Amazed by the Resistance-- Why does the State fight to Ignore the Cost of Providing an Adequate Education?

   Our last post began a discussion of the court of appeals case brought by St. Cloud Educational Rights Advocacy Council (SCERAC) to require the state to comply with the Supreme Court's Skeen decision requiring the state legislature to fully fund education.   Skeen interpreted the Minnesota constitution's education clause to require that the state must provide enough funding to afford each student with an education that meets all state standards.   Minnesota generally meets that obligation for advantaged students, but it fails to provide enough funding to provide an education that meets all state standards to less advantaged students: lower income students, English language learners, students with disabilities, students of color and the fifteen percent of all students with dyslexia.   In fact, shamefully, the state defends the current system by asserting that the Skeen funding adequacy decision protects only advantaged students, but not what the state calls the "extra cost" of providing an education that meets state standards to lower income students, English language learners, students with disabilities," and by implication students of color. 
   
      We posted a link on this topic on the Contract for Student Achievement group site-- a group site that attracts persons interested in educational reform.   Contract for Student Achievement's moderator, Chris Stewart, responded that he is "amazed by the resistance" to the idea that Minnesota should determine and make transparent that cost, and well he should be.  The state's position seems right out of Kafka.  How could anyone, liberal or conservative, possibly argue that a system is thorough and efficient when it demands that the components of that system must provide a quality of service at less than its cost.  But that is what the state is trying to do, and it audaciously contends that it must provide the full cost of providing an education that meets all state standards only to advantaged students, who by definition are least likely to need more funding, but that the state need not provide the "extra cost" of providing an education to the very students that the constitutional education clause was written to protect. 

    Chris Stewart was absolutely right to be amazed and so should we be all.   To be clear, Jvonkorff on Education is not asserting providing the full cost of meeting state standards is a panacea.   On the contrary,  no system is guaranteed to work simply because it has enough money to produce a quality product.   In its Court of Appeals case, the plaintiff group, SCERAC, asserts that the constitution also requires that the state and its school districts actually use adequate funding when provided to deliver an education that meets state standards.  And that is going to require some delivery reforms as well.  But failure to provide enough funding dooms the system to failure, and actually affords the delivery system a ready excuse for failing to implement necessary reforms.

    Under the State's current system -- adequate funding for  advantaged students only -- school districts with a very high percentages of students who are educationally less advantaged are necessarily  accumulate huge budgetary operating deficits, as compared to what they need to meet state standards.   But Minnesota marches on, asserting that it is bewildered by the opportunity gap in education, but by golly, its perfectly OK to provide the funding necessary to deliver an education that meets state standards only to advantaged students.   

    In the Court of Appeals, SCERAC argues that in order to come into compliance with the Skeen mandate, the legislature must start by knowing the cost of providing an education that meets all state standards to different categories of students.   For 25 years, now, three governors, the legislature and the Minnesota Department of Education have intentionally avoided determining the cost of providing an education that meets state standards.    Yet legislators from both sides of the aisles, and many community leaders otherwise dedicated to closing the opportunity gap, seem to cringe at the thought of determining what it should actually cost to provide students with the education that the state legislature has decreed that they must have.   What in the world are they thinking?  We should actually have to pay the full cost of closing the opportunity gap?

    Doesn't it stand to reason that the Governor, the legislature, the Minnesota Department of Education, school boards and the public at large all should know how much it actually costs to provide each Minnesota student with an education that meets all state standards. Why would they attempt to run a system of public education without knowing the true cost of delivering the education that state law requires?   Why would any public servant seeking to run an efficient, constitutionally compliant, thorough and efficient system of public education purposely avoid knowing what the actual cost of providing that education might be?   Shouldn't we too be "amazed by the resistance" to that simple idea that the legislators who fund our education system should know what it actually costs to produce the educational product that they require local districts to produce.    How indeed could anyone advocate that an education system could be "thorough and efficient" if it demands that the system produce an educational product without knowing whether the revenue provided is adequate?

    Does anyone think that it is possible to run an enterprise efficiently in complete ignorance of the cost of meeting its mission and objectives. Suppose General Motors, or Ford, or Toyota decided to produce cars to particular specifications: (such as horsepower, fuel efficiency, durability and reliability, and extra amenities) ignorant of the cost of production?  With a management ignorant of production costs, how long would those companies exist before achieving bankruptcy?    

