Cruz Guzman Court of Appeals Decision Mangles the Constitutional Education Clause

In the last several blog posts Jvonkorff on Education has been writing about one of the most important education issues to face Minnesota's Courts in this century -- whether Minnesota's Education Clause is enforceable, and if so, under what circumstances.   The issue arises in the recently decided Cruz-Guzman case, in which plaintiffs are trying to force the state to integrate racially isolated metropolitan schools.    The Court of Appeals decision will soon be reviewed by the Minnesota Supreme Court, and the outcome could reaffirm, or destroy, one of Minnesota's most important constitutional rights.

The Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs are using the "Education Clause" of our constitution to require the state to unwind the growing racial isolation of many of our urban schools. Our Education clause requires the legislature to create a uniform, general thorough and efficient system of public education.

The issues in Cruz-Guzman are complicated, and frankly, the Court of Appeals decision in Cruz-Guzman contains what Jvonkorff on Education regards as series of critical errors.  But the issue is so complex, it may take me a few posts to develop a full understanding of what the Court said, and why.    

By now, some of you are already asking why a court would still be considering an effort to integrate racially unbalanced schools more than 50 years after the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in public education was a violation of the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment.  Wait a minute, you say, I though that the school integration issue was resolved back in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education.   And that would certainly be correct, but Brown v. Board of Education dealt with what we lawyers call "de jure" segregation, that is segregation by law.
 

In each of the cases considered by the Supreme Court in Brown, as the court explained:

  "minors of the Negro race,had been denied admission to schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to race."

The plaintiff children's schools refused to admit them, because of their race, even though they lived geographically in the attendance area for the school to which they were denied admission.   The Supreme Court recognized that using the law to deny children admission to a school because of their race, was a public statement alleging that they are inferior.  "To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race," the court stated,  "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."  The Court continued:

The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs: "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.

Brown v. Board of Education found that when the state or its instrumentalities use the law to separate the races, or keep kids from enrolling in a school based on race, that this is a violation of the 14th amendments "equal protection clause", which states:

No state shall ….deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws

.Thus, the fact that segregation was enforced by law had really two influences on the Brown court.   First, the Court found that separation of the races using the force of law was inherently unequal, because of the impact it had on children who were being intentionally separated.  Second, state action was required in order to trigger the fourteenth amendment, under the language of that amendment.    If a private school segregates, there is no state action, and so that would not be actionable under the fourteenth amendment.   (That's why state and federal laws have been enacted to bar racial discrimination in commerce: to remedy racial segregation in the private sphere.)   But to fall under the 14th amendment, state action is required.  As the law of Brown v Board of Education developed, federal courts refused to apply the Brown decision to schools that are racially isolated, but not as a result of the action of the state or its instrumentalities.

    That explains, then, why the plaintiffs in the Cruz-Guzman case decided to use the Minnesota constitutional Education Clause as a hook to try to combat the growing racial isolation of metropolitan area public schools.   The Education Clause states:

The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state.

    The problem with using this clause to force school districts to "desegregate" racially isolated schools, is that there is no direct language that naturally lends itself to extending the Brown v. Board of Education decision to schools that are racially isolated not by law, but by socio economic forces, or by choice.  The racially isolated schools targeted by Cruz-Guzman do not deny admission based on race.  So, the plaintiffs in Cruz-Guzman hit on the idea of alleging that the Education Clause requires Minnesota schools to provide all students with an adequate education, and that racially isolated schools fail to do that, because they are racially isolated. 

Their arguments had two elements.   First, they argued that racially isolated schools inherently provide an inadequate education, because diversity is a constitutionally required component of an adequate education.   Second, they argued that there is a cause and effect relationship between racial isolation and the educational outcomes of students:  that if you move a student from a racially isolated school to a diverse school, that student's education is more likely to be adequate.

    So now we have laid the foundation for understanding how the District Court and the Court of Appeals handled this claim, and why, in the course of deciding this issue, the Court of Appeals came to some rather remarkable and terribly wrong conclusions.   For that, we will have to wait for the next post in the series.  The answer involves a failure by the plaintiffs to found their claim on actual state standards in law, and a rather remarkable, and totally indefensible application of some careless language taken from a decision of Justice Scalia in a gerrymandering case. 

Cruz Guzman Decision Part 2 

Past Series on Education and Constitutional law:

McCleary v. State, Part I   McCleary v State Requires Legislature to Base Funding on Actual Cost
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part II
McCleary v State and Determining the Cost of Education
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part III
 McCleary v. State: what level of scrutiny is appropriate for legislative funding decisions
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part IV
Correlating the cost of education: fund the child.
Jvonkorff on Education  McCleary V. State Part V
Summary of Decision Network for Excellence
Washington Supreme Court Blog  
JvonKorff on Education, The Rose Decision 
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part I
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part II
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part III
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part IV