Exposing the State's Evasion of the Education Clause--the all state standards requirement

Jvonkorff on Education has been working methodically to expose a decades long effort by the legislature and past governors to evade the forceful constitutional finding by the Minnesota Supreme Court, that the constitutional test of adequacy is an education that "meets all state standards."  In the last post, we showed that the State of Minnesota advanced the idea that Minnesota's funding system was, in 1990 constitutionally adequate, because all districts were meeting all state standards, which the state itself defined as all mandatory laws, regulations and policies applying to all school districts.  This position made sense then, and it makes sense now:  it posits that the educational system cannot be "thorough and efficient" if school districts don't have enough funding to meet the mandates imposed on them.  That's the logic behind the Skeen decision's "all state standards" decision.

This post continues the narrative from the prior post.  The state not only advocated that the test for an adequate education was state laws and regulation -- that is, state standards. We show also that the state told the court that the legislature had ordered new and more robust state standards.  By so doing, the Attorney General intentionally discouraged the Supreme Court from adopting court-crafted educational standards.   The Attorney General rebutted the potential claim that Minnesota's current standards weren't adequate enough to meet the needs of all students by touting the impending adoption of rigorous proficiency based standards.  

The state’s brief to the Skeen Court specifically informed the Court that Minnesota’s education standards were about to change.   Minnesota, the Court was told, was about to implement outcome based education, in which the state standards were achievement based, rather than input based:

Minnesota is a national leader in the implementation of outcome based education programs and learning methods.   …Outcome based education which focuses on what students need to know to function in society is regarded by state and national leaders as being essential to the success of students in the next century.   (State’s Skeen Brief at 14). 

In fact, in the early 1990’s Minnesota was on the brink of transitioning from an input-based system to an output-proficiency based system. The distinguishing characteristic of the old input based system is that state statutes and regulations did not focus on what children learned, but rather focused on the provision of state mandated inputs, essentially the number of hours and days of instruction using licensed teachers, the availability of libraries, textbooks and the like. As a result, in the 1990’s Minnesota was failing many students. When the state developed and administered the so-called “basic reading test,” the performance of lower income students and students of color were on the average far  below their advantaged peers.  The Department of education and legislature were taking a huge risk arguing that the existing state standards were sufficient to produce an adequate education. 

To ward off the possibility that the Supreme Court might not buy the argument that state standards should set the test for educational adequacy, the Attorney General told the Court that these new rigorous state standards were in the works. From 1993 to 1995, the Minnesota legislature implemented into law (Minn. Stat.120B.30 Subd.7c) a commitment "to establishing a rigorous, results-oriented graduation rule for Minnesota's public-school students .... starting with students beginning ninth grade in the 1996-97 school year." The new legislation would demand far more of school districts, and for the first time begin to require demonstration of proficiency. The legislature had already mandated these changes when briefs to the Supreme Court were filed, and the state’s brief to the Skeen Court specifically informed the Court that Minnesota’s education standards were about to change pursuant to the new outcome based education law.

The State argued the measure of adequacy was compliance with state standards, and told the Court that Minnesota was in transition to a new system of performance-based standards.   The test of quality education, the state explained, was not the inputs, but rather the actual performance of students. "State standards" meant the new proficiency standards.

To recap, the legislature and Minnesota Department of Education, defendants in the Skeen case, told the Court that Minnesota's educational system had a responsibility to low income students and touted the state's efforts in this regard.  They told the court that the test of an adequate education was the state laws and regulations imposing mandates on local districts, and they committed to make those standards more rigorous, based on performance instead of attendance.

When the Supreme Court decided Skeen, it knew, then, that Minnesota was transforming its system, legislatively, to an outcome based system, which measured and used proficiency outputs for state standards.  And the Court  had been told that achievement, not inputs, is “regarded by state and national leaders as being essential to the success of students in the next century.”  And, knowing that state standards were about to change, the Supreme Court held that state standards -- the mandates imposed by the legislature--constituted the definition of basic education.  Basic meant obtaining the education that the State requires of all districts—the requirement to meet all state standards. The Court then held that the constitution required the legislature to provide enough funding for all students to receive an education that met those state standards.

But there is more:  as the state moved to proficiency based standards, the Governor -- Pawlenty -- began an effort to establish a new school funding system that would meet the constitutional mandate, by providing the full dollar cost of meeting all state standards.  This story does not end well, however.  It ends with the decision of two governors, and possibly a third, to sidestep their constitutional responsibility, and the complete abdication by the education community to protect the rights of their students to an education that meets all state standards. Stay tuned for the next post.