Costing an Adequate Education for The Students Minnesota Leaves Behind

   This begins a series of posts on why it is critical for Minnesota's three branches of government to study and determine what it would really cost to provide the students Minnesota now leaves behind with an adequate education, one that meets all state  educational standards. Let's start this post by agreeing, you and me, that Minnesota is failing to provide way too many students with an adequate education.   Can we also agree that it is important to know whether the schools serving those students are receiving enough funding to provide that adequate education.  

In Minneapolis, only 19 percent of black students who are not English language learners scored proficient on the MCA reading tests for 2023.   If we want to improve those educational results --- and it's absolutely critical to  do so -- isn't it obvious that we must know how much it should cost to fix that problem? As it happens, in the last 30 years or more, a significant body of research has developed to provide states with guidance on what it should cost, on what should be spent, to deliver an adequate education.  Unfortunately, the state of Minnesota, its Department of Education, its legislature, and its governors, have utterly failed to take advantage of that research.   

In its recent report on the "Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems,"  the Shanker Institute and two highly regarded graduate schools of education urge that:

If district funding levels are not determined rigorously by states, resources may appear adequate and equitable when they are not (and policymakers may not even realize it). All states should routinely “audit” their systems by commissioning studies to ensure that they are accounting for differences in the needs of the students served by each of their school districts.

Regrettably, the last time that Minnesota undertook to audit its finance system based on actual cost research was 2004, and that effort was intercepted and cut short by Governor Pawlenty when he cancelled the 2004 school finance task force.   Since that time, our state leadership has intentionally avoided auditing our finance system based on educational cost research.  Perhaps the time has come where the Department is ready reverse its position and conduct a genuine audit applying education costing research, where it is most needed, in costing the delivery of an adequate education to students of color, lower income students and English language learners. 

Minnesota is not completely oblivious to cost, of course. The state knows what districts actually spends on teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, transportation and all the rest.  But what we're talking about here is the amount of funding required to deliver students with an adequate education to meet all state standards--to bring all students able to do so to proficiency; to close achievement gaps; to meet the needs of student with dyslexia; to prepare emerging multilingual learners to speak and write fluently and to read higher level material necessary to navigate in the upper grades.

In our next several posts, we'll discuss the state of education costing research.  Our beginning point will be a three part publication by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) the first of which is called "Costing out an Adequate Education", authored by Bruce Baker--to whom I am grateful for pointing me to it.   

 

Cruz-Guzman Litigants Ask "What is a Constitutionally Adequate Education" Should You Care?

 In our last post, we pointed out that the Minnesota Supreme Court's recent Cruz-Guzman decision has radically, (but appropriately), refocused Minnesota's jurisprudence onto the central motivating purpose of our constitutional education clause: whether Minnesota's system of public education is providing a fully adequate public education system, one that "meets all state standards," to each student, and what Minnesota must do to deliver that adequate education.  This refocus results because the Supreme Court held that our constitutional education clause cannot be used to integrate schools simply for the sake of integration:  instead, the clause operates to require a system of thorough and efficient education that affords each student an "adequate education that meets all state standards."  

Right now, as we speak, the Cruz-Guzman litigants are beginning to focus a laser beam on this question:  What is a constitutionally adequate education? Who decides that question?  If students, or some of them, are not receiving an adequate education, what relief should the courts provide to protect what the Supreme Court has held is a fundamental right.   The answer to these questions will permanently impact the rights of families and students of color, lower income students, English language learners, the students that Minnesota's education system disproportionately fails.   

The decision that the Courts are going to make in the next several years is way too important to be decided without public attention and public scrutiny.  Other major constitutional issues: the second amendment regulation of guns, abortion, Presidential powers and accountability, all of these and more receive intense public discussion and scrutiny.  But in Minnesota, public discussion and scrutiny of the constitutional right to an adequate education is not covered effectively by the media, nor is it the subject of active advocacy by the the organizations who speak to the needs of the impacted children. 

And so, as time permits Jvonkorff on Education will blog on these questions. The blog is opened for moderated comments should you care to engage in dialog.  This first post attempts to summarize, in non legal terms, how Minnesota's Skeen decision approached this central question: who defines the right to an adequate education, how is it defined, and how is the constitutional right to be enforced.  

