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.