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.