copies of this or any other Sybil Liberty paper, or to order the ACLU handbook The Rights of Students or other student-related publications, call 800-775-ACLU or visit us on the internet at https://www.aclu.org .

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The Constitutional Right to an Education

• First Online: 31 August 2022

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• Wade L. Robison 5  

Part of the book series: AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice ((AMIN,volume 11))

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The right to an education in the United States is grounded on the form of government created by the Constitution. The proper argument for understanding why there is a right to an education is not to show that it is implied by, say, the right to petition the government, a right that does require enough education to read and write, but to see that it is a necessary condition for the structure of government we have. The proper argument is not piecemeal, that is, going from provision to provision to determine which, if any, requires an education, but transcendental, seeing how the very nature of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends upon the people being educated.

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Robison, W.L. (2022). The Constitutional Right to an Education. In: McGregor, J., Navin, M.C. (eds) Education, Inclusion, and Justice. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04013-9_4

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What can I do to help advance the right to education?

The right to education is a notion that many take for granted. Yet millions around the world are still deprived from this fundamental right. Simple actions in peoples’ daily lives and work can have a major impact on an ordinary citizen, local communities and beyond.

Are you an engaged citizen?

People can find out and monitor how their countries’ are enacting the various international conventions and agreements that they have signed up to. UNESCO offers a global Observatory that provides valuable data on the right to education in 195 States. Check how your country is advancing the right to education. You can also help UNESCO spread the message that education is a human right for everyone.

Are you active online?

Most people in the world know the importance of education. However, many might not be aware that education is a human right protected by the law, and one that must be guaranteed to all by the State. The fact that the right to education is guaranteed by law gives it a concrete and legal substance. One of the aims of UNESCO’s campaign on the right to education is to make sure people everywhere are aware of this. Help spread these important messages to your networks.

Are you a journalist?

Journalists can play a key role in ensuring the right to education around the world. They can enlighten and help amplify the importance of accessing education in their communities, and the fact that it is a legal right for everyone. Journalists can give a voice to marginalized and excluded groups who might not be benefiting from their right to learn. They can help unpack essential and sensitive issues that are impeding access to education in their communities and unmask violations of the right to education.

Are you a parent?

Parents everywhere must ensure that their children - girls and boys - equally have access to quality education. Any decision that parents make for their children will have a major impact in their future lives. The influence of parents can go beyond their children and can inspire other members of their families and communities to take the right path on the right to education.

Are you a student?

Helping peers to stay motivated and focused in school can go a long way in ensuring individuals’ right to education. Many children drop out of school for different reasons, and it is usually never their choice. Fellow students can help, encourage and influence their classmates to stay in school and alert relevant authorities if they witness that their right to education is being violated or denied.

Are you a teacher or an educator?

Teachers are one of the most influential and powerful forces for equity, access and quality in education. They can play a major role in shifting mindsets in their communities and empowering girls and boys to learn, dream and succeed. Teachers can tackle many of the obstacles blocking children from accessing education, and alert relevant authorities if their right to education is being violated or denied.

Are you an association or an NGO?

Associations and NGOs have an essential role with regard to the right to education as they have the power to hold States accountable in light of their legal obligations, empower citizens to have a say in decision-making processes, raise awareness on issues of concern, monitor the implementation of the right to education and expose violations. Associations and NGOs working both locally and globally to advocate for the right to education should be supported.

Are you a lawyer?

Accountability in education is key. Lawyers and magistrates can make a difference by informing citizens about their judicial right to education. They can take the necessary legal measures when this fundamental right is being violated, and denounce to appropriate authorities when the law is not being implemented as it should.

Are you a parliamentarian?

Parliamentarians and lawmakers are the guardians of the right to education and must ensure that this fundamental right is not denied to anyone in their respective jurisdictions and States. They can help strengthen education laws and guarantee that international conventions and agreements are being legislated and implemented. Parliamentarians can influence key government decisions and actions on education.

Are you a policy-maker?

Policy-makers must ensure that human rights principles are applied to all aspects of educational activities. They must guide institutions by paving the road towards good governance, transparent and accountable educational systems that able to meet the needs of all learners. Policy-makers must ensure that the right to education and international commitments are duly reflected in national legal and policy agendas.

