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
