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.