In the US, we are famously guaranteed some rights, such as a right to free speech, assembly, press, and even to bear arms, just to name a few. But one such right not named in our Constitution is a right to education. In some international forums, a right to education has been named a human right, and one that a developed country should have no issues supporting. Yet, a explicit right to education does not exist here.
A key part of that, is that all children receive a basic (K-12) education without discrimination. That is where the right to education as it stands currently, falls into such disarray in the United States. In fact, public schools are infamously unequal across the country. This was codified in the 1972 Supreme Court case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. Essentially, because school districts in the U.S. are funded in large part through property taxes of the area they are in, schools in even adjacent municipalities can lead to different amounts of funding per student. That was the crux of the argument, as two neighboring schools were receiving very different income streams due to the respective property values in their neighborhoods, and this was shown to coexist with disparate educational outcomes for students from both schools.
Now, we know that our cities and major urban areas in the US are not perfect. There can often (and especially in my home city of Austin) be significant disparities between different socio-economic groups, which tend to self-segregate residentially. Thus, the schools in the poorer parts of town have less funding than schools in the wealthier parts of the city, when often a resource reversal may even be more appropriate. While this is not where I am going to argue a policy goal, the ideal scenario in which this system would be perfect would be a completely mixed residential setup, such that the current property tax scheme would fund all schools (per student) equally. However, this is not the case, and many have brought up that legally mandating a right to education may be the only way to force the Supreme Court to resists the legality of their previous decision.
Proponents say that it will increase educational outcomes for everybody but the opposition to this says that a right to education will not change outcomes at all because funding is not the most critical factor is education outcomes for students. Regardless, there needs to be some kind of critical look at how schools are being funded in order to prevent the massive modern say disparities in educational outcomes.