The basic argument is that the State of Michigan, which requires all children to attend school, shuffled Detroit students into classroom environments that undermined teachers’ efforts to provide meaningful educational benefits. The judges focused mainly on a specific claim that students had been denied “substantive due process.” But under Supreme Court precedent, there is also a strong argument that Michigan’s statewide education system violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Michigan’s Constitution — like the Constitution in virtually every state — requires “a system of free public elementary and secondary schools.” Michigan has generally fulfilled that obligation by granting local school boards the authority to run school systems. In the late 2000s, however, the state took direct control of the Detroit public schools. In so doing, it displaced Detroit’s elected Board of Education, as well as the local superintendent.

In the decade that followed, the bottom fell out from under Detroit’s schools. The schools physically deteriorated, as did students’ academic achievement. In every year that the National Assessment for Educational Progress has been administered since 2009, Detroit fourth and eighth graders have ranked dead last in the country when compared with students in other large urban districts. In each of those years, only about 5 percent of Detroit’s children were ranked proficient in math or literacy.

By any measure, the state’s takeover of Detroit schools was a failure. But it was also a constitutional abdication. Though the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not require absolute equality in educational outcomes, it has also emphasized — in Plyler v. Doe and other cases — that a basic education is of fundamental, constitutional importance. It’s true that the court has not yet decided the contours of a fundamental right to a “basic education.” But by any conceivable standard, children in Detroit were denied those basics when they were being taught by other children, in uncomfortable, even dangerous, conditions; when organized reading groups “read books at a fourth- and fifth-grade reading level, even though the students are in high school” or when even teachers themselves lack textbooks.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that even when states are under no obligation to provide a “fundamental right,” the Equal Protection Clause prohibits states from selectively facilitating those rights. States, for example, have no obligation to provide for appeals in child-custody cases. But because the right to parent one’s children is “fundamental,” a state cannot condition the right to appeal on a party’s ability to pay court costs.