The case is a long shot. Late last week, the district-court judge in Detroit, Stephen J. Murphy, dismissed it. (The plaintiffs are appealing that dismissal.) Murphy essentially stated that he needed guidance from the Supreme Court if he were to weigh in on whether the students’ abysmal proficiency levels and learning conditions amount to a violation of the Constitution. He also concluded that the suit makes too many hard-to-prove causal claims. Even though Michigan subjects the predominantly black Detroit students to conditions to which it doesn’t subject, say, the predominantly white students of nearby Grosse Pointe, Murphy wrote, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that the state is treating the former group differently because of their race and thus violating the equal-protection clause. Another obstacle: The federal judiciary has grown particularly restrained on educational-rights issues in recent decades, in part because of the backlash from parents and others opposed to integration efforts that followed the wave of school-desegregation rulings in the 1970s and ’80s.

The fact that a suit like Gary B. v. Snyder was even filed says a lot about the state of education in the United States today. The case is indicative of a new chapter in American education in which advocates, frustrated with persistent achievement gaps and glaring disparities in school quality despite efforts to combat those problems, are resorting to unconventional means to bring about change. Similar to the recent wave of teachers’ strikes , the lawyers behind Gary B. v. Snyder seek to interrupt what the plaintiffs and their supporters argue is a status quo of educational unfairness not only in Detroit, but also across the country.

The lawyers behind Gary B. v. Snyder sought recourse through the federal system, explained Kristi Bowman, an education-law scholar at Michigan State University who cowrote an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, because Michigan’s courts have generally refused to take on education-rights cases. That’s largely because the language on education in its constitution is even more vague and limited than that in the constitutions of many other states, some of whose courts have been very active in adjudicating suits about how schools are funded. States including Arkansas and Delaware, for example, constitutionally require the provision of “general” or “efficient” education, while states such as Colorado and Idaho stipulate that education be “thorough” or “uniform.” A few states, like Virginia, mention quality. And one state—Montana—guarantees “equality of educational opportunity” for all its residents. It also requires in its statutes that all schools provide a sound foundation for literacy in kids’ early years.

In Michigan, though, children’s right to education is simply about access—schools essentially only need to be in operation for that right to be fulfilled—rather than about “education of a particular level or quality,” said Bowman, who also serves as MSU’s vice dean for academic affairs. As Matthew Patrick Shaw, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, put it, Michigan’s constitution contains “no aspiration to high quality, no aspiration to efficiency.”