Integration Does not Close the Gap---unless it also delivers an adequate education

Proficiency Percentages 2018 Minnesota's Report Card

School integration and school busing is back in the news, as a result of the Harris-Biden dust-up in the recent debates.  So-called "forced busing" is a hot-button deeply emotional issue, easy to exploit politically, but its an issue from the past that side-tracks our attention from solutions for the major crisis in education, our failure to provide adequate resources for the education of students of color, English language learners, students with disabilities, and lower income students.  Integration is an important value, of course, but 50 years after Brown v Board of Education, we aren't meeting our constitutional responsibility to educate children wherever they are. 

In his recent article in Atlantic, Wil Stancil, a prominent and respected advocate for integration, touts the integration of American suburbs.  That integration is a good thing, of course, but the most pressing educational issue in Minnesota's suburbs and in the metro area, by far, is our failure to provide an adequate education to children wherever they are.  At the top of this blog, we've posted  the last published Minnesota Department of Education proficiency statistics for selected Minnesota suburbs, for Minneapolis and my own district, St. Cloud.  I've also included proficiency percentages for an all-black charter school, Higher Ground Academies.  We've removed English language learners from the reported black scores to achieve comparability.

The proficiency percentages are symptoms of our failure to meet our constitutional responsibility to students of color, whether in integrated schools or not.  A similar gap exists between higher and lower income students, and native English speakers and non-English speakers.  There is an ongoing technical debate as to whether integration is statistically associated with (or even causes) better education.  Possibly, some of the 11 percentage point difference in reading and 7 point difference in math between Minneapolis and Osseo is accounted for by integration, but that would be averting our gaze from the central feature of what these statistics display.   Integrated or not, Minnesota is failing these students, and it is high time we looked at whether we are too comfortable in Minnesota in delivering education to the students that Minnesota is leaving behind with too little resources deployed in the same old way. 

Higher Ground is serving entirely black students.  Their poverty rate is high.   The school's special education rate is quite low, that is true.   But if we examine what Higher Ground is doing, we find a school that has adopted many of the strategies that research calls for to address the needs of their students.  Big ideas, collaboration, supervision, meaningful professional learning communities, significant extra learning time offered for students to accelerate learning and to catch up, a dedication to students as leaders and scholars and a school wide aspiration to reach post-secondary education. While the organizing principle at Higher Ground is different, in many respects it is using the techniques we described in our post about Brooke East Boston, the respected charter in Boston. 

Higher Ground is telling us something: Minnesota is failing students of color, lower income students and English language learners because of systemic failure.  These are students who can learn far more successfully than we recognize.  We aren't deploying enough resources to these students, and we aren't using the strategies that actually work in a robust and systemic way.   Its not that Higher Ground is a charter school, and its certainly not because it serves a single race, its because they are implementing policies, practices, and procedures that actually work.   Minnesota has become too comfortable with doing things the same way, and letting kids fall behind.    If we are prepared to brag about the integration of our schools, while we watch them fail too many students, there is something deeply wrong with Minnesota's education community and the those who advocate for children.

If Minnesota wants to abide by its constitutional responsibility, we must do three things.  We must comply with the constitutional mandate of providing all students with sufficient resources necessary to meet all state standards.  We must make sure that when adequate resources are provided to the districts and schools that serve them, those resources are actually deployed to implement necessary change, to "go big" with change, as former superintendent Peter Hutchinson called for.  We must use fix the institutional straightjackets that prevent Minnesota's public school districts from implementing the instructional strategies utilized by schools like Higher Grounds, so that outstanding charters no longer have a monopoly on systemic change.  We have in Minnesota public school districts some leaders who recognize the need for this change, leaders who are trying to implement necessary change that works, with one hand tied behind their backs. 

Minnesota needs to start putting these children first, and while integration is a laudable objective, we need to face the fact that without systemic change, we are going to continue to fail far too many children whether they are integrated or not.