Background of the Skeen Decision.   The Skeen decision was brought by a consortium of school districts with limited property tax bases.  They were typically outside the MSP-St. Paul metropolitan area, with lower residential, commercial and industrial property values.   As a result, they lacked the ability to pass high revenue producing operating referendums to supplement what the state provided them. Most of them did not have significant enrollments of students of color, lower income students, and English language learners.  They did not claim that their students were disproportionately failing to meet state and local educational expectations: on the contrary, they simply claimed that their students should have the same revenue support, per student, as tax rich districts like Minneapolis, St. Paul and inner suburban ring districts.  They claimed that the constitutional education clause, and the constitutional "uniformity" clause demanded equality of funding and of access to property tax referendum funding. 

State's Position:  Representing the State, its legislature and Department of Education, the Minnesota Attorney General took the following Position:

    (1)  Skeen Districts Already Provided an Education Meeting State Standards. The Attorney General argued that Minnesota provided a high quality of education to all students in the Skeen districts, and those districts themselves admitted that they were delivering an education to those students that was meeting all state standards.  There was no occasion for the Court's to intervene in what is essentially the legislature's plenary authority.   This stipulation--agreement by all parties -- that students were receiving an education meeting state standards played a central role in the Supreme Court's decision.

(2)   Setting Standards-- Defining Educational Adequacy Not a Judicial Function.  The Attorney General argued that the Constitution allocates the responsibility to decide what students should be taught, and what they should learn, was inherently a legislative function and "separation of powers" considerations required the that the judiciary should not be arrogating that function to itself. 

(3)  New Legislative Outcome/Proficiency Standards Under Way.  The Attorney General told the Court that Minnesota's current minimal undemanding state standards were being replaced by a higher more demanding set of standards that would measure what students actually learn, not merely what they had an opportunity to learn.

This third position is critical to understanding the Court's Skeen decision.  In urging the Supreme Court to reverse the trial court's holding that the Skeen districts deserved equal per pupil funding (including property tax referenda) the state said in two briefs:

The trial court recognizes but gives no weight to the fact that Minnesota is also a national leader in the implementation of outcome based education programs and learning methods.
Outcome based education, which focuses on what students need to know to function in society, is  regarded by state and national educators as being essential to the success of students in the next century. .....there is uncontroverted testimony in the record that the state is moving rapidly toward being better able to use outcome based standards to compare districts and students, much the same as inputs measures were used to do ....
comparisons in the past

The Supreme Court Responded by Carefully and Sensibly Establishing the Constitutional Parameters and Apportioning Responsibility for Defining and Providing an Adequate Education'

The Supreme Court decision contains the following elements:

    (1)  The Court recognized that it is a legislative responsibility to determine what an adequate     education must provide to Minnesota Students:  Drawing from the parties' agreement that state standards--consisting of state statutes, state regulations and mandatory state policy-- define the minimum basic education that all districts must provide,  the Court held that the dividing line between what the state legislature must fund for all districts was an "adequate education that meets all state standards."  The Court did not establish a constitutional minimum: it had no occasion to. the state through the Attorney General and the parties recognized that the legislature had recently fulfilled its duty to establish high state proficiency based standards.  Under Skeen, as long as those standards are not constitutionally suspect, the constitutional definition of an adequate education is not determined by the courts, but rather by the legislative standards applicable to all districts and students embodied in state law, state regulations and mandatory state policy.  

The Court would have understood that those standards included proficiency-outcome based standards, because the Attorney General told the Court that those were the best standards, because they set learning requirements, and that the legislature was now moving aggressively to implement  best-in-the nation proficiency based standards. 

(2)   The Court rejected decisively the Attorney General's proposal that the legislature was free to fund the provision of those standards as it saw fit, without any role for the Court.  On the contrary, the Supreme Court held, the right to an adequate education that meets all state standards was a fundamental  right, just like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from racial discrimination. Having established state standards, the Constitution demanded that the legislature provide districts with enough funding to afford each student with an education that meets all state standards.  The Court rejected soundly the claim that all districts must receive equal funding, and held instead, that funding must be sufficient to provide an education to each student that meets all state standards. That meant that districts serving large enrollments of students with higher educational needs were entitled to increased funding to meet their needs. 