Join UNESCO in advocating for the #RightToEducation , a key human right that has the power and potential to transform lives around the world.

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Education as a RI constitutional right passes Senate hurdle, moves to House

The bills have failed in the past, and are once again a step closer to becoming law..

On Thursday, the full Senate passed two bills that could transform education in Rhode Island, though both have failed in the past.

One would make an equitable education a constitutional right, and the other would cap class sizes at 20 students in some public schools.

Breakdown of the bills

Senate Resolution 72 , which would build "the fundamental right to a public education" and educational equality into the state's constitution, has been a tough goal to reach for lawmakers who've chipped away at it for more than a decade. Last year, it failed to clear the House after gaining support from Education Commissioner Angélica-Infante Green, among other education leaders. At the time, House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi said he feared lawsuits over curriculums and didn't want education policy decided by "an unelected judge."

More: Cap on class size, education as a right: How these new bills could change RI education

Now, the resolution is once again in the same place it was months ago, having seen Senate approval and on its way to the House.

Senate Bill 177 , which would limit the size of kindergarten through second grade classes, also passed the Senate as it has in the past. However, if it became law, it would require hiring far more teachers during a time when a teacher shortage has plagued the state. Sen. Sam Zurier estimated it may necessitate finding 200 additional hires.

What happened last year: Constitutional right to an education fails in final hours of the General Assembly

Providence has one of the highest class caps in the state, at 26 students, though at present, it averages around 21. At present, the district remains short of staff, with 131 union-represented classroom vacancies, according to a district spokesperson.

How to support your students while living costs remain high

As the cost of living remains high, universities are spending millions of pounds on additional support for students. Maddy Godin explores some key guiding principles for helping students to thrive in their studies amid financial pressures

Maddy Godin

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Rising living costs impact every aspect of student life, including studies, social lives, health and well-being. A 2023 survey of Russell Group students found that 94 per cent had concerns about the cost of living, one in four regularly went without food and other necessities and more than half had stopped participating in extracurricular activities. 

The challenges are compounded by the government’s failure to raise maintenance loans in line with inflation; students accessing the maximum loan are now almost £2,000 worse off than if loans had kept up with inflation since 2021.

Universities are stepping up to help as much as they can, but it can look like an overwhelming problem to tackle. Drawing on some of the most impactful projects we have seen, here are some key principles for effective student support.

Cash is often king

There is a significant gap between the real cost of university and the government support available. And with parental earnings thresholds frozen since 2008, the assumption that parents can top up the difference simply isn’t feasible for many families. Direct cash assistance is one of the most effective ways to help people: it’s simple to implement, and students can choose how to spend it to meet their needs.   

Universities should therefore prioritise hardship funds and bursaries where they can and offer targeted support for their most vulnerable groups. But remember that this vulnerable group is growing as middle-income students also feel the squeeze. Some universities have responded by broadening the criteria for guaranteed support, which, at Queen Mary University of London, resulted in 39 per cent of undergraduates being automatically awarded the Queen Mary Bursary.

It’s also beneficial to make hardship funds available throughout the academic year, not just when students enrol. Even a small grant can keep a student afloat if something unexpected happens – an accommodation problem, a broken laptop or an emergency dentist’s bill – so flexible financial support can make a big difference, preventing students from taking on unnecessary and dangerous debt. 

Look beyond the essentials 

Financially disadvantaged students can miss out on many aspects of the student experience, widening the existing disadvantage gap. If a student is worried about how to pay a gas bill, they’re probably not going to pay for a gym membership or upgrade their old laptop. Universities should think creatively about where they put funding to enhance different aspects of the student experience.

A fantastic example of this is the University of Warwick’s long-running “Rock Up & Play” programme , which offers free opportunities to get involved in sports and has welcomed more than 2,300 participants so far this academic year. Open to the university’s student and staff community and covering a wide range of sports including swimming, netball, dodgeball, squash, trampolining, ultimate frisbee and even esports, the programme removes the financial barriers to participating in organised sport, enabling all students to enjoy the associated health and social benefits. There are inclusive options, such as walking football, sensory-friendly table tennis and women-only sessions, and some are also open to the local community at a low cost.