A word about using Proficiency Scores

Proficiency scores provide a one window on student performance.  One must avoid jumping to conclusions based on a set of scores, especially without studying the context deeply.   The scores provided above do certainly tell us something about achievement gaps, for example.  They do invite us to question whether it would be wise under current circumstances to undermine the success of schools like Higher Ground Academies.   However, it would be a mistake to compare the test scores for students from one school to another and jump to conclusions.  Special education students are not extracted from these scores, and there is a significant difference among schools in that category.  The poverty rates for white students vary from one school district to another.   And so on.  A set of test score reports is a starting point, not the ending point, for a longer inquiry. 

School Districts Don't Use New Money Effectively--Too Bad There's Nothing we Can Do =)

In our last post, we listed a number of articles and books discussing whether increases in school funding result in measurable improvement in achievement.   There is an entire branch of scholarly research seeking to use statistical measures for this purpose.  Stanford's Hanushek is the most shamelessly aggressive at attempting to propagate the idea that increasing school funding has little, if any measurable impact on student performance.  More recently, Baker and many others, have sought to show through elaborate statistical measures that, in fact, "Money Matters."   Baker, Does Money Matter in Education, (2016 Shanker Inst, 2d Edition).  

A rather strange line of argument in this vein suggests that we should not increase school funding, because it will not be properly spent.  This theory draws on evidence that when school districts are actually supplied with significant funding increases, they don't spend it where it can do the most good. It follows, the argument goes, it is wasteful to appropriate significantly more money to public education, because powerful forces allocate that money away from the students who need it the most.

Let's unpack that argument to see if it really makes sense.  Let's imagine the governor and legislative leadership sitting at the table discussing the profound failure of their state's school system to meet the educational needs of a large group of students who are being left behind.  A proponent of more spending urges a significant increase in funding to solve this problem.  The others shout the proposal down:  even if we give "them" more money, they say, "they will not spend it where it is needed the most."  The advocate for more funding stands responds:

"wait a minute, we are the ones who decide where the money goes.   When we give them significantly more money, we can tell them that they have to use it for programs that work.  We aren't helpless: we are in charge.   Let's give school districts more money, but only if they use it effectively." 

No, the others argue, we can't do that.   Hanushek and others have done statistical studies that prove that we are powerless to make that happen.  They've studied Ohio and Kentucky, and they've proven that its simply inevitable that money will not be used efficiently.  Its a fundamental principle of American education, proven by statistics, that throwing more money at education will simply wind up wasting money.   That's too bad, the Governor says.  We'd like to make things better for our children, but we just don't know how to make our school districts use it the way we want them to.

A more sophisticated version of this idea, that more money won't work, because it will be reallocated where it is not needed is found in an otherwise outstanding work by Odden and Archibald:  Dr. Allan R. Odden;Sarah J. Archibald. Doubling Student Performance: . . . And Finding the Resources to Do It (pp. x-xi). Kindle Edition.  They write:

from assessing the research on the education system's use of new resources over time, Odden and Picus (2008) concluded that the education system has used the bulk of new resources for programs outside the core instructional program-not the best strategy if the goal is to dramatically improve student performance in core subjects.

Moreover:

 from recent studies of use of funds after an adequacy-oriented school finance reform (Mangan, 2007; Mangan, Odden, & Picus, 2007; Odden, Picus, Aportela, Mangan, & Goetz, 2008), it also seems schools and districts do not use new resources for strategies that we have concluded will have the largest impact on improvements in student learning-such as ongoing professional development with instructional coaches, tutoring for struggling students, and extended learning time.

This is the "we are the powerless" excuse--or should we say rationalization-- for under-funding public education.  It's as if the legislature and governor aren't constitutionally charged with the administration of the public schools.  Oh dear, we can't give them more money, because we aren't smart enough to require that they use it for "strategies that...will have the largest impact on improvements in student learning...." 

Odden, otherwise one of the most thoughtful writers on school funding exclaims:

if districts in the top half of spending received more funds, they would retain all or nearly all of their current programs and practices and potentially layer new initiatives on top-a strategy that would not result in dramatic improvements in student learning.

