In Detroit, a battle over the right to literacy

By Eliza Mills and Lizzie O’Leary

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(Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

“I feel like I’ve been cheated.”  It’s one of the first things Jamarria Hall said about his education at Osborn Evergreen Academy of Design and Alternative Energy, a Detroit public school. Hall is 17 years old, tall and gangly. He spent grades nine through 12 at Osborn, one of the five lowest performing schools in Detroit named in a federal suit against the state of Michigan. The class action lawsuit filed in September 2016 alleges that the public school system in Detroit denies children their constitutional right to literacy under the Fourteenth Amendment. 

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