UCL and the University of Edinburgh also operate successful activity and participation grants which allow students to benefit from extracurricular activities, while the University of Southampton offers a technology grant and the University of Manchester provides a work experience bursary.

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• Creating safe spaces for students to talk about financial difficulties
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Team up with your students

Universities should not make these decisions at the senior level alone. Students give vital insights into where support is most needed, and how it can best be delivered. 

Some of the most successful schemes involve cooperation between universities and their student unions. When Queen’s University Belfast teamed up with its students’ union to mitigate the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, the result was a food pantry donating more than 50 types of food and other essential products, which so far has been accessed more than 11,000 times since September 2023, and given out more than 2,500kg of rice and 1,000kg of pasta. It includes a kitchen for students to cook meals on site to reduce spending on cooking equipment and energy, and has won praise from students for providing foodstuffs – “It’s great for things like spices so you can experiment with recipes without the expense,” said one student – as well as employment opportunities: “I work in the pantry so not only does it provide me with income, I also get my pasta and herbs every week!” said another.

Don’t think you can solve all the problems on your own

Russell Group universities collectively spend tens of millions on additional support, and there is much that the sector can continue to do to help. However, this is a systemic issue, and not one that universities can solve alone.

One of the strengths of UK universities is their ability to embed themselves into the local community, providing many opportunities for effective partnerships that deliver well-rounded support. This could be working with local allies on safe and affordable housing – like in Durham, where Durham University and its student union teamed up with their local MP, parish and county councils to lobby government for student housing support – negotiating meaningful student discounts on your city’s transport networks or ensuring students can access health and well-being services both on and off campus.

Universities can also use their collective voices to push for wider systemic changes. We are urging government to not only reassess student maintenance loans, uplifting them in line with real and historic inflation rates, but to re-establish maintenance grants and review the parental earnings thresholds that determine loan amounts. Combining local university projects with a solid bedrock of government-backed support is the way to ensure effective, holistic support for students who have been a vulnerable but often overlooked casualty of the cost-of-living crisis.

Maddy Godin is a policy researcher (higher education) at the Russell Group.

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Trump’s Call for Israel to ‘Finish Up’ War Alarms Some on the Right

Recent remarks he made urging an end to the Gaza conflict, with no insistence on freeing Israeli hostages first, were another departure from conservatives’ support for Benjamin Netanyahu.

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By Jonathan Swan

Reporting from Washington

Two Israeli journalists traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., a little over a week ago, hoping to elicit from Donald J. Trump a powerful expression of support for their country’s war in Gaza.

Instead, one of them wrote that what they heard from Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago “shocked us deeply.”

“Both U.S. presidential candidates, Biden and Trump, are turning their rhetorical backs on Israel,” concluded Ariel Kahana, a right-wing settler who is the senior diplomatic correspondent for Israel Hayom. The newspaper is owned by the billionaire Republican donor Miriam Adelson; Ms. Adelson herself arranged the interview with Mr. Trump, according to a person with direct knowledge of the planning.

What had Mr. Trump said that so alarmed Mr. Kahana?

He told the interviewers that Israel was losing public support for its Gaza assault, that the images of devastation were bad for Israel’s global image and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should end his war soon — statements that sounded far more like something President Biden might say than the kind of cheerleading Mr. Netanyahu has come to expect from Washington Republicans.

“You have to finish up your war,” Mr. Trump said. “You have to get it done. We have to get to peace. We can’t have this going on.”

That statement apparently troubled Mr. Kahana even more than Mr. Biden’s warnings to Israel. Mr. Biden has called for a six-week cease-fire in exchange for Hamas releasing Israeli hostages. In the interview excerpts released by Israel Hayom, Mr. Trump did not qualify his call for Israel to finish the war by insisting on the release of hostages.

“Trump effectively bypassed Biden from the left, when he expressed willingness to stop this war and get back to being the great country you once were,” Mr. Kahana wrote in Hebrew. “There’s no way to beautify, minimize or cover up that problematic message.”

Trump aides insisted this was a misinterpretation. A campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said that Mr. Trump “fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself and eliminate the terrorist threat,” but that Israel’s interests would be “best served by completing this mission as quickly, decisively and humanely as possible so that the region can return to peace and stability​.”