If the state sends money needed to implement necessary reforms to districts, but they misuse it, who is to blame after all.   Starving children of a critical education, because we at the legislature lack the fortitude and creativity to require that adequate funding be used efficiently, is legislative malpractice.  An article by Gordon suggests an other reason for this legislative malpractice:  that the legislators and Governors don't really care about the students who are getting left behind to demand that money be properly directed.   She writes:

I find that school revenues and spending initially experience dollar-for-dollar increases with Title I, but that—over time— school districts’ revenues respond, significantly offsetting the impact of the Title I revenue. Three years after receiving increases in Title I, poor school districts have little to no increases in school spending over what would have been the case without the Title I increase.  Gordon, Do federal grants boost school spending? Evidence from Title I Journal of Public Economics 88 (2004) 1771– 1792

Please, don't tell me that we can't fund our schools properly, because they will merely waste the money.   Minnesota's constitution demands that the legislature establish a thorough and efficient system of public education.   There's no room in the language "thorough and efficient" for evading the constitutional responsibility by asserting that the system that the legislature has established in unfit to implement the programs strategically necessary to meet its intended purpose. 

In the next post, we'll analyze some of the forces, and some of the rationalizations for failing to allocate more money to the programs that do the most good, and in subsequent posts, we'll describe a strategy designed to circumvent the inefficient allocation of new resources in creative ways. 

Resources on the Costing K-12 Education

Here is a list of some of the many academic research pieces on costing K-12 education.

Baker, School Finance and Courts: Does Reform Matter, and How Can We Tell? (2011) (Teachers College Record Volume 113, Number 11)

The Real Shame of the Nation The Causes and Consequences of Interstate Inequity in Public School Investments (Education Law Center) This paper presents, for the first time, a new National Education Cost Model (NECM) to better understand the relative adequacy of state investments in public schooling toward achieving common outcome goals. Although it purports to present a measure of funding adequacy, in fact, it presents a statistical estimate regarding adequacy to bring students to average performance, not to state standards or proficiency.

Baker, Does Money Matter in Education, (2016 Shanker Inst, 2d Edition) This second edition policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education. It includes research released since the original brief in 2012 and covers a handful of additional topics. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn’t make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality.

 Borman, Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity Data,   Our results suggest that schools do indeed matter, in that when one examines the outcomes across the national sample of schools, fully 40% of the differences in achievement can be found between schools. (2010)

Committee on Education Finance, National Academy of Sciences,  Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance This volume of background papers was prepared in connection with one part of the committee's study. The volume includes eight papers commissioned by the committee to inform its discussions about equity and adequacy in education finance, two of the issues it was specifically charged to address. (online version of Ladd, et al, below)

Downes, What Is Adequate? Operationalizing the Concept of Adequacy for New York (2004)The ultimate goal of this discussion is to suggest how existing methodologies could be combined to produce a defensible, replicable, and understandable method for determining adequacy.

Duncome, Estimating the Cost of an Adequate Education in New York (Syracuse Univ 2002) The objective of this study is to develop estimates of the costs of financing the achievement of higher standards. The key tools employed to estimate the cost of adequacy are education cost functions and cost of education indexes.

Duncome and Yinger, How Much More Does a Disadvantaged Student Cost? (Syracuse Univ. 2003) This paper provides a guide to statistically based methods for estimating the extra costs of  educating disadvantaged students, shows how these methods are related, and compares state aid programs that account for these costs in different ways.

Dynarski, It's Not Nothing, The role of Money in Improving Education (Brookings, 2017) Summarizes statistical evidence from Jackson and LaFortune that significant increases in funding translate into improved educational results.  Argues that short term increments do not do so.  

Equity and Excellence Commission, For Each and Every Child, (2013)The commission’s charge was to provide advice to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Education on the disparities in meaningful educational opportunities that give rise to the achievement gap, with a focus on systems of finance, and to recommend ways in which federal policies could address such disparities.

Hyman, Does Money Matter in the Long Run?   American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 9 (4): 256-80.  Using statistical techniques, the author attempts to determine whether additional primary school spending had a long term impact on the success of students as measured by post-secondary enrollment.  Students in the study population exposed to $1,000 (ten percent) more spending were three percentage points (seven percent) more likely to enroll in college and 2.3 percentage points (eleven percent) more likely to earn a postsecondary degree. As found in other recent studies (e.g., Cascio et al., 2013), the author also provides evidence that local government responses to state
or federal education policies can result in bene ts accruing to students who may not have been the intended beneficiaries of the policy.

