I’ve spent the past two days at a conference hosted by the National Access Network, an alliance of organizations that works to support state-level legal efforts to increase educational opportunity.

The fact that such an organization exists, servicing a growing body of lawyers who have tried state-level education lawsuits in nearly all of the 50 states, may seem something of an anomaly to casual observers of civil rights in America. After all, we are barely more than a half-century removed from one of the most well-known lawsuits in American history, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which established as a matter of national jurisprudence that schools could no longer discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. So the concept of equal educational opportunity has long been at the very heart of the battle for civil rights.

The anomaly is that even as civil rights have become increasingly a matter of federal court action—from Miranda rights to free speech rights to other matters of equal protection—the progress of lawsuits on the federal level to further education as a civil right has long since ground to a halt. Whether it was the 1973 Rodriguez US Supreme Court decision which ruled that children do not have any kind of a right to education in the federal government, or the 2007 Seattle / Louisville decisions which effectively ended the legacy of Brown-initiated desegregation efforts, the federal courts have been a place where education advocates have gone only to get bad news over the past three decades.

In the wake of these negative rulings at the federal court level, a quietly impressive—and at times, heroic—group of lawyers have risen up to fight on behalf of children in the states instead. The basic nature of the challenges that these lawyers have brought is to question whether states, all of which have some limited clause requiring the provision of public education, have met a certain standard to provide educational opportunity to their children. Some of the lawsuits have fought for more equitable distribution of resources between wealthy and poor districts; others have argued instead for an adequate level of resources in every school district within a state, equity notwithstanding. The trial record is a mixed one, but the adequacy lawsuits have been particularly successful, winning 20 out of 28 state cases at the state Supreme Court level.

The recognition among lawyers that these state lawsuits are the “only game in town” has grown into a truism, with any discussion of raising a new federal level claim scorned upon as unrealistic. The problem with foregoing action at the federal level, be it legal or political action, is that it impels an end game where we have 50 different sets of standards, resources, and ultimately educational opportunities—and children will win or lose depending on what state they are born in. That might have been okay two hundred years ago or even a half century ago when youth in different states faced unique economic challenges, but that is no longer the case today.

All of this made my participation at the conference, representing Our Education’s 20,000+ students who believe that quality education ought to be a federal right guaranteed to all American children no matter what state they live in, something of an oddity. In a roomful of brilliant lawyers who have spent thousands upon thousands of hours fighting to force statehouses to do better by children but who have generally looked at the federal government without much hope, the idea of a constitutional amendment is at best naïvely optimistic, and at worst, a detraction of resources and energy away from more winnable strategies.

Nevertheless, there was a thoughtful discussion among the lawyers and a few organizers present about what might be wrought from a long-term campaign to amend the constitution to make quality education a federally guaranteed right. First and foremost was the understanding that a federal amendment campaign can create space for more moderate state level arguments and even some federal policy changes. Second is the recognition that one of the missing ingredients in today’s efforts to improve schools is a widespread, sustained level of organizing on the part of parents, students, educators, and other concerned citizens in support of change. A federal amendment can create energy and mobilize people in a way that other, more nuanced policy changes may be too complex to do. Lastly was some level of consensus that there does need to be a federal-level end game in mind, even among lawyers who have spent so much time fighting in the states. After all, if one accepts that we cannot afford to have dramatic inequality of educational opportunity in America along racial, socioeconomic, or gender lines, isn’t it equally evident and urgent that we fight to eradicate inequality based on geographic happenstance?