Why isn't there a constitutional right to education?

Because the United States Constitution is silent on the issue of education, details of its provision fall to the states. The result, argues sociologist and Partnership member Marta Tienda, are educational inequity and variation in quality that are eroding the US’s international competitiveness. During the thirteenth annual American Educational Research Association Brown Lecture in Education Research, she proposed restoring the social contract with “standards of public education funding and academic quality below which no school should fall” and called for a young people’s equivalent of the AARP to push for these guarantees.