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On Thursday, July 13th, a group of New Jersey parents filed a class action lawsuit against the New Jersey Commissioner of Education, 25 Boards of Education, and numerous other public officials.  The lawsuit, Crawford v. Davy, identifies a class of students attending the state’s 96 worst schools: those where more than 50% of tested students have failed both their language arts and math assessments for the past two years, or 75% of them have failed one of these assessments during the same time.  A little more than 60,000 students attend these schools. Just under 6% of the state’s k-12 population.

The lawsuit has caused quite a stir in the state’s education circles.  The New Jersey Education Association thinks it’s a “PR” stunt, quite possibly because their members are in front of these children in these educational deserts.  The school board president in Camden thinks the lawsuit is “outrageous.”  He doesn’t, however, believe it’s outrageous that there are nine schools under his leadership that meet the lawsuit’s criteria.  Not to mention so much dysfunction overall that Camden has become a case study in exactly how not to run a school district.  The Superintendent of one of the districts named recently said she doesn’t think the answer is to take away money from the public schools.  Another school board member in another district believes we all need to work together and make the public schools better, not abandon them.  A professor at a local university believes that neighboring districts won’t take these kids anyway.

Notice something about all of these assertions–something missing, perhaps?

If anything, Crawford v. Davy has given all the institutional players a chance to show just where their interests lie: with the institution.  The “something missing” to which I refer is any substantive reply to the complaint being brought to bear by these parents.  There is no discussion about Martin Luther King Middle in Trenton, where 80.4% of students can’t pass the language arts portion of the state assessment, and 92.8% can’t pass the math portion.  There is no discussion about it from Newark’s superintendent, where they have 24 schools on the list serving (or not serving) almost 15,000 students.

There is no discussion because there are no answers from these folks, unfortunately.  There is nothing past the lip service of more money and more time these people proffer in a state where we deny the reality of public school ineptitude in these districts so adamantly we tell children they are partially proficient when then can’t pass their assessments-to let them know they have failed would be too tragic.  Too tragic–for the adults, that is–to admit what their inability to educate has wrought on these children.

Crawford v. Davy, ultimately, asks both large and small questions.  Should a child be zoned into a school that, by all measure and metric, does not work?  Do standards actually mean anything to the education bureaucracy?  Is a constitutional guarantee to a certain level of education worth pursuing, or is it not worth the paper it’s printed on?  Indeed, is it okay to ruffle the feathers of the education establishment with such reductionist questions?  Questions that ask, quite simply, “Did our children get what we paid for?”

In these districts, at these schools, there are no other questions worth asking.

Derrell Bradford is deputy director of E3.