Under Skeen, the definition of adequate education is determined by statutes and regulations that determine what districts must provide.   The Court quite properly rejected the contention that the judiciary should decide whether students should be required to demonstrate the ability to factor quadratic expressions, or remember who was the third President of the United states, or what caused the civil war. Nor should it decide whether all students should graduate with 8th grade, or 10th grade reading skills.  Adequacy is defined under Skeen based on what the expectations of districts and their students established by state standards.  

Funding, on the other hand, is not exclusively a legislative responsibility under Skeen. The legislature must provide enough funding for districts to provide each student with an adequate education meeting those state standards.   The state is not allowed to set high standards and attempt to force districts to meet them through a policy of public humiliation for their failure.   What the legislature sets as state standards must be correspondingly funded: if some districts need more funding to meet those state standards, then state must provide those funds.   

State standards, under this regimen include the LEAPs Act (ELL's), the Special Education laws (students with disabilities); the Worlds Best Workforce Act (WBWF), and the rigorous proficiency standards set by state learning standards and the Minnesota comprehensive assessments.   Now, translating these standards into educational operational requirements is not a simple matter. But under Skeen, the Cruz-Guzman parties should not be hiring experts to tell the Court whether students need to do algebra, understand civics at a particular level, or read and speak academic English on graduation.   State standards answer that question.  

In the context of Cruz-Guzman, it is crystal clear, undebatable, that Minnesota is failing to deliver an adequate education that meets all state standards.  It would be tragic indeed, if the Courts spend the next five years focusing on the narrow question of what role racially isolated schools play in delivering the education that the constitution requires, or nitpicking over whether doing algebra is a required component of an adequate education.   To some extent, the Cruz-Guzman is being conducted upside down and backwards.  Instead the Court should grant summary judgment to the class that the class representatives must advocate demanding that the state submit a credible properly financed plan to provide an adequate education that meets all state standards to each student:

• The Real Summary Judgment Issue: The class plaintiffs and intervenors should be moving for partial summary judgement establishing that the State and the impacted districts are not delivering an adequate education to each students, and that that problem falls disproportionately on lower income students, English language learners and students of color.  The funding system is clearly a causative element.   Other elements are responsible as well, and they all need to be fixed if the state is going to meet its constitutional requirements.
  
• Partial Summary Judgment Order:  The Court should then issue an order requiring the State of Minnesota to present a comprehensive, visionary plan, with all of the necessary elements, to transition to an education system that meets all state standards for each student, including funding, staff development, sufficient learning time, staff support and all the rest. An integration remedy is not good enough.   An adequate funding remedy is not good enough.  The state should be required to prepare a truly transformational education plan, adequately funded, as it must be, with guardrails to demand necessary systemic reforms.
  

In our next posts, as time permits, we'll explore which elements of Minnesota's broken education system need to be addressed.

• Let's Look at the Skeen Case to understand Minnesota's Constitutional Education Clause
•  Education and the Constitution (3): State Minimum Proficiency Requirements Fundamentally Changes the Cost of Education 
• Minnesota's Education System Is Unconstitutional--the Change in State Minimum Basic Education
• Minnesota's Education System is Unconstitutional Part I

What's Your Opinion.   Feel free to post respectfully in the moderated comments below.  

 

 

 

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Supreme Court's Second Cruz-Guzman Decision Requires Fundamental Re-Evaluation of Education Clause Claims

The Minnesota Supreme Court's recent Cruz-Guzman decision has radically, (but appropriately), refocused Minnesota's jurisprudence onto the central motivating purpose of our constitutional education clause: whether Minnesota's system of public education is providing a fully adequate public education system, one that "meets all state standards," to each student, and what Minnesota must do to deliver that adequate education.    

It remains to be seen, however, whether the parties in the case, the plaintiff class representatives, the other parties and the District Court will recognize the significance of  this change for students in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and elsewhere.  Until now, the Cruz-Guzman case was seen merely as Minnesota's new Brown v. Board of Education, a school integration case, using the Education Clause as a legal hook.  In the Supreme Court's 1993 Skeen decision, the Supreme Court made it quite clear: the education clause requires the legislature to deliver an fully adequate education to each student, an "adequate education that meets all state standards."   An adequate education is a fundamental right enforceable in the courts.  While there certainly are many educational and societal benefits to integrated schools, there is however, no credible evidence that requiring all public schools to be racially balanced will result in the delivery of an adequate education to students of color, to English language learners, and to lower income students, certainly not one that meets all state standards. 

