Joshua E. Weishart (West Virginia University – College of Law; West Virginia University – John D. Rockefeller School of Policy and Politics) has posted The Compromised Right to Education? (71 Stanford Law Review Online 123 (2018)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This essay responds to Derek Black, The Constitutional Compromise to Guarantee Education, 70 Stanford Law Review 735 (2018), which advances an originalist theory for recognition of a federal right to education. Black argues that Congress intended to guarantee education as a federal right of state citizenship through the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. I question whether the relevant history is susceptible to the another inference, one that situates education a right of both state and national citizenship. I also question whether recognition of a federal right would have the unintended consequence of devaluing existing state education rights.