There is no such thing as an American public education. If a child goes to a public elementary or secondary school somewhere in America, everything that influences her likelihood of success—from the quality of her classroom teachers to the rigor of the standards she and the school are expected to reach—everything hinges on the happenstance and geography of her birth.

If she is born to a well-to-do family in an affluent New England town, the public schools there will reflect her fortune; if she is born into the poverty of the Deep South, her chances of going to college plummet dramatically. The reality is that there are different opportunities, different supports, different worlds for different kids here in America, even in a day and age where America’s children face more in common—international competition in high tech job markets, increasing demands on civic and social participation—than ever before. Yet our schools in America continue to train Californians to compete with Virginians and Georgians to compete with New Yorkers. So much, then, for the “American” dream.

And so much for America’s leaders who might claim to be the guarantors of the American dream. Eight students representing the more than 25,000 members of Our Education, a national non-profit youth organization dedicated to empowering the student voice in efforts to improve K-12 education, gathered in Washington, DC for two busy days of meetings with lawmakers from both parties and both houses of Congress to make the needs of students loud and clear. The results were not encouraging. Only four out of the forty Senators and Representatives who met with us declared their support for guaranteeing all American children the right to a high quality public education as a fundamental right. Put another way, 90% of the national officials asked did not say they would support a constitutional amendment to make high quality public education a right for every child.

But why is such a right necessary? This was a common refrain offered by the Representatives and Senators. After all, isn’t education supposed to be a matter of States rights?

The answer to this question depends on what one thinks is more important: the collective future of America’s children, or an ideological squabble over theoretical concepts of federalism and the role of government. Every day that our nation’s leaders prioritize the latter over the former is a day that exacts huge consequences on our children and our society as a whole—over one million high school students drop out of school each year, and gaps between U.S. students and international students cost the nation more than $2 trillion each year.

Support among American officials was a little bit more encouraging for national standards, legislative incentives to increase student representation on local school boards, and a federal Students Bill of Rights—the three other priorities expressed by Our Education’s student advocates. Nine elected officials declared their outright support for national standards; sixteen expressed support for federal legislation to encourage local student participation on school boards; and eleven were in favor of some form of Students Bill of Rights.

All told, two bottom lines are clear. First, without a major grassroots push to make public education a national priority, the current system of fifty state standards and 15,000 district providers of varying quality will continue to rule the day. This disjointed system will work cost the nation enormous sums in terms of economic, civic, and social deadweight loss, and it will short change millions of youth along the way. And second, no voice is better suited to stand up to change the status quo than the very young people who are affected by it in the first place.