Ladd, et al,  Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance, (National Academies Press, 1999) In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Congress requested a major study of the U.S. system of elementary and secondary education finance. In response to this request, the National Research Council (NRC) set up the Committee on Education Finance to undertake the study. The committee was established within the NRC’s Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.

LaFortune, SCHOOL FINANCE REFORM AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016)  Using an event study research design that exploits the apparent randomness of reform timing, we show that reforms lead to sharp, immediate, and sustained increases in spending in low-income school districts. Using representative samples from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, we find that reforms cause increases in the achievement of students in these districts, phasing in gradually over the years following the reform. The implied effect of school resources on educational achievement is large.

Odden, Doubling Student Performance, and Finding the Resources to Do it, (2009)  Argues that major improvements in student performance may be accomplished by reallocating resources. Asserts that new funding, when provided to school districts is not allocated to the programs and strategies most likely to improve achievement for students who are lagging behind. 

Yinger, Helping Children Left Behind, State Aid and the Pursuit of Educational Equity. (2004 MIT Press)  An overview and five case studies of school finance reform; a resource for scholars, public officials, and others interested in education finance reform.  (395 Pages)

Yinger, How Equitable is the School Finance System in New York State(Syracuse 2019) This policy brief provides an overview and evaluation of the education finance system in New York State. Argues that the State needs a costing entity to provide accurate costing.  Discusses the failure of New York to maintain the funding requirements called for in judicial decisions and provides costing analysis of the New York student weighting system. 

If we funded public utilities as we do schools, the electrical grid would fail

A public school system is very much like a public utility, except that public education gets its revenues from the state, whereas an electrical public utility gets its revenues from its customers, at rates that are set by the public utility commission.  Both the public utility and public education are required to provide service at a level set by the state.   The public utility's service requirements are set by state law, by public utility commission regulations and by the utility's franchise agreements.  Public education is required to provide service at a level state by the state also, what in past blog posts we have required by state standards. But public education revenues, unlike public utility revenues, are set in blatant disregard of cost. 

The difference between the two system is a measure of what we really value.  Neither public schools nor public utilities are free to decide unilaterally the quality of public services they choose to provide.  If their revenues are set permanently below the costs of providing state required services, they will go broke eventually, or to avoid going broke they must violate the state minimum services requirements.   In both cases, constitutional law guarantees relief in theory, but while both state and public utilities take this obligation very seriously for utlities, frankly, the state and the education establishment just look the other way, when it comes to the constitutional obligation to fully fund public education. 

In the case of public utilities, the moment that the state attempts to force them to provide service at levels below cost, the utility will seek prompt relief, and most certainly they will receive it.  It is accepted as a given that public utilities have a right to judicial relief if the state or its public utility system attempts to force a utility to operate at a loss.   Moreover, if the public utility attempts to evade its minimum service requirement, the state will immediately intervene.   Public utilities, although privately owned, are franchised by the government and regarded as providing an essential service entitling the state to regulate prices and terms of services.  Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113, 125 (1877).

 Nobody expects public utilities (electricity, natural gas, for example) to deliver their products for less than the cost of production.   That would be silly wouldn't it!  It costs the electric company different amounts to serve different customers.  Some customers are in more remote rural areas and the cost per customer of serving them is high; some customers are bunched up together, and the cost of them is relatively low.   Because the electric company is a public utility, it must serve all of these customers at fair and reasonable rates set by the public utility commission, and when the commission sets rates, if it sets some rates too low to recover costs, it must make sure that the other rates are high enough to cover the loss.   It is possible to require a public utility to "cross subsidize" some customers, but it is unconstitutional to make the public utility to do so unless the total of all revenues cover the total of all costs plus a reasonable rate of return. 

