Rights claims are nearly ubiquitous in both educational theory and politics, even though the entitlements that philosophers and advocates champion usually outstrip what courts recognize as legal rights. Whatever their legal merit, rights claims have moral weight of their own. Given the growing prevalence of educational rights claims in theory and in practice, the philosophical underpinnings and implications of such claims warrant renewed attention. And focusing a theoretical lens on educational rights is especially important now as a complement to philosophers recent and growing attention to other types of welfare rights. Philosophers and political theorists have dedicated a great deal of attention to other social goods that might count as rights in a just democracy, including rights to health care and basic income.3 Yet existing literature tends not to focus much on education, despite its concern with advancing equal citizenship. And although many educational theorists use the language of rights to advance a vision of civic education or a particular distribution of educational resources, rights are often in the background of their analyses, too.