But there is no getting around the division between Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans, who seem to be competing to see who can more ostentatiously demonstrate support for Mr. Netanyahu’s government. They are flying to Israel to meet with Mr. Netanyahu , planning to invite him to address Congress and generally urging Israel to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to annihilate Hamas.

In contrast, Mr. Trump’s hedging commentary to Israel Hayom is only the latest in a long line of public statements he has made to undercut Mr. Netanyahu, whom he has still not forgiven for congratulating Mr. Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.

In 2021, Mr. Trump told the Axios journalist Barak Ravid that he had concluded that Mr. Netanyahu “never wanted peace” with the Palestinians.

Mr. Trump’s first reaction to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack was to criticize Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence services. Advisers privately pleaded with him to clean up his comments and he quickly turned to standard lines of support for Israel’s right to defend itself.

The ambiguity of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about the Israel-Hamas war has let different audiences hear what they want in his public statements. He has said nothing of substance about what he would do differently from Mr. Biden on Israel policy if he were president, and his team again refused to get into specifics when questioned by The New York Times.

Given that void, right-wing supporters of Israel and Israelis like Mr. Kahana are parsing every utterance from Mr. Trump, worried that in a second term he might not be as reliable an ally as he was in his first term, when he gave Mr. Netanyahu nearly everything he wanted, including moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

“Those who support Trump and also are deeply supportive of Israel’s efforts to win the war with Hamas have to reconcile themselves with the fact that at a crucial moment when the administration seems to be speaking out of both sides of its mouth, and creating a sense of instability in the relationship between the United States and Israel, Trump exacerbated that instability as the putative nominee of the other party,” said John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.

“The only difference between Trump and Biden — and I say this as somebody who is not a supporter of Biden — is that Biden has put his money where his mouth is. He’s been sending arms,” Mr. Podhoretz added. “So that would seem to suggest that operationally, the problem with Biden is rhetoric and not policy. And all Trump is is rhetoric, and he’s not laying out any policy that should make anybody feel good.”

Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, insisted in an interview that people were misreading Mr. Trump’s statements.

While he said he respected Mr. Kahana, Mr. Friedman suggested the reporter had over-interpreted Mr. Trump’s remarks: “I understand the fear of Republican isolationism, because there is a vein within the Republican Party that moves in that direction, but I didn’t hear him to say what he said. I heard him to say, ‘Finish the job’ — meaning defeat Hamas, defeat them decisively, defeat them as quickly as possible. And then move on.”

Some of Mr. Trump’s former advisers have filled the Trump policy vacuum with their own ideas to resolve the conflict. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has pursued foreign deals using relationships he built during the Trump administration, said at a Harvard University forum in February that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable” and that Palestinians should be “moved out” and transported to an area in the Negev Desert in southern Israel that would be bulldozed to accommodate them.

Mr. Friedman has gone much further than Mr. Kushner, who seemed to be only musing. Mr. Friedman has developed a proposal for Israel to claim full sovereignty over the West Bank — definitively ending the possibility of a two-state solution. West Bank Palestinians who have been living under Israeli military occupation since 1967 would not be given Israeli citizenship under the plan, Mr. Friedman confirmed in the interview.

It’s far from clear whether Mr. Trump would support this, though he did tell the Israeli interviewers that he planned to meet with Mr. Friedman to hear his ideas. Mr. Friedman said he had not yet discussed his plan with Mr. Trump.

Unlike Mr. Friedman, Mr. Trump has long clung to the possibility of a grand bargain between Israel and the Palestinians, insisting that only he can broker the “deal of the century.” Still, while in office, Mr. Trump acted so lopsidedly in favor of Israel that a two-state solution that would be acceptable to the Palestinians was never realistic.

John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump, who has become a sharp critic, said that Mr. Trump’s interview with Israel Hayom “proves the point that I’ve tried to explain to people: that Trump’s support for Israel in the first term is not guaranteed in the second term, because Trump’s positions are made on the basis of what’s good for Donald Trump, not on some coherent theory of national security.”

