Our plan of attack is to show that Minnesota's constitutional education clause contains two corresponding mandates: (1) to identify educational standards, and create and (2) to fund a uniform system to deliver those standards to all students. The legislature has historically met this first requirement, by adjusting state educational standards to identify the education necessary to participate as citizens in a republican form of government, and to serve as a great equalizer to prepare all children to participate in the economy, regardless of economic status, race or class. However, the legislature has persistently failed in meeting this second constitutional responsibility: to provide adequate funding and accountability systems necessary to deliver an adequate education that meets state standards to the children with the greatest educational needs.
At the national level there are signs that the Trump administration is preparing to slash funding and other support for English language learners, for early childhood education, and for the needs of students most in need. The Trump administration's justification for abandoning traditional federal supports for public education is that public education should be left to the states. This shift of responsibility would necessarily call for Minnesota and other states to replace what the federal government has slashed with corresponding increased funding and accountability. In some states, governors have acknowledged the need for fundamental reform, but in Minnesota, that leadership so far has been missing.
Neither Minnesota's legislature nor the Governor have advanced bold reforms in funding and accountability. Neither has coalesced around a robust plan to implement best practices, for accountability, nor has either targeted necessary funds to implement those reforms for students with the greatest needs. The Association of Metropolitan School Districts policy position describes this as an abject failure to meet the states constitutional obligation as follows:
- Failure to Meet Constitutional Obligation "Minnesota’s constitution makes it the Legislature’s duty to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. By many measures, the State is not meeting that obligation."
- Basic Formula Losing Ground to Inflation. ""The basic formula has lost significant ground to inflation. It would be $1,364 per pupil higher for 2025 if it had kept pace with inflation since 2003 — the year the Legislature eliminated the general education levy and committed to funding education with state income and sales tax revenue."
- Special Education Funding Inadequate. "The 2023 Education Bill increased special education cross subsidy reduction aid to 44 percent for the next three years and then to 50 percent in FY27, providing welcome financial relief. However, even with this significant investment, a significant shortfall will remain."
- EL Funding Inadequate. "In FY22, AMSD school districts spent nearly $145 million on services for English learners but received just $34.6 million in English learner funding. The 2023 Education Bill included new investments in the English Learner program, but even after full implementation, a shortfall will remain. "
Twenty years of persistent failure to implement bold reforms suggests that those reforms will not be implemented unless the constitutional officers are compelled, by conscience or through litigation to do their constitutional duty. In this post, we begin a detailed review of Minnesota's constitutional education clause and what it requires.
The Education Clause and its Historic Foundations
Article XIII Section 1 of Minnesota’s Constitution requires the Minnesota legislature to establish and fund a uniform, thorough and efficient general and uniform system of public schools. Minnesota's Supreme Court in its Skeen and Cruz-Guzman decisions have held that this constitutional provision mandates the state legislature to provide public school districts with enough funding to afford each student with an adequate education that meets all state standards. The Skeen decision is now over thirty years old, but the Minnesota legislature, our governors and attorneys general have treated the educational constitutional right as a mere slogan.
Article XIII Section 1 of Minnesota’s Constitution requires the Minnesota legislature to establish and fund a uniform, thorough and efficient general and uniform system of public schools. It reads as follows:
Section 1. UNIFORM SYSTEM OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state.
This constitutional clause was written by delegates
at the 1857 Minnesota Constitutional Convention, but the text of Minnesota’s
education clause was inspired by similar
education clauses adopted by states from 1850 to 1868. These constitutions reflected a growing concern that economic and social inequality, and the slavery system, constituted a threat to the republic.
During this time there was an evolving consensus
that a free public education education was inherent in a republican form of government, and that sentiment was given voice in Minnesota's constitution. Two excellent law review articles provide context. (Steven G.
Calabresi & Michael W. Perl, Originalism and Brown v. Board
of Education, 2014 Mich.
St. L. Rev. 429, 450–54 (2014); Derek W. Black, The Constitutional
Compromise to Guarantee Education, 70 Stan. L. Rev. 735, 739 (2018)).
Education as the Balance Wheel of the Social Machinery.
As we consider the intent of the education clause, it is critical to recognize that the authors of Minnesota's constitution were influenced by the common school movement, inspired by Horace Mann and others. Mann’s thesis was that “public education had the power to become a stabilizing as well as an equalizing force in of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” The authors of the Minnesota constitution expected that an adequate education would be delivered to children regardless of class, native language or color. They rejected any suggestion that students with less advantages were less deserving of an adequate education. When we later consider the Supreme Court's decisions in the Skeen and Cruz Guzman cases, we will see that the Supreme Court emphatically rejected an assertion that the state meets its funding responsibility simply by providing the same amount of funding to all students and districts regardless of need.
Legislature's Obligation to Set Educational Standards
Over 150 years, the Minnesota legislature’s assessment of the education required to “equalize the conditions of men” evolved with changing social, economic, and demographic conditions. The flexibility of Minnesota’s education clause allowed for this adaptation. In the mid-1800s, the common school movement fostered a basic McGuffey’s reader-based education that was deemed sufficient to accommodate the then-existent agrarian-based economy.
Then, at the turn of the century, the Minnesota legislature recognized that the education system could not remain stagnant, while serving as the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” envisioned by the Constitution. To this end, in 1899, the legislature passed a compulsory attendance law requiring children age eight to sixteen, living within the borders of a school district or city, to attend public or private school. In 1913, the Minnesota Supreme Court heard and rejected a challenge to the legislature’s efforts to elevate Minnesota’s public-school system by creating centralized shared high schools, thus reaffirming the court’s recognition of the robust role of our Education Clause. Justice Hallam wrote that the words of the Constitution:
“were not [merely] a grant of power to the Legislature, for all the powers there mentioned would have existed without such grant. They were inserted as a mandate to the Legislature, prescribing as a duty the exercise of this inherent power."As of 1910, less than half of the United States population had completed an eighth-grade education, a statistic that remained relatively constant until 1940. Compulsory attendance—and a great expansion of Minnesota public high schools—began to transform the education levels of the next generation of Minnesota students. By 1991, the enrollment rate for five- to nineteen-year-olds rose to ninety-three percent for blacks, whites, males, and females alike. Although the median years of education rose dramatically, American leaders and decision-makers became increasingly convinced that our public school system was not preparing our young to compete in the new global economy.
We report to the American people that while
we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and
colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to
the United States and the well-being of its people, the
educational foundations of our society are presently being
eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very
future as a Nation and a people.
Nation at Risk gave birth to a new standards movement which sought to ensure that all students received a more robust education, and a correlative movement to assure that all students, including those with greater educational needs, receive that education.
In the next post, we'll see that ten years after Nation at Risk, the Minnesota legislature responded by implementing more robust state standards, standards which focused on what students actually learn, and we'll then discuss how the legislative demand for rigorous standards applicable to all students, impacted the two seminal Supreme Court decisions, Skeen and Cruz Guzman.
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