To assure that government will not commit the unpardonable sin of forcing a public utility from operating at a loss, a highly developed legal and administrative framework has been developed to protect the consumers and utilities. If a public utility fails to receive adequate funding, it will stop investing in necessary infrastructure.
In the case of public utilities rates are set by the Public Utilities Commission.  However, the state must not set rates so low that the utility cannot recover enough revenues to cover its costs plus a reasonable rate of return.   The US Supreme Court has held:  

In each case, the our constitutional law requires the government to assure adequate revenues to cover the cost of meeting the respective service requirements. In the case of public utilities, the fifth and fourteenth amendment of the federal constitution and corresponding state constitutional protections demand that regulators must assure that public utilities receive "enough revenue not only for operating expenses but also for the capital costs of the business. These include service on the debt and dividends on the stock .... By that standard the return to the equity owner should be commensurate with returns on investments in other enterprises having corresponding risks. FPC v Hope Natural Gas (1944)

Thus, if the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission forced Xcel Energy, or some other public utility to deliver electricity or natural gas at below cost, we'd all regard that is completely ridiculous.   Moreover, a rate order implementing such a foolish policy would be soon overturned without hesitation by the state or federal courts.  Its a fundamental economic concept that nobody, government or private enterprise can deliver products or services at a loss, and in the public utility context, doing that is unconstitutional.  Enforcement of this principle is not at all controversial; the courts have been applying this standard persistently and with rigor for more than a century. This obvious principle is applicable everywhere, except in public education, where the government expects schools to deliver an state standard education without regard to cost.

The Courts will not let government set total revenues of a public utility based on politics or by pulling the rates out of thin air.   Those rates are subject to rigorous judicial review, and in order to sustain the rates set by the state, the state must show that it has carefully investigated those rates, and that the ultimate rate decision has been based on data and competent economic and accounting judgments.  (See Mitchell Hamline Law Review)  The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has a staff of 20 dedicated to economic and financial analysis.  Assuring that the utility receives its full cost of service plus an adequate rate of return is serious business, and a trained staff conducts rate reviews with meticulous caser.  It is critical to the economy of the state that the utility can serve all of its customers, that the utility can afford to invest in plant and equipment, and that investors can rely upon receiving an adequate rate of return.

Electricity  is important to Minnesota and were the state to backslide, a stable of high-priced lawyers would bring a major case to set things right. The appellate courts would have no trouble striking down an attempt to regulate utilities without regard to cost.  No such nonsense would be tolerated.  If Minnesota treated public utilities like public schools, our electrical service would begin to fail, our electrical infrastructure would depreciate, but before that would happen, the courts would set things right.   The staff of 20 experts in the public utility commission, trained costing and financial experts are there to make absolutely sure that this never happens.   Under-funding electricity is illegal and unconstitutional and not to be tolerated.

The difference between the way that we fund public schools and public utilities is stark.  Like public utilities, public schools have an obligation to provide educational services that meet state standards.   Statutes, (which we call state standards), establish what school districts must provide.  The Minnesota constitution demands that school districts provide an adequate education, and our Supreme Court has twice held that this means that the legislature must provide sufficient funding to districts to meet all state standards for all students. However, the Minnesota department of education has nobody on staff dedicated to tracking the cost of providing state required education.  The state is meeting its obligation to meet all state standards purposely blindfolded. 

Twenty trained public utility commission experts are dedicated to assuring that public utilities are fully funded.  Nobody at the Department of Education is even trying. Universities don't train people to provide costing information on public education; there is no demand for that expertise. When so-called experts attempt to offer opinions on the topic, they base their opinions on what underfunded schools are already doing, instead of calculating the cost of delivering an education that meets state standards, but in Minnesota we don't even listen to them.  As with public utilities, some education customers are more costly to serve than others.   But the state legislature and its attorneys contend that the cost of those students is an "extra cost" which need not be included in the calculation of what schools need.  Honestly, they do.  This is a proposition they would not dare inflict upon public utilities, because judges would dismiss their position as laughable.