“What he said in this most recent interview was ambiguous to a certain extent, but it seemed to me to be verging on negative about Israel’s conduct of the war,” Mr. Bolton said in an interview. “And I think there’s more there than meets the eye.”

“What matters to Trump more than anything else is how you look in the press. So forget the justice of it,” he added. “It just looks bad.”

The way Mr. Bolton sees it, when his former boss warns Mr. Netanyahu that his image is failing, “he’s not worried about Israel’s image. He’s worried about his if he has to defend it.”

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting.

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan

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A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility,   2024

On Transgender Day of Visibility, we honor the extraordinary courage and contributions of transgender Americans and reaffirm our Nation’s commitment to forming a more perfect Union — where all people are created equal and treated equally throughout their lives.  

I am proud that my Administration has stood for justice from the start, working to ensure that the LGBTQI+ community can live openly, in safety, with dignity and respect.  I am proud to have appointed transgender leaders to my Administration and to have ended the ban on transgender Americans serving openly in our military.  I am proud to have signed historic Executive Orders that strengthen civil rights protections in housing, employment, health care, education, the justice system, and more.  I am proud to have signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, ensuring that every American can marry the person they love. 

Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation.  Whether serving their communities or in the military, raising families or running businesses, they help America thrive.  They deserve, and are entitled to, the same rights and freedoms as every other American, including the most fundamental freedom to be their true selves.  But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families — silencing teachers; banning books; and even threatening parents, doctors, and nurses with prison for helping parents get care for their children.  These bills attack our most basic American values:  the freedom to be yourself, the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and even the right to raise your own child.  It is no surprise that the bullying and discrimination that transgender Americans face is worsening our Nation’s mental health crisis, leading half of transgender youth to consider suicide in the past year.  At the same time, an epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, especially women and girls of color, continues to take too many lives.  Let me be clear:  All of these attacks are un-American and must end.  No one should have to be brave just to be themselves.  

At the same time, my Administration is working to stop the bullying and harassment of transgender children and their families.  The Department of Justice has taken action to push back against extreme and un-American State laws targeting transgender youth and their families and the Department of Justice is partnering with law enforcement and community groups to combat hate and violence.  My Administration is also providing dedicated emergency mental health support through our nationwide suicide and crisis lifeline — any LGBTQI+ young person in need can call “988” and press “3” to speak with a counselor trained to support them.  We are making public services more accessible for transgender Americans, including with more inclusive passports and easier access to Social Security benefits.  There is much more to do.  I continue to call on the Congress to pass the Equality Act, to codify civil rights protections for all LGBTQI+ Americans.

Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans:  You are loved.  You are heard.  You are understood.  You belong.  You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility.  I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.

     IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-ninth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-eighth.

                             JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

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What the Push for Parents’ Rights Means for Schools

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Parents in Isle of Wight County, Va., recently came into a lot more power.

Emboldened by a new conservative majority, the county’s school board voted 3-2 this month to enact two policies—one that bans sexually explicit materials in K-8 instruction and another that gives parents of high school students the chance to inspect and opt their children out of learning materials and curriculum that contain sexually explicit themes.

“Parents are the basic educators of their children, particularly with their moral upbringing and their beliefs,” said John Collick, chair of the Isle of Wight board and one of the policies’ supporters. “The schools are there to add value to that education that the parents have already started.”

Isle of Wight is one example of a school district experiencing the impact of a growing parents’ rights movement.

Parents’ rights have become a staple of conservative politicians’ education agendas in recent years, especially following schools’ pandemic shutdowns. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin capitalized on parent frustration with schools in 2021 to become the state’s first Republican governor in more than a decade. A national parents’ bill of rights is a priority for members of the new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The movement has led to parents’ rights policies passing at the district and state levels around the country, albeit some of them policies that largely restate rights parents already have to voice their opinions at school board meetings and transparency requirements for public school districts, experts say.

But the movement has also been a cause for concern for some educators and advocates for equity in schools, who worry the policies give conservative and often white parents an outsize voice and deepen divides between public schools and those they serve.

While parents’ efforts to force such changes in their local schools have gained momentum and attention in recent years, they’re the latest example of a decades-old tradition of parent organizing. And their movement’s legal impact is still unclear, as it’s too new for key questions related to such parents’ rights policies to have come before—and be settled by—the courts.

