Remembering the Pawlenty Education Task Force Finance Report

The purpose of this post is to summarize some of the key points one can derive from the 2004 Minnesota education finance commission report, Inve$ting in our Future (2004) and the costing study which followed, Estimating the Cost of an Adequate Education in Minnesota (2006).   Together, the two reports provide powerful ammunition to support the conclusion that Minnesota’s public education finance system is constitutionally inadequate. 

• The two reports taken together suggest that the deficit in special education funding is only part of the total shortfall in state funding required to meet constitutional standards and the actual K-12 education budget.  The shortfall in special education funding is $1.5 billion per biennium, and the Task Force Report is convincing evidence that the constitutional shortfall is greater than that.   
• The two reports support the conclusion that even as of 2006, the shortfall in constitutionally adequate funding was over $2 billion per biennium.  Since 2006, the legislature has added major costly requirements to mandatory requirements in the world’s best workforce, LEAPS Act, and dyslexia law, and there is every reason to believe that the under-funding deficit is even higher today.   
• The two reports support the position that to educate students with higher educational needs, the state must fund additional learning time – more learning time during the school day, and summer learning – for the students with higher educational needs. 
• The two reports support a conclusion that districts with high concentrations of students with higher learning needs disproportionately carry the burden the state's  inadequate funding.
 

In the 1990's there had been a growing recognition that when a state converts to a proficiency based education system, it is essential to adjust state funding to meet the financial challenges required to educate students with higher educational needs to higher levels of proficiency.   In 1998, the National Conference of Legislatures urged its members to shift school finance to an adequacy approach which would require substantially  more funding to educate children with higher educational needs.  (Educational Adequacy: Building an Adequate School Finance System).   

Equal funding among school districts was not a sufficient measure of constitutional adequacy, the Report explained:

An adequate school finance system should provide for and ensure the use of sufficient funds necessary to develop and maintain the needed capacity to provide every student with a reasonable opportunity to accomplish expected education objectives that are clearly articulated and measurable.

 Shortly after assuming the governorship, Governor Pawlenty initiated a school funding task force to study Minnesota's current funding system and to make recommendations on the changes in our school finance system necessary to support a proficiency based regimen. 

In 2004, the Minnesota Task Force issued its report “Inve$ting in our Future.”   (You can read the report itself by clicking on the hyperlink. ) Among other things the Investing in our Future report called for “a rationally determined, learning-linked, student-oriented and cost-based Instructional Services Allocation”.  The Report explained:

The Instructional Services Allocation (ISA) should be an annual revenue amount sufficient to cover full dollar costs of ensuring Minnesota public school students have an opportunity to achieve state specified academic standards. These standards are connected to a comprehensive instructional program offered by schools.

This formula should take into account the added costs included with relevant characteristics of each student (e.g., disabilities, poverty, school readiness, English language learners, and student mobility). In addition, Minnesota’s new funding formula should compensate districts for cost factors beyond their control (e.g., student population sparsity, technology access, and higher costs of living).

If the Governor had followed the task force recommendation, he might have led Minnesota's executive and legislative branches to transform Minnesota's school finance system to a cost based system.  To do that, it would have been necessary to develop data to determine the costs requisite to teach students with higher educational needs and then to advance budgets that included that cost information.  But the Governor, who by then had Presidential ambitions, chose to terminate the Commission's work and pursue a very different course.  In the next post, we'll look in more detail at the Task Force's findings and their implications for Minnesota's current school finance system.  

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