    The consequence of attempting to run government enterprises while ignoring the cost of production are grave indeed. The analogy is not perfect, but the Soviet Union's command economy  ran on a national economic system that largely ignored cost:  GOSPLAN -- the central government state planning agency -- would assign production quotas to collective farms, factories, and other enterprises without considering the production costs; and, the result was economic chaos, as anyone who studied that system will tell us.  As we have said, the analogy is not perfect, but Minnesota runs public education in many ways like GOSPLAN ran the soviet economy -- as if the state can command production without even considering its cost.  As in the soviet system, our political leadership  -- the commissars in the legislature and education department  -- determine the quality and quantity of the product that school districts must produce by command, ignoring willfully the cost :  The state sets (1) proficiency standards for what students must learn at each grade level and in the key subject areas including math, science, reading and writing (2)  programmatic standards, that require particularized programs for students of all categories (students with disabilities, English language learners, students with dyslexia and lower income students), (3) content standards that impose what districts must deliver in various programs.  And all of these standards are commanded centrally with complete ignorance of the costs. Is it any surprise that Minnesota cannot make progress in closing its achievement gap?  

As stated above, according to the State's own explanation to the court in the SCERAC case, Minnesota is not required to pay the full cost of providing an education that meets all state standards for "students of poverty, English language learners, and students with disabilities."  Yet we all wring our hands and wonder what could possibly be the matter:  the students for whom we fail to provide adequate funds don't do very well, despite everything that we try! Yes, what possibly could be the matter?  

    In the last three years, to take a recent example, the state legislature responded to parents and students legitimate complaints that the state was ignoring the educational needs of students with dyslexia.   In several legislative sessions, the legislature piled on new, (and much needed), dyslexia mandates that are known to be quite expensive, yet did these new standards, applicable to 15% of all students, were implemented without adding a dime to revenues for that purpose.  Some school districts responded by basically ignoring the requirement altogether.  Many school districts responded by providing the absolute minimum services -- just enough to claim that they were doing at least something.   This same story, has repeated itself over and over again.   It costs more, way more, to provide an education that catches students up, when they are years behind entering third grade.   Certainly students who are behind need more learning time, and more differentiated instruction to catch them up.   But the state intentionally evades providing enough funding for these students: why does it surprise us, then that students keep falling behind, and the ones who statistically fall behind, are the students that the state claims in need not fully fund?

  Like the soviet system, Minnesota runs its "system" of education without considering the cost implications:  how many days and hours of learning does it take various students to meet the proficiency standard? how do those costs differ depending on the demographic characteristics of the students served? what are the requirements for specialized in-service training and supervision to assure that teachers have the curriculum and professional support that they need? 

Where do business interests in Minnesota stand on this problem?   Ironically, when it comes to understanding the need to correlate costs with revenues and production quotas, the very leadership who understand economics the best,  are the first to cast their understanding of economics aside and announce that public education should be subject to the same economic insanity that Stalin and Khrushchev's regimes imposed on the Soviet command economy.  Produce what we order you to produce, regardless of cost!

As stated in our last post, we pointed out that in 2004, Governor Pawlenty appointed a blue ribbon task force with a mission to assure that:

Minnesota’s education finance arrangements ensure resources are distributed “equitably” to students throughout the state and does Minnesota appropriately adjust state revenue allocations for legitimate cost differences between districts, including additional costs for “at-risk” students?

The task force recommended that the State must begin to allocate funds that provide:

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--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).  

 As explained in the last post, upon reading the task force's recommendation, the Governor promptly sent the task force home.   

The legislature has repeatedly sidetracked bills that would require the state to determine the full cost of meeting state standards, even though the Supreme Court's Skeen decision demands that the state provide school districts with enough funds to provide each student with an education that meets state standards.   Governor Dayton commissioned his own school funding task force and prohibited the task force from recommending that the state should provide additional funds to meet state standards.  

If we Want Better Education
It is Critical that those Charged with Delivering it
Must know what it Costs to do so!

We'll discuss SCERAC's court of appeals case further in the next post. 

 

St Cloud Educational Rights Advocacy Coalition Fighting to Enforce Skeen Decision (1)

On September 27, 2020 we argued the appeal of St. Cloud Educational Rights Advocacy Coalition (SCERAC) to a panel of the Minnesota Court of Appeals.   SCERAC is a coalition composed of parents of students in the St. Cloud District and of educators, school board members and former school board members, and St. Cloud area children's advocates.   SCERAC is appealing an adverse decision from a local district court which found, among other things, that the State, the legislature, Governor, Commissioner, and Department of Education are immune from suit to enforce the Minnesota Constitutional requirement that the state must provide enough funding to districts to provide each student with an adequate education that meets all state standards.   SCERAC says the District Court decision is 180 degrees opposite from what the Supreme Court has already decided.