 Public schools are really a form of public utilities.  Both public schools and public utilities provide important necessary public services.  Both are required to provide those services to all comers.   And either one would surely fail if required to deliver services at below cost.    As with school districts, the government determines the reimbursement rate for public utilities.  However, think what would happen if the State tried to set utility rates in the same way that it set funding for public education---in other words, by ignoring the cost of providing mandated services? (Or, to rephrase the issue:  if the State can set public utility rates by determining the cost of electricity or natural gas, why shouldn't it be able to do the same with the cost of public education)

Suppose, for example,  the state decided to cut NSP's electric utility rates by 20% next year, just because Minnesota families are overburdened with medical costs, taxes and other expenses?  Suppose the state created a committee at the Public Utility Commission to examine rates, but the committee was ordered to ignore the true cost of producing electricity!  Would that be constitutional?  That's what Minnesota has been doing in public education for over two decades.  

Clearly, our Courts would not allow the State to set utility rates at a level below the cost of providing service! Indeed, if the State attempted to force public utilities to deliver electricity in return for revenues below the cost of service, the state or federal courts would strike those rates down as unconstitutional, because it is just not possible to deliver a product for less than cost, and you can't rationally set rates, unless  you have a system that determines the rates based on real hard facts. 

To be a bit more technical, public utility rate setting actually begins by determining the public utility's necessary operating expenses.   The Public Utility Commission here in Minnesota approves rates based on a rigorous examination of the actual cost of delivering the required service, for example, natural gas or electricity.   As Wikipedia explains,the traditional rate formula is intended to produce a utility's revenue requirement:  R = O + (V - D)r   In this formula, R is the utility's total revenue requirement or rate level. The R is the total amount of money a regulator allows a utility to earn.   O is the utility's operating expenses.  Notice that where public utilities are concerned, the starting point for determining the revenues is the total operating costs required by the utility.   If the legislature proposed to set revenues for electric companies or natural gas companies without determining their total operating costs, why the legislature would be the laughing stock of the nation, and a lawsuit would result in an immediate injunction.   You can't run a power business or a natural gas distribution business if you're not allowed to cover your expenses.    V in the formula is the gross value of the utility's tangible and intangible property.   r is the rate of return a utility is allowed to earn on its capital investment or on its rate base.    The formula recognizes that it is impossible to maintain the physical plant necessary to run a public utility, unless the utility is provided with sufficient revenues not only to cover operating costs,  but also to provide enough money to pay for the equipment needed to deliver the service.    As Wikipedia explains:

"A [public utility's operating expenses, such as wages, salaries, supplies, maintenance, taxes, and research and development, must be recouped if the utility is to stay operational. Operating costs are most often the largest component of the revenue requirement, and the easiest to determine. Although both agencies and courts have the legal authority to supervise the utility's management, they will not substitute their judgment unless there is an abuse of managerial discretion.

Public utilities are protected by a process that assures that their right to full funding of their operations, plus a substantial rate of return sufficient to attract investment to build necessary infrastructure, is guaranteed.   The way it works is that the utility prepares a cost estimate which sets out the various component costs required to cover their costs plus a reasonable profit.  

The State administrative agency that regulates utilities reviews those costs and reduces them where they are unreasonable through an administrative process that guarantees the utility due process.  
In other words, when setting power or natural gas rates, the management of the public utility informs the state utility commission what the reasonable expenses of the utility are going to be, and the state basically accepts that judgment.  But actually public utility rate-setting requires the State to assure that the utility's expenses are completely covered  by revenues, with profit to spare. 

Public utilities expect that before their revenues are determined by the State using experts in evaluating the true costs of delivering electricity must make a fair and rational determination of the necessary revenues.   Under threat of constitutional litigation, the state has carefully crafted an administrative process, implemented by staff trained in the economics of costing public utility services, to determine the cost of service, and if the state ever attempts to make a public utility conduct its business at less than cost, the court will most certainly strike that attempt down.

