The right to education in the United States of America

Authors

  • José Luis Martínez López-Muñiz

Keywords:

Education law, human rights, fundamental rights, north american constitutional law, international treaties

Abstract

Although the right to education is today largely recognized in the world, United States only recognize this right at the federal constitutional level in the primary aspect of its core, equivalent to the parents freedom to choose their children’s education, but not as social right, even less as inseparably bound to that freedom. On the other hand, despite of the intensity and generalisation of judicial conflicts aroused about it, only a third of the Union’s member States are guaranteeing under their constitutions a social right to education, and exclusively as a right to a public school. These pages analyze this legal reality and the impact that the ratification of some international treaties by the United States has or could have on it.