In the prior post, we identified two methods of estimating the full dollar cost of delivering an adequate education. But there is another method largely ignored in Minnesota and elsewhere. Every district in Minnesota serving students of color, lower income students, English language learners, and/or students with disabilities is spending way more money, per student, than the state supplies for those students education. Most of them are stretched and would like to be able to spend more. Since each of those district is spending more than the state is supplying, surely it is reasosonable to conclude that what they are spending is compelling evidence of the minimum amount of money necessary to provide those student with an adequate education. The real question is how much more than they are spending, constrained as they are, would be required to provide that adequate education.
Funding Students, Not Just Schools
It costs more to educate some students than others. Minnesota's funding system doesn't reflect that — and the students paying the price are the ones who can least afford it.
There is a principle in education finance that sounds almost obvious once you state it: it costs more to educate a child who arrives at school three grade levels behind than a child who arrives ready to learn. It costs more to serve a student who doesn't yet speak English than one who does. It costs more to educate a child living in deep poverty — with all the health, nutrition, housing, and family instability challenges that poverty brings — than a child whose basic needs are reliably met.
This is not a liberal or conservative position. It is arithmetic. And it has significant implications for how Minnesota funds its public schools.
Minnesota's current system acknowledges this principle in theory — it provides categorical supplements for certain high-need student populations. But those supplements are set at levels determined by political compromise, not by rigorous analysis of what education actually costs for these students. The result is a systematic underfunding of exactly the students who need the most support.
The Historical Shift That Changed Everything
To understand why weighted student funding matters so much, it helps to understand how the cost of education changed when Minnesota — and the country — shifted from seat-time to proficiency-based standards.
Before the 1980s, Minnesota public schools were legally required to deliver required course content in a minimum number of hours of instruction. That was the standard: show up, teach the curriculum, maintain the required student-teacher ratios. Under that model, it was expected and accepted that students would perform very differently. Some would thrive; some would struggle; some would fall through the cracks. No one was held responsible for closing the gap.
In 1983, Minnesota began transitioning to a proficiency-based system — one that holds schools accountable not for the instruction they provide but for the learning that results. All students are expected to reach minimum standards of proficiency in core subjects. The state now mandates reading at grade level, math proficiency, and graduation. Schools are judged on whether their students achieve those outcomes.
This transition was the right thing to do morally and economically. But it fundamentally changed the cost structure of public education. Under seat-time standards, a trained teacher with an appropriate curriculum was essentially sufficient. Under proficiency-based standards, a school serving students who are significantly behind — whether due to poverty, language barriers, disability, or other factors — must do dramatically more to achieve the same outcome: more instructional time, more intervention services, more support staff, more family engagement, more individualized attention.
"If students are behind, or must overcome barriers to successful learning, they need more services, more time learning, and more support, and therefore significantly more funding."
— Thomas Fordham Institute, "Fund the Child" (2006)
This conclusion comes not from progressive advocates but from the Thomas Fordham Institute — one of the country's most prominent conservative education think tanks. When even ideological conservatives acknowledge that high expectations for disadvantaged students require more resources, the debate about whether weighted funding is necessary should be settled.
The Students Minnesota Is Underfunding
On average, students living in poverty arrive at school with accumulated educational deficits — less early childhood preparation, more health and nutrition challenges, more frequent mobility, less access to out-of-school enrichment. Closing those gaps requires significantly more instructional support, earlier intervention, and extended learning time. Research consistently shows that the additional cost of providing an adequate education to low-income students double the base cost for more advantaged students or more.
