The ten year old Cruz Guzman case is at a stage where parties must reveal their expert opinions. The plaintiffs in Cruz Guzman claim that there is a causal link between racial composition of schools and academic outcomes. They assert that if Minnesota would require all schools to be racially diverse that might improve academic outcomes and Minnesota's constitution therefore requires judicial relief ordering the economic and racial integration of Minneapolis and St. Paul schools. Representatives of Charter Schools, including Higher Grounds charter school, assert to the contrary, that schools serving non-diverse populations can deliver an adequate education. Implicitly, their position supports an inference that other defects in Minnesota's public education system account for Minnesota's failure to deliver an adequate education to so many students
On April 15, 2026, the Court posted the report of Higher Ground's expert. The intervenors’ expert report—while primarily aimed at disputing a causal link between racial composition and academic outcomes—nonetheless provides substantial factual support for the conclusion that public schools in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are not providing an adequate education, and that this inadequacy falls disproportionately on students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. While challenging an integration conclusion, the report provides powerful evidence that the State of Minnesota is violating the constitutional education clause by failing to provide the adequate education that meets all state standards required by the Supreme Court's Skeen decision.
Here are the key findings in the expert's report supporting an inadequate education finding.
1. Majority of Students Are Not Meeting State Academic Standards
The report relies on Minnesota’s statewide assessments, which are explicitly aligned to the Minnesota Academic Standards. Students are deemed “proficient” only if they meet or exceed those standards. Using this benchmark, the report finds that:
In Minneapolis Public Schools, only about 35.79% of students (including students of all races and incomes) are proficient in math and 40.79% in reading.
In Saint Paul Public Schools, proficiency is even lower: approximately 26.55% in math and 34.82% in reading.
These figures establish that a substantial majority of all students in both districts are not meeting state-defined academic expectations, which is strong evidence of systemic inadequacy if adequacy is defined by meeting those standards.
2. Large Numbers of Schools Are Identified as Failing Under the State’s Own Accountability System
The report uses Minnesota’s North Star accountability system, which identifies schools for “targeted” or “comprehensive” support based on low performance. It finds that:
Many schools in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are formally identified as low-performing under this system.
Numerous schools show extremely low proficiency rates, often in the single digits or teens in both math and reading.
These schools are not marginally underperforming—they are persistently and severely below state expectations.
This is particularly significant because it reflects the State’s own determination that these schools are failing to deliver acceptable educational outcomes.
3. The Inadequacy Is Systemic, Not Isolated
The report repeatedly emphasizes that:
“Several but not all” schools are low-performing—but the number of such schools is large.
Districtwide proficiency rates confirm that the problem is not limited to a handful of outliers.
Taken together, the data show a systemic pattern of inadequate educational outcomes across substantial portions of both districts, rather than isolated failures.
4. Disproportionate Impact on Students of Color
Although the report rejects racial concentration as a causal mechanism, it documents a clear and important distributional fact:
Schools with the lowest performance levels tend to have higher concentrations of students of color.
The overall achievement patterns show persistent racial disparities in academic outcomes.
Students of color are therefore more likely to be enrolled in schools that are failing under state standards.
This supports the conclusion that educational inadequacy is disproportionately experienced by students of color, regardless of the report’s views on causation.
5. Disproportionate Impact on Low-Income Students
The report also presents evidence related to socioeconomic status:
Schools with high concentrations of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL) tend to have lower achievement levels.
When the report analyzes school-level poverty composition (e.g., percent FRPL), it finds statistically significant relationships between higher poverty concentrations and lower achievement, although suggesting that the effect sizes are modest.
Students from low-income backgrounds are therefore overrepresented in the lowest-performing schools.
This establishes that educational inadequacy is also disproportionately borne by low-income students.
6. Persistent Disparities Across Schools and Student Groups
The report’s descriptive and regression analyses together show that:
Achievement gaps across schools are large and persistent.
These gaps align with school-level concentrations of disadvantage, including both race and income.
Even when controlling for individual student characteristics, the overall distribution of outcomes reflects deep structural disparities in where students are educated and what outcomes they experience.
7. The Report’s Own Framework Links Adequacy to State Standards
The expert acknowledges that defining “adequacy” is complex, but adopts a practical approach: Evaluating performance relative to state academic standards and state accountability systems.Under that framework:
Schools failing to produce proficiency in core subjects and
Schools identified as low-performing by the State
are, by implication, not delivering an adequate education.
Even though Higher Ground's expert rejects racial composition as a causal driver of achievement, the report provides strong factual support for the following conclusions:
Public schools in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are not providing an education that enables most students to meet state academic standards.
This failure is widespread and systemic, affecting a large share of schools and students.
Students of color and low-income students are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-performing schools and therefore bear the greatest burden of this inadequacy.
In short, the report undermines a segregation-based causation theory, but affirmatively documents the existence, scale, and inequitable distribution of educational inadequacy in these districts.
This then is the expert report of a party to the Cruz Guzman case who opposes the relief that the plaintiffs ask for. They intervened in the case as defendants in support of the State. Yet, their own expert is documenting the failure of the state to provide an adequate education that meets all state standards required by the Minnesota constitution.
That poses an important question: are the parties in the Cruz Guzman dedicated to fixing Minnesota's unconstitutional education system, or they merely fighting over whether schools must be integrated or not. In our next post we will argue that Minnesota's constitutional education clause requires the courts must be a forum for providing an adequate education, not merely a sparring ground in which parties fight over which solutions won't work