Periodically, I've posted opinions that argue that Minnesota's school finance system is unconstitutional because it requires school districts to deliver mandated services, but fails to provide the funding necessary to deliver those services.   Links to some of those posts are listed below at the bottom of this post.   Suppose your spouse demanded that you purchase a lake home on Gull Lake on two acres of forested land with three fancy bedrooms, a family room and two modern bathrooms, but insisted that you "keep the price under $125,000."    That would be unreasonable, wouldn't it, because you can't budget $125,000 to buy a house with specifications for many times that price.   You'd have to figure out what a house like that costs, before you can set your budget.    The same is true with regard to public education.   You can specify how much a school district will have to spend per student.  Or, you can specify what the school district must accomplish:  what quality of education it must produce in its students.  But you can't specify revenue and results, unless you assure that the revenue is sufficient to get the job done. 

In Minnesota, however, the State makes absolutely no effort to determine the necessary operating expenses. As I pointed out in an October post, a 2004 Minnesota Education Finance Reform Task Force recommended that our public schools should be funded based upon a rationally determined, learning-linked, student-oriented and cost-based Instructional Services Allocation. (See Inve$ting in our Future, Seeking a fair, understandable and accountable, twenty-first century education finance system for Minnesota, Recommendation.  But the state terminated the task force designated to establish the reasonable cost of mandated services. 

In 2011 the Governor established a new task force, he told the committee not to try to determine the cost of providing state mandated services.   In other words, like Governor Pawlenty before him, the Governor decided that it would be inconvenient for the public to find out how much state revenues it would actually require to deliver the services that the State requires. 

If it is unconstitutional to order public utilities to deliver electricity at below cost, how can it be constitutional to order public school districts to deliver education at below cost, while providing them with no taxing power to meet state requirements?    I'm not suggesting that the same Constitutional law principles govern public utility rates and public education. I am suggesting that the same common sense principles make it impossible to contend that when a state mandates that districts deliver a specified service, that it need not provide sufficient funding, or a taxation source to provide sufficient funding, to provide that service.

If Minnesota is ever going to fix its school finance system, we need to stop avoiding hard economic facts.  You can't budget for public education unless you figure out the actual cost of providing that education.   What's true for electricity is true for education:  revenues must cover costs or the system is broken.   

Links
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part I
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part II
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part III
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part IV
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

Suppressing the Cost of Providing an Adequate Education--in Minn and Mass

In a number of posts, we've criticized Minnesota for failure to consider the actual cost of meeting state standards.  How could we possibly meet those standards if we ignore the cost of doing so?  The Supreme Court has ruled that the state has an obligation to provide funding to all districts sufficient to provide students with an education that meets state standards. We've contended that it is impossible for the state to comply with that constitutional requirement if it fails to determine the cost of meeting all state standards.  

Now, a new suit brought in Massachusetts calls attention to the importance of developing and recording costing to meet the constitutional adequacy requirement.  Massachusetts has grappled with education funding issues for decades, but it has actually worked at meeting that requirement by determining and reporting on the cost of meeting state adequacy requirements.  However imperfect Massachusetts may be, that state has at least implemented an official costing mechanism.  The difference is rather stark:  Massachusetts responded to its 1993 McDuffy constitutional decision by creating a state commission to report officially on cost.   Minnesota has responded to its 1993 Skeen decision by intentionally suppressing any costing procedure.  One state has acted to comply with its constitution, while the other has actively chosen to avoid compliance.

In Massachusetts, an official costing commission was formed to comply with the McDuffy Supreme Court decision.  The commission provides the legislature and citizens with data necessary to evaluate whether the state is meeting its constitutional requirement to fund an adequate education.  The Commission's efforts create a fact-based background for the legislature, for the public, and for school districts.   There are legitimate complaints that its work is not diligent enough, but at least Massachusetts is making an attempt at compliance.

In contrast, as we have said,  Minnesota responded to its own state constitutional decision by purposely suppressing any effort to determine cost of meeting state standards.    What is the matter with us in Minnesota? We have one of the nation's worst achievement gaps, and we think we can fix it with smoke and mirrors while ignoring its cost. 

Our attention was attracted by an announcement that in June of 2019, a large group of organizations commenced a new constitutional funding suit in Massachusetts, Mussotte v Peyser.  The plaintiffs in Peyser are using official cost information to advocate for improvements in their school finance system. This, evidently, is exactly what Minnesota wants to avoid.  "If we don't provide cost information," they seem to say, "then there will be no evidence that we are depriving students of their constitutional rights."