Students who are still acquiring English require specialized instruction, bilingual support staff, and additional time. Minnesota's current ELL funding creates what researchers describe as a "cross-subsidy" — districts are required to spend far more on ELL services than the state provides, meaning other programs are effectively subsidizing ELL education. The 2020 Walz administration report recommended reducing this cross-subsidy to no more than 50% by adjusting per-student funding and lifting the cap for inflation. That reform has not been fully implemented. The 2023 legislation represented a major step forward — nearly doubling the per-pupil EL allowance and creating a new cross subsidy aid component starting FY 2027 — but that new component only reimburses 25 cents on the dollar of the remaining gap, so a significant cross subsidy burden remains. A district's cross subsidy, as measured by the state, is not the difference betweeen providing an adequate education to ELL's, its merely the difference between what the district is spending and the amount of reimbursement. Other than a potential constitutional claim, there is no practical mechanism to assure that districts are allocating adequate funding to English language learners.
Special education is treated differently. State and federal law demands that districts provide the adequate education the law demands, but purposely underfunds the cost. Students and their parents are afforded a right afforded to no other student: to seek administrative or judicial relief to force the district to provide a free and appropriate education. As a result, Special education is the one area where Minnesota has built a relatively robust state accountability and funding system. Federal law requires a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities, and the state has developed compliance monitoring, fiscal oversight, and complaint adjudication systems to back it up. As one example, the Minneapolis public school district is required to spend as of the latest report $43 million more on special education than the state reimburses. To cover this deficit, Minneapolise must divert funds from programs and services for other students. Under the Minnesota Supreme Court's Skeen decision the state is required to provide districts with enough funding to provide an adequate education meeeting state standards For students with disabilities districts are required to deliver the adequate education, but even for special education students the funding requirement is ignored.
Research is overwhelming that early childhood education — particularly for children facing educational barriers — produces substantial returns. The Great Start for All Minnesota Children Task Force, authorized by Governor Walz in 2021 with bipartisan support, recommended that Minnesota move toward a system where no family pays more than 7% of annual income on early care and education, and that early learning scholarships be expanded to include three-year-olds. Early investment reduces the remediation costs that accumulate when children arrive at kindergarten significantly behind. In 2024, first Children’s Finance estimated early childhood shortages affected 89,528 Minnesotan children with working parents. Without better options, many parents stay home or reduce their work to part-time in order to care for their children. Some parents alternate working hours with their partners or other family members, missing out on important family bonding time.
What the Research Says About Funding Weights
The 2004 Taxpayers Association study found that the cost of an adequate education in Minnesota varied from roughly $6,200 to over $14,000 per student — a ratio of more than two to one, depending on student characteristics. That study was conservative and is now more than two decades old. More recent research suggests the differentials may be even larger.
Dr. Bruce Baker's national research finds, as a general principle, that input-based analyses — which is what Minnesota's current categorical supplements essentially are — "fail to capture the full additional costs to provide equal opportunity in high need settings." In other words, the supplements Minnesota currently provides are structurally likely to underestimate what high-need students actually require.
The St. Cloud Example
In 2023, the St. Cloud Area School District — in partnership with a citizen group called SCERAC — prepared a detailed description of what adequate funding would make possible for its students. The district's submission to MDE described specific programs that additional revenue would support, including: expansion of early childhood education; significantly enhanced Multilingual Learning services; expansion of its dyslexia programming; increased counseling and support staff; diversification of accelerated learning opportunities; and continued recruitment of teachers and staff of color.
The district noted with pride its commitment to evidence-based Multilingual programming — and documented the "multi-million dollar funding shortfall" that prevents it from fully implementing what it knows works. This is the practical consequence of inadequate weighted funding: schools that know what to do, and want to do it, but lack the resources.
The Principle: Fund the Actual Cost
The 2004 Governor's Task Force stated the principle clearly and it has not changed: "Education funding must be tailored to relevant characteristics of each individual student, such as student disabilities, household or neighborhood poverty, pre-K or Kindergarten readiness, and the needs of English language learners."
Twenty years later, Minnesota has still not implemented this principle in any rigorous way. Categorical supplements exist, but they are set by political negotiation rather than cost analysis. The adequacy study described in the previous post would provide the factual foundation for setting those weights correctly — based on what education actually costs for each student population, not on what the Legislature finds politically comfortable.
Funding the actual cost of education is not a luxury. Under Minnesota's proficiency-based standards, it is a legal and moral obligation.
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