SCERAC Asks Court of Appeals to Enforce Skeen's Funding Mandate

This is the first in a series of posts to explain the brief that St. Cloud Educational Rights Advocacy Council submitted to the Minnesota Court of Appeals.  The St. Cloud Educational Rights Advocacy Council is a group of parents, students, school board members (past and present), and community leaders who have been involved for years in trying to supplement the educational programs that the St. Cloud district cannot provide, because of the state's inadequate funding.  SCERAC members have worked for years to support education, and eventually, it was decided that the state was never going to act courageously, without a court decision enforcing Minnesota's constitutional education clause. SCERAC is relying on the 1993 Skeen decision, in which our Supreme Court held that the constitution provides a fundamental right to adequate education funding, which the Court defined as "enough funding" to afford "each student" with "an education that meets all state standards."  SCERAC alleges, what any educator knows, that Minnesota is not providing enough funding to provide the education that state laws, regulations, and policy require.   SCERA says that the current system violates the constitutional right established in the Skeen decision. 

The Skeen decision is a pretty simple--straightforward decision, at its core.   Skeen says that the State must provide enough funding to each school district to do the job that the State of Minnesota requires of all school districts.  That's not a very startling proposition!  The constitution requires the legislature to provide a thorough and efficient system of public education.  How could a system be thorough and efficient if it demanded that a school district must deliver an education that costs, say, $16,000 per student, but to do that with only $10,000 per student!  Listen:  we're having our home shower repaired because it's getting old and leaking.  Suppose hypothetically the craftsman who inspected the job told is that it would cost about $5,000 to put in a new shower fiberglass shower, or $2,000 more to put in a nice looking tiled shower.   Imagine we said, no, we demand that you put in a tile shower for $4,000:  imagine what he'd say.   How thorough and efficient would it be to require a craftsman to do home repairs at the price the homeowner demanded, without regard to the cost of labor and materials? 

That's what Skeen is about.  It says, the constitution requires the state to pay the full cost of what it demands a school district to do:  that is, the education that the state requires. 

The background of the Skeen decision begins with a lawsuit brought by the Association of Stable and Growing School Districts (ASGSD).   In 1988, a consortium of about 25% of Minnesota school districts brought an equity-based school funding suit, Skeen v. State, asserting that Minnesota’s constitutional education clause demands that all school districts deserve equal funding and that consequently, reliance on property tax based “excess levies” providing superior access to supplemental funding to districts like Edina and Minnetonka deprived the Skeen districts of an equal opportunity to this funding.   Skeen was what scholars call an "equity" suit: urging that the state had an obligation to fund all schools and districts equally so that all students would receive the same educational inputs.   You can read more about the equity theory in an article written by Jack Perry, a Minnesota lawyer, by clicking here.

However, in 1989, Kentucky’s Supreme Court in Rose v. Council for Better Educ., Inc., 790 S.W.2d 186, announced an alternative constitutional funding test, one that required Kentucky to provide enough funding to afford all students with an adequate education.  See also Abbott v. Burke, 119 N.J. 287, 575 A.2d 359 (1990).  In their briefs to the Supreme Court,  Minnesota advocated against the application of an equal funding test and supported an adequacy foundation for Minnesota’s education clause.  Minnesota said funding need not be equal:  each district needs enough money to deliver an education to its students that state law requires.  The State of Minnesota's own brief thus argued for funding based on actually producing the desired educational results, telling the Court:

“The plain meaning of the Education Clause … is that the system of public schools must be similarly available to all students similarly situated, it must be a complete system, and it must properly produce the desired effects."

Thus, the Minnesota defendants advocated that adequate funding meant the amount needed to produce an adequate education for all students. The Minnesota defendants further argued that the Court should defer to the legislature to establish state standards, but that once having established those standards, the state’s funding obligation was to provide enough funding to meet state education standards. Like the craftsman discussed earlier, Minnesota recognized that you have to pay for the product that you demand.  

In making this argument, the State pointed to a stipulation entered in the trial court establishing that Minnesota’s current funding system meets all state standards.  The agreement stated:

All parties agree that….all of the plaintiff districts meet or exceed all educational requirements for themselves and their students established by the Minnesota Legislature, the State Board of Education, and the Commissioner and the Department of Education…..The parties agree that for purposes of this litigation all school districts in Minnesota meet state requirements set forth in statutes, rules and policies. 

That's the test, the State told the Supreme Court. Minnesota's funding is constitutional if it the state provides enough funding so that each district can "meet or exceed all educational requirements for themselves and their students established by the Minnesota legislature, the State Board of Education, and the Commissioner and the Department of Education." 

This brings us to an extremely important point in understanding the Minnesota Supreme Court's ultimate decision in Skeen.  The State itself (including the department of education and legislature) fought against funding equality for all students and districts because it recognized that different students require different amounts of resources.   The State said, look, it's not unconstitutional for some districts to spend more than others.  All that matters is that each district has enough money to provide an education that the state requires, and that amount may be different, from district to district, but the funding must be sufficient to meet all state standards.   If Minnetonka wants to provide an equestrian program for its students so that they can learn to ride, the constitution doesn't demand that all other districts need enough money to teach their students to ride a horse.

The above-quoted agreement became the foundation for the Minnesota Supreme Court’s ultimate constitutional funding standard.  The Supreme Court resolved the constitutional issues presented by deciding

(a) that the Minnesota Constitution affords a fundamental enforceable right to sufficient funding,

(b) that Minnesota satisfies its constitutional funding obligation if it provides enough “funding to each student in the state in an amount sufficient to generate an adequate level of education which meets all state standards.”  Skeen v. State at pages 315-316.

As it happened, the Skeen plaintiffs had agreed in their case that all districts had enough money to meet all state standards.  How can that possibly be, you ask!  Didn't we have achievement gaps in 1993 when Skeen was decided?   Of course, the answer is yes.  But in 1993, Minnesota's state standards -- its education laws, regulations, and policies -- focused on educational inputs, not educational results.   It was possible at that time for a district to meet state standards, while large proportions of our students did not receive what could possibly be described as an adequate education.  

In short, Minnesota’s mandatory standards at the time were not rigorous and they weren't based on what students must learn.  However, the State defendants told the Court that Minnesota's state standards were being changed:  the legislature had just decided to set standards based on outcomes, on what students must learn.  When the case was submitted to the Supreme Court, Minnesota defendants were worried that the Supreme Court might do what the Kentucky Supreme Court had done:  that is, to set judicial standards for an adequate education.   To reassure the Court the state specifically committed that the legislature was developing rigorous standards which would assure that all students would be held to high achievement-based standards, instead of undemanding input-based standards.  As promised, during the next decade, the State began to create a robust and rigorous set of state education standards that obligates each district to comply with proficiency and programmatic standards far more demanding than existed when Skeen was decided.  

As you can imagine, if you are thinking ahead, once the Supreme Court decided that the state must provide districts enough funding to afford each student with an education that meets state standards, why then it was going to cost more money to meet state standards, especially if those standards focused on what students must learn.   But as we shall see in the next post,  Minnesota did, in fact, adopt a set of rigorous standards based on what students learn, standards that radically increased the cost of delivering an education that meets state standards, but there was no corresponding effort to correlate state funding to state standards.  

•  SCERAC v. Walz, et al. Brief in the Court of Appeals

• Will the Inn be Full in the Walz Education Budget