What are parents’ rights?

The term “parents’ rights” has been thrown around often in legislative debates and campaign rallies over the past two years. Some have used it to bolster arguments for state restrictions on school curricula and materials related to racism, sexuality, and gender identity. Others have used it to advocate for systemic changes like expanding school choice through measures such as private school vouchers.

As of last June, 84 bills filed in 26 states sought to expand parents’ rights in schools, according to FutureEd, an education policy think tank affiliated with Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. The proposals are often general in nature, arguing that parents should have the right to review curriculum, speak at school board meetings, know how school budgets are being spent, protect their children’s privacy, and know what measures schools are taking to keep students safe, all of which parents are already legally able to do.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican and chair of the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee, said those five tenets will be included in a federal parents’ bill of rights that GOP House members plan to reintroduce this spring.

But the concept of parents’ rights isn’t new. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that parents have a voice in their child’s education in a handful of court cases, such as the 1925 Pierce v. Society of Sisters decision, in which the court stated that parents have the right “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

“There was a general sense that parents have rights to make decisions for their kids, including in education,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “But it was typically just thought of as a thing that you have.”

The parents’ rights policies being considered now seek to enshrine those rights in law or policies, McCluskey said.

How the parents’ rights movement came to be

The recent parents’ rights movement marks one moment in a long history of parent advocacy and organizing, FutureEd Director Thomas Toch said.

Traditionally, parents would engage with schools through participating in parent-teacher associations and fundraising, chaperoning field trips, and planning school events. Then the civil rights movement came, and parents of color started pushing for systemic changes in schools through school boards and eventually through court cases like Brown v. Board of Education, leading to racial integration in schools.

Black parents during the civil rights era were the first to make parent organizing political out of the need for better education for their children, Toch said. Decades later, parents of color in many communities have once again become well organized as they push for more experienced and effective teachers, more school funding, more public school options, and higher quality education materials.

But the pandemic brought a new group of conservative, and often white, parents into the fray, Toch said. They feel schools overstepped their bounds with COVID-19 mitigation measures like masks and by addressing race and sexuality in instruction.

“These sorts of flashpoints have emerged throughout history,” Toch said. “But today we see, in part because of the power of social media and the reach of the internet, a much more fast-moving conservative parental backlash to what they see as inappropriate government and curriculum initiatives.”

That rapid growth is what has kept the parents’ rights movement at the center of media attention. Well known groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have created political action committees to help conservative school board members get elected. They’ve also lobbied for state laws banning books with content about race, gender, and sexuality , and pushed for more oversight of what is being taught in schools.

“[Parents] feel trapped in the indoctrination of their children in public schools,” said Suzanne Gallagher, executive director of the Oregon-based group Parents’ Rights in Education.

Gallagher doesn’t see state-level parents’ bill of rights laws as the end of the road. She’d like to see more parents run for and be elected to school boards to prevent or change policies that don’t align with their values.

“If we’re putting pressure at that level we will begin to raise candidates who can then go to state legislatures and start changing things,” Gallagher said. “We need to make this the national crisis that it is.”

What the push for parents’ rights means for schools, practically

It would take parents bringing the issue to courts to understand the legal impact of recent parents’ rights policies on schools, McCluskey said.

“I don’t know that we have enough track record of these parents’ rights bills being implemented for a long time that we can say how they work out,” he said.

But the policies are likely to have an impact on how school and district leaders approach transparency surrounding curriculum and learning materials, McCluskey said.

Such a situation has played out in Ocean City, N.J., where district leaders faced parent outrage over new state sex education standards that included instruction about gender identity and sexuality.

Over 100 people participated in a protest against the standards last September in Ocean City, expressing concerns that they would lead to “indoctrination” and “grooming” in schools, the Ocean City Sentinel reported . The protest led the local city council to adopt a parents’ bill of rights policy that gives parents the power to review curriculum and learning materials used in classrooms and opt their kids out of curriculum “that the parent believes is in conflict with [their] conscience or sincerely held moral or religious beliefs.”