SCERAC's case is founded upon Minnesota’s two great education clause cases, Skeen and Cruz-Guzman.  Those two cases hold that there is a fundamental right under the Education and uniformity clauses to a general and uniform system of education which provides an adequate education to all students in Minnesota.”   They both hold that an adequate educational funding is

“an amount sufficient to generate an adequate level of education which meets all state standards.” 

In the next posts, we're going to provide background on why it is essential that Minnesota begins to comply with the Skeen decision.   We shall see also, that the state defendants have contended that this Skeen right, to sufficient funding does not apply to the so-called "extra cost" of providing an education that meets all state standards to "students of poverty, students with disabilities, and English language learners."

 In this post, we'll say a few words about Minnesota's persistent educational crisis-- its abject failure to meet the minimum funding standards set more than 25 years ago by the Minnesota Supreme Court.  Then we'll get more technical and explain the legal theories behind SCERAC's case and what SCERAC proposes that the State should do to meet its constitutional obligations, and why the State's position is wildly contrary to the Skeen decision itself and, well, plain common sense. But first, let's just remind ourselves of the persistence of Minnesota's alarming failure to meet the needs of students of color, lower income students, English language learners, and now students with dyslexia. 

There can be no doubt that despite eloquent statements of good intentions, Minnesota has utterly failed to make adequate strides forward in addressing the educational needs of students that Minnesota has traditionally left behind:  In his State of the Union Speech in 2003, Governor Pawlenty recognized:

“As good as our schools have been, we are leaving too many children behind. And the sad reality is, they tend to be poor, disabled or children of color.”

To follow on his State of the Union declaration, in 2004 the Governor appointed a blue-ribbon school finance task force to make sure that “Minnesota’s education finance arrangements ensure resources are distributed ‘equitably’ to students throughout the state and […] Minnesota appropriately adjust[s] state revenue allocations for legitimate cost differences.”   With the assistance of technical financial advice, the the Task Force warned

"That rising numbers of lower income students requires additional educational services and additional school support services, including school readiness, health, counseling and academic advising..." 

Minnesota must  reform its finance system, to account for the additional costs of educating the students with the greatest educational needs, it warned:

• “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).
  
  
• For large proportions of students to achieve at the Minnesota academic standards level, school funding will have to be directed to provide (1) earlier-in-the-life-of-a-student instruction primarily in the form of greater individualized instruction in the primary grades (kindergarten through 3rd grade) and (2) extended school day, school year, and school career exposure to systematic instruction.
  

Concerned perhaps with the political implications of this recommendation, the Governor disbanded the Task Force and since that time, no Governor, nor any legislature has taken meaningful steps to implement these recommendations.   A series of reports, too numerous to itemize have documented Minnesota's consequent failure to address the so-called equity gap in Minnesota's education system.  All sorts of initiatives have been tried, yet still, there has been no effort to correlate the cost of delivering an adequate education with the needs of students that Minnesota's system is failing. 

Under the Dayton Administration, the Minnesota Department of Education decried its own failure to address the equity gap in our education system:

Our population is aging. Seventy percent (70%) of jobs will require more than a high school diploma. We don’t have an adequate number of qualified candidates to fill many good-paying jobs. The fastest growing segment of our future workforce is students of color, and they currently have the state’s lowest graduation rate. Minnesota has one of the worst black-white achievement gaps in the country.”  

 

In 2018, former Minneapolis Superintendent urged that the Minneapolis system needed to "Go Big or Go Home" financially.   He wrote:

Tens of thousands of families have stopped wondering [about its poor results] and have left the district. That has led to a financial death spiral in which each year for the last seven years the district has spent more than it takes in. In that time, it has plowed through its “reserves” (savings to be used in emergencies or for one-time investments) at an astonishing rate to pay for ongoing costs until they have virtually run out.

In 2019 the Federal Reserve Board issued a ringing indictment stating:

While Minnesota’s educational disparities are well-known, this report shows that these disparities are evident across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status…achievement gaps have persisted for decades despite policies implemented to promote equal opportunity for education,

More recently, in an ironic twist, a group of leaders including former Justice Page, announced their belief that Minnesota needs a new constitutional amendment protecting the rights of students to receive an adequate education, evidently because they believed our current clause has failed to afford that right.    It is our thesis, however, that the constitution is not at fault, it is the abject failure of Minnesota advocates for children and for educational leaders to demand that the constitution be enforced to the fullest extent.    We have a robust constitutional right; the Supreme Court has given it meaning.   In Minnesota, we simply don't care enough, it seems, to demand that our courts, our Governors, and our legislators, fulfill the mandate that is plainly there.  More on this topic to come.