In 2015, however, the Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs sued the state claiming that our Constitutional Education Clause makes racially isolated schools unconstitutional, whether they provide an otherwise adequate education or not.  In fact, in a press release, the plaintiffs disclaimed any intent to fix Minnesota's broken school finance system, stating that the case is "not about money." As discussed later in this series of posts, the Supreme Court's 2023 decision has now rejected the Plaintiffs' contention that the education clause bans racially isolated schools, per se, holding instead that the Constitutional Education Clause is violated by racial isolation only if racial isolation is a substantial contributing factor to the denial of an adequate education.    Having decided that, the Supreme Court sent the Cruz-Guzman case back to the District Court to give the Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs the right to prove that racially isolated schools (ie. mostly one race) are a substantially contributing factor to denying students an adequate education.   In these posts, we will endeavor to explain that the consequences of that Supreme Court decision have not been fully appreciated. 

In fact, our thesis is that Plaintiffs and their counsel now have a fiduciary responsibility to address all of the major contributing factors that are necessary to combine to provide Minnesota students an adequate education, one that meets all state standards.   Those factors include, for example, adequate funding; extended learning time, adequate professional development and supervision for teachers and staff, and many others.  

People who are injured by a violation of law deserve a complete remedy for their injury.    If you are injured in an accident and hire a lawyer to obtain a remedy, you wouldn't expect your lawyer to sue for the injury to your arms, but not the injuries to your head and torso. Clients hire their lawyers to fix their problem and to bring the whole case that is necessary to do that.   By the same token, if Minnesota students could hire the lawyer of their choice to obtain their educational rights under the education clause, and if the lawyer were listening, why would they lawyer address only one of the many problems that leave too many Minnesota students behind. In this series of posts, we urge that the Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs, the class represented, and the class of students unrepresented, deserve complete representation, representation that fixes our broken system by providing them with an adequate education. 

This first post, lays a bit of foundation to develop our argument that if the Skeen Plaintiffs focus only on rectifying racial imbalance in schools, they are destined to lose their Education Clause case, but worse, they will lose an opportunity to force Minnesota at long last to provide the students they represent with an adequate education that meets all state standards.

Four published cases comprise Minnesota's appellate courts' published guidance on the Constitutional Education Clause.  They are Skeen, Forslund and the two Cruz-Guzman cases.  Together, they tell us that the education clause requires plaintiffs to advocate on behalf of a solution that provides the students they represent with an adequate education. 

 In the first,  Skeen v. State (1993), the Skeen plaintiffs asserted that Minnesota was providing an unequal education to students in different school districts, by providing unequal funding to those districts.   The Minnesota Supreme Court held that the Minnesota education clause provides a fundamental right, enforceable in the courts.   That right demands, the Court held, that the legislature provide districts with enough funding to afford each student with an "adequate education that meets all state standards."  State standards, the parties in Skeen agreed, were determined by laws, regulations and state policy applicable to all districts.  Significantly, the Skeen districts were not urban core districts, of the kind for which most education suits are brought .  On the contrary, the Skeen districts were primarly located outside the Twin Cities urban core, and mostly white.  The Minnesota standards governing education at that time, were modest and undemanding.  As a result,  the Skeen plaintiff districts admitted that they had enough revenue to meet all state standards for their students.   Consequently, the Supreme Court rejected their attempt to use the Education Clause to address their funding issues, because the financial issues they described were not denying students an adequate education.   

Skeen held that Minnesota's finance system must be sufficient to provide each student with an adequate education that meets all state standards.  Skeen, tells us, then,  that the education clause supplies a remedy when for a law (or system of education laws) that results in a denial of an adequate education that meets all state standards.  Under Skeen, if plaintiffs show, for example, that Minnesota's education finance system fails to provide students with an adequate education that meets all state standards, and if they prove that proper funding would address this problem, the Education Clause provides a remedy.  Otherwise, the legislature may use a funding formula that provides more money to some districts than others as long as each district has enough funding to provide each student with an adequate education that meets all state standards, but unequal funding that results in denial of an adequate education that meets all state standards must be struck down. 