The city council has no governing control over the school district in Ocean City, so the parents’ bill of rights doesn’t change what the district can do legally, Superintendent Matthew Friedman said. But the situation led the Ocean City district to be “as transparent as possible” about the standards and lessons being taught in schools, he said. The district held parent academies where district leaders showed parents the state standards, how they’ve changed over the years, clips of videos that will be shown in classes, and concrete examples of lesson plans.

“I don’t take [the parents’ bill of rights] as a negative,” Friedman said. “I’m a huge proponent of the partnership between our district and parents and guardians because that is a recipe for success. So having a piece of paper to amplify or remind people of their rights, that’s great.”

The district’s school board doesn’t plan to adopt its own parents’ bill of rights, however, as a commitment to parents’ rights is already interwoven into district policies and practices, Friedman said.

Parents’ rights connect to a push for school choice

School choice initiatives— like new laws in Iowa and Utah establishing voucher programs that let parents use public dollars to pay for private school tuition—have risen in tandem with the push for parents’ rights.

Often, the choice bills are tied to the concept of parents’ rights, with politicians arguing that parents should have a right to choose other schools if they’re concerned about what is being taught in their local public schools and that the government should support that move.

“We’ve seen an intensification of efforts to legislate choice programs that use public monies for private schooling in recent years because of the frustration that many parents experienced during the pandemic with traditional schools having to go virtual,” Toch said. “I think advocates of vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts have thought to tap into that disaffection.”

Because parents’ rights policies call for more transparency, they’re likely to lead to more support for school choice, said McCluskey, who supports the expansion of school choice.

“If parents have more information and they have the ability to choose among schools, that gives them more to work with to decide what school is the best fit for their children,” he said.

Can parents’ rights benefit everyone?

While conservative activists and politicians have led the recent push for parents’ rights laws and policies, the policies themselves are written to apply to all parents.

“Providing parents with insights into what their schools are teaching their children and how and how well is reasonable,” Toch said. “Smart school administrators have long brought parents into decision-making via curriculum committees and other ways of encouraging them to share their perspectives and in other ways to give them a voice.”

But in many cases, parents’ rights advocates have spread misinformation about what’s happening in schools, Toch said, such as a hoax that claimed schools were providing litter boxes to students who identify as furries and claims that schools were teaching critical race theory. Those instances don’t benefit schools, he said.

The conversations surrounding parents’ rights also often fail to include voices from people of color, said Lakisha Young, executive director of The Oakland REACH, a parent support and organizing group for Black and brown families in Oakland, Calif. And recent media attention to the conservative parents’ rights has pushed the voices of parents of color into the background, she said.

Young doesn’t see parents’ rights policies helping her organization or others like it.

“I think all of these things are philosophical,” Young said. “I think they’re symbolic. Somebody is going to have to take [it] and make it mean something.”

The Oakland REACH has focused its efforts on building solutions for families as their children struggle with a lack of resources and support for basics like reading and math. Young hasn’t been bothered by the conservative parents’ rights movement, as she sees her fight for better schools for students of color as completely separate.

“Our communities are in perpetual fight mode and that’s the burden,” Young said. “Anytime these families want to drop that mantle, they can and their kids will be fine. They may not get everything they want. They may be upset or whatever, but their kids are going to be able to read and do math.”

Back in Isle of Wight in Virginia, Collick doesn’t expect much to change after the school board passed its policies restricting sexually explicit material. The chairman doesn’t believe there was sexually explicit material in the district to begin with, but sees the policies as a way to prevent students from being exposed to such material in the future.

The school board is preparing to consider another policy next month that would provide a framework for how teachers can discuss race and racism and specifically ban critical race theory . The policy would direct teachers to avoid sharing their political views in the classroom, which Collick believes will “create better critical thinkers.”

“We don’t want anyone to be taught that our government is inherently racist,” he said. “We want to make sure that everybody understands that they are of value to our society no matter what their race, ethnicity, sex, or anything else is.”

Collick believes the policy changes will ultimately benefit parents.

“Gov. Glenn Youngkin has made it clear the parents have the ultimate right to decide how their children are educated,” he said. “He’s not going to back off on that and neither are we.”

A version of this article appeared in the March 08, 2023 edition of Education Week as What the Push for Parents’ Rights Means for Schools

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