The Peyser case is the third major school funding suit brought in Massachusetts to address the needs of lower income and minority students.   The first opinion in McDuffy v. Secretary of Education (1993) coincided with our on Skeen decision, but the Massachusetts decision triggered efforts to cost an adequate education, whereas the Skeen decision has spawned repeated efforts to suppress costing information.  

The McDuffy suit was brought on behalf of students in certain property-poor communities who alleged that the Mass school finance system violated the education clause of the Massachusetts Constitution. The  McDuffy plaintiffs challenged the failure of those districts to provide an adequate education and urged that the school finance system was failing large numbers of students.  As a result of McDuffy, Massachusetts began a major reform in the state's school funding system.

Recognizing that providing a constitutionally adequate education required the state to make provision for the cost of that education, the state  also established a Foundation Budget Review Commission (FBRC), which was to recalculate the foundation budget every three years, adjusting it based on changing costs and student need.

Ten years after McDuffy, a group of plaintiffs again sued the state in Hancock v. Driscoll, charging that the foundation budget was inadequate. The trial court ruled for the plaintiffs. The Commonwealth’s highest court agreed with the lower court that state funding was inadequate; however, it reversed the trial court’s decision because the Commonwealth had showed “a steady trajectory of progress."  Minnesota on the other hand hasn't even begun to comply with its constitution. 

As Hancock was being decided, Massachusetts had been using a costing process, however imperfectly, whereas Minnesota had been ignoring cost for ten years.  As we've explained in our June 14, 2019 post,  Minnesota's governor considered and then turned away an effort to use cost in funding.   (See June 14, 2019 post).  The fate of the task force is an example of persistent efforts by Minnesota leaders to suppress and ignore data on the cost of providing an adequate education to the students we traditionally leave behind.   There seem to be powerful forces who want to suppress the fact that funding insufficiency is a major reason for the achievement gap.  

Minnesota's Supreme Court has twice ruled that the constitution requires that the state provide school districts with sufficient funding so that districts can provide an education to all students that meet "all state standards,"  but there has been no effort in Minnesota to implement those findings with a cost analysis. Indeed, in 2011, Governor Dayton convened a new task force but barred it from considering cost. 

This new Mass. suit shows how official costing evidence can force the state to confront data.  The state's budget commission, the FBRC, last conducted a cost review in 2015,  The FBRC concluded that the State had failed to

“deliver quality [education] consistently to all geographies and all demographic groups across our state.”

The Commission also found a significant need to fund services for low-income students, students with disabilities, and English language learners, as well as employee and retiree health insurance. It found Massachusetts “understates the cost of educating students to the tune of at least $1 billion per year.”  The plaintiffs in the Peyser case, a group of state education interests are using the official costing report as ammunition to update and repair the state's education finance system.  The plaintiff groups include:

Massachusetts Teachers Association, Lawyers for Civil Rights, and Professor Peter Enrich of Northeastern University School of Law. The lawsuit is supported by a broad-based coalition, the Council for Fair School Finance, whose members include AFT Massachusetts, the Boston Teachers Union, Citizens for Public Schools, Lawyers for Civil Rights, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and the New England Area Conference of the NAACP.

The Peyser case illustrates another difference between Minnesota and Massachusetts, if you will allow us a final editorial comment.  In Mass., advocacy groups have actively and persistently fought for better funding for schools.   They recognize that reform comes with a price.  They have united, somehow, around persistently challenging the state's failure adequately to fund education. In Minnesota there is virtually no active support among the parallel organizations for efforts to fight for proper funding for the students we are leaving behind.   The reasons deserve, perhaps, a completely different post some other time, but it suggests that Minnesota liberals and NGO's don't care enough about the kids we are leaving behind to advocate for adequate funding. 

For now, let us just say that it is long past time for Minnesota to take the first steps in repairing its broken school finance system, by establishing an official process to determine the cost of meeting state educational requirements for the children we are leaving behind.