The case is riding a wave of bipartisan anxiety about a national lack of civic engagement and knowledge, from voter participation rates that are among the lowest in the developed world to pervasive disinformation on social media.

Fewer than half the states hold schools accountable for teaching civics, according to a review in 2016 by the Education Commission of the States. Only 23 percent of American eighth graders were proficient in civics on the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test that included questions on the Constitution and the roles of the various branches of government.

Rhode Island does not require schools to offer courses in government or civics, does not require standardized tests in those subjects or in history, and does not provide training for teachers in civics, the lawsuit says.

Beyond civics classes, the suit also argues that the state’s neediest children, particularly Latino immigrants and students with special needs, are failing to acquire the basic academic skills they need to effectively exercise their rights to free speech and voter participation. Among eighth grade English-language learners in 39 states, those in Rhode Island ranked last in math and second to last in reading on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The Rhode Island Department of Education declined to comment on the allegations in the suit.

The argument Aleita’s lawyers are making will be a heavy legal lift, as federal courts have, for four decades, been hostile to education inequality claims.

In the 1973 case San Antonio v. Rodriguez, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the State of Texas had not violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by funding schools in low-income neighborhoods at lower levels than schools in more affluent areas. In July, a federal judge in Michigan declined to challenge that precedent, ruling that “access to literacy” was not a constitutional right for schoolchildren in Detroit.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Rhode Island case believe that, by focusing on civics, they can take advantage of an opening in the Rodriguez ruling. Justice Lewis F. Powell, writing for the majority, agreed with a dissenter in the case, Justice Thurgood Marshall, that educational inequality might rise to the level of a constitutional violation if it prevented students from exercising their “right to speak and to vote.”