Forslund:  In Forslund v. State, the Plaintiffs alleged that Minnesota's tenure law, (and  school district seniority systems) expose some students to "bad teachers", because it was allegedly hard to fire those  bad teachers.  However, the Plaintiffs did not allege that eliminating the seniority and tenure systems alone would deliver students an adequate education.  They weren't demanding adequate funding: they weren't seeking additional learning time, or any of the other best practices that enhance student education.   The State pointed out that under Skeen, the education clause provides a remedy to provide students with an adequate education, not to attack mere legislative policy decisions with which they disagree. The Forslund Court agreed stating:

"to establish a violation of the Education Clause, a plaintiff must demonstrate that the legislature has failed or is failing to provide an adequate education. Presumably, a number of variables influence whether education is adequate. Such variables might include the financing system challenged in Skeen, the numerous policies alleged to result in continued segregation in Cruz-Guzman, or the challenged statutes alleged in this case to result in the retention of ineffective teachers. When an Education Clause claim is based on one or more of these variables, a plaintiff needs to prove facts to establish that those variables are actually resulting in an inadequate education. In other words, a plaintiff cannot sustain a claim that the state is providing a constitutionally inadequate education without proving that the state is in fact providing a constitutionally inadequate education.

The Court continued:

In this case, appellants allege a different sort of claim. Although the amended complaint nominally alleges the deprivation of the right to a uniform and thorough education, appellants’ theory of liability—as alleged in the amended complaint and more thoroughly outlined in briefing—is that the challenged statutes “impinge on” or “burden” their children’s right to an adequate education. Appellants assert that they need not prove that the state has actually failed to provide an adequate education. More specifically, they assert that they need not allege that teaching is so ineffective as to render the education system constitutionally inadequate. Instead, they assert, they need only allege that effective teaching is essential to an adequate education and that their children run the risk of encountering ineffective teaching because of the challenged statutes.

Forslund is not a Supreme Court case; it has wrinkles that the Supreme Court may not agree with.  But Forslund lays down a warning that it is ill-advised, indeed foolish, to bring an Education Clause suit in Minnesota that addresses one and only one of the many factors that combine to create an adequate education.  Education Clause claims must actually propose a remedy that will substantially contribute to providing an adequate education. 
In our Next Posts, we'll examine how these principles were applied in the Second Cruz-Guzman case, and why an Education Clause that focuses on racial composition of public schools is bound to fail.   To succeed, the Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs, or any plaintiffs purporting to represent Minnesota students, must address all of the factors necessary to produce an adequate education.  The class of students that our educational system is leaving behind, deserve representation that focuses on adequate funding, adequate teaching, adequate learning time, and a comprehensive solution  

Focusing only on racial composition is not a winning strategy, because students can learn in a racially isolated setting, when the school uses best practices.   To illustrate this point, Table I below provides the reading proficiency rates for non English language learner Black students at Higher Ground Academy -- an intervenor in the Cruz-Guzman case.  The proficiency rates at Higher-Ground Academy are just about double the rates for the same classification of students statewide.  Although Higher Ground's enrollment is over 98 percent black, their students are outperforming the statewide averages significantly. 

Table I: Proficiency Rates Non ELL Black Students
Higher Ground Academy

Table II, below presents the proficiency rates for the parallel population of students at one of the metro areas good school systems, Osseo.    This is an integrated diverse school system. Its Black (non ELL) student proficiency rates are about 25 percentage points below Higher Ground's proficiency rates.  

Table II: Proficiency Rates Non ELL Black Students
Osseo Public School District

We're not suggesting that the proficiency rates displayed for Higher Ground prove that all Higher Ground's students are receiving an adequate education that meets all state standards.  We've provided these examples to illustrate the difficulty of making out an Education Clause case that offers up racial integration as producing an adequate education, without accompanying major changes in school financing and other reforms, is bound almost certainly to fail.  More to say on this topic will follow in the next post. 

More on the Education Clause in previous posts.

• Let's Look at the Skeen Case to understand Minnesota's Constitutional Education Clause
•  Education and the Constitution (3): State Minimum Proficiency Requirements Fundamentally Changes the Cost of Education 
• Minnesota's Education System Is Unconstitutional--the Change in State Minimum Basic Education
• Minnesota's Education System is Unconstitutional Part I