Part 5 of a series

Cruz-Guzman Series, Part 5: Beginning With the End in Mind — What an Adequate Education Actually Requires

1. No single lever gets you there

Part 1 of this series argued that no single reform lever — integration, funding, staffing, or curriculum — can by itself deliver a constitutionally adequate education; the causes of inadequacy are plural and interacting. Providing an education that meets all state standards cannot be achieved by introducing one change — not class size alone, not teacher salary alone, not integration alone, nor any other single lever standing by itself. In Part 3, we showed that contrary to popular belief, Cruz-Guzman is not an integration only litigation. The Cruz-Guzman amended complaint broadly addresses multiple remedies. In this post, we discuss the experience of individual schools that are actually producing exceptional results for high-need students: those schools meld multiple changes and improvements together, in coordinated, mutually reinforcing ways, rather than betting everything on one intervention. In a subsequent post, we'll discuss some strategies that educational advocates might use to encourage the parties in Cruz-Guzman to focus on the broad comprehensive reforms that can transform Minnesota's public education so that it acheives the constitutional mandate of providing an adequate education to each student, one that meets all state standards.

2. What does the effective-practices research actually say?

Fortunately, this is not a question we have to answer from first principles. There is a substantial body of empirical research — separate from, and largely uninterested in, the integration/segregation debate — asking a narrower question: among schools serving similar high-poverty, high-EL populations, what distinguishes the schools that produce strong achievement gains from the schools that don't?

The most influential of this research comes from Harvard economist Roland Fryer and his collaborator Will Dobbie. In a 2011 study of 35 New York City charter schools, they found that the input measures policymakers traditionally fight over — class size, per-pupil spending, the share of teachers with advanced degrees — were not correlated with school effectiveness. What was correlated, and explained roughly half the difference between high- and low-performing charter schools, was a bundle of five concrete, operational practices: more instructional time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, and high-dosage tutoring.

Fryer then tested whether these were merely “charter school” practices or general principles of effective schooling by importing them into twenty of the lowest-performing traditional public schools in Houston, in a randomized field experiment. The result: the changes produced an average achievement gain of roughly 0.2 standard deviations in math per year — comparable to the effects reported for attending a high-performing charter school. Fryer's own conclusion is worth sitting with: the best practices of high-performing charter schools may simply be general lessons about the education production function — meaning they are not ideological artifacts of the charter sector, but transferable operational knowledge about how schools actually work.

This matters for our purposes because it gives us an empirically grounded, non-ideological checklist against which to evaluate any school — traditional or charter, integrated or not — and against which to evaluate what the legislature would actually need to fund to meet the Skeen standard.

3. Two adequacy studies reach the same conclusion from a completely different direction

It is worth pausing on this convergence, because two other bodies of work — approached from an entirely different methodology — arrive at nearly the same operational picture.

The first is the 2018 Michigan school finance adequacy study by Picus, Odden & Associates, commissioned to determine what it would actually cost the state to fund an adequate education. Where Fryer and Dobbie started from statistical analysis of charter-school effectiveness, the Michigan study started from the research literature on individual school-improvement elements and then costed out what a school would need to deploy each one. The “high-performance school model” the study's authors built their funding recommendations around describes essentially the same operational picture as the Fryer bundle. High-performing and improving schools, the study found, organize teachers into collaborative grade-level or subject-area teams — not isolated classrooms — that meet regularly during the school day to plan curriculum, review short-cycle assessment data, and adjust instruction based on what the data shows. Those teams are supported by dedicated instructional coaches, funded at a rate of roughly one coach for every 200 students, whose job is to model lessons, observe teachers, and give direct feedback. The model funds a minimum tutoring position in every school plus additional tutors triggered by poverty and EL enrollment, on the same high-dosage, data-targeted logic as the Fryer bundle — and it insists all of this rests on a foundation of explicit, ambitious, school-specific achievement goals and a professional culture where “instruction is public,” meaning staff are expected to use, and be held accountable for using, the practices shown to work rather than teaching in isolation according to individual preference.

Parenthetically, we note that the work of Bruce Baker and others provide persuasive critiques of the use of “Evidence Based Funding” to determine the funding necessary to deliver an adequate education. See for example, Bruce Baker, School Finance 101: When Evidence Based Isn’t: Informing State School Finance Formulas to Provide Equal Educational Opportunity for All We cite the evidence based funding research here, not in support of its funding conclusions, but rather in support of its identification of effective practices.

Another study is the Illinois Evidence Based Funding brief prepared for the state's Vision 20/20 initiative — the research summary underlying Illinois's 2017 school funding formula reform, developed by a collaborative of Illinois school leaders (IASB, IASBO, IASA, and others) working from the same Odden/Picus evidence base applied in Kentucky and Vermont. Where the Michigan study is organized around a narrative description of the high-performance school, the Illinois brief itemizes the funding model element by element — full-day kindergarten, class size, instructional coaches, tutors, guidance counselors, extended day, summer school, EL and special education staffing — with a specific effect size and dollar figure attached to each. The brief is explicit that the underlying structure is a three-tier Response to Intervention model: Tier 1 is the core instructional program made as effective as possible (small classes, collaborative planning time, sustained professional development); Tier 2 is tutoring, extended day, and summer school triggered by poverty and EL counts; Tier 3 is special education. Its summary effect-size table is a useful gut check on which investments the research actually supports and at what strength — full-day kindergarten (+0.77), instructional coaching paired with classroom application (1.25 to 2.70), one-to-one and small-group tutoring (0.4 to 2.5), targeted EL intervention (0.45), and small K-3 class size, which shows roughly double the effect for low-income and minority students (0.50) that it shows for the overall population (0.25). Notably, the same research finds no reliable achievement benefit from the two interventions state budget debates gravitate toward by default — untargeted instructional aides and secondary class-size reduction beyond the K-3 grades — which is itself a useful corrective for legislative debate.

The significance of three independent lines of research — one statistical (Fryer/Dobbie), one narrative-and-cost-based (Michigan), one itemized-and-effect-sized (Illinois) — converging on nearly identical operational requirements is that it makes the “system, not lever” argument considerably harder to dismiss as an artifact of any single methodology or state. It also gives the Skeen costing question a concrete, defensible answer: an adequate education, under this research base, costs specific, itemized things — coaching ratios, tutoring positions, collaborative planning time, EL-specific staffing — not an undifferentiated increase in the per-pupil formula. That is precisely the kind of costing exercise Minnesota has never commissioned to completion, a point later parts of this series will take up directly.

A fourth line of evidence, qualitative rather than statistical or cost-modeled, points in the same direction. Karin Chenoweth's It's Being Done series — a decade-long body of case-study reporting on public schools that post strong results for high-poverty, high-minority populations — identifies the same recurring bundle from the ground up, school by school:

1. High expectations paired with real accountability, not accountability theater
2. Curriculum built to standards, taught deliberately — not just teaching to the test
3. Systematic, embedded use of data to drive instructional decisions
4. Deliberate, protected instructional time — schools “pack the day” and eliminate low-value activities
5. Sustained, job-embedded professional development for teachers
6. Distributed leadership teams (principal + teachers + parents + community), not lone-hero principals
7. Decision rules oriented to student need over adult convenience
8. Above all — organizational/systems coherence: the practices function as an integrated system, not a menu of add-ons

Chenoweth's most recent volume in the series, Districts That Succeed, states the point directly: helping more students achieve is not a matter of adopting a program or practice. That is a practitioner-literature echo, arrived at through fieldwork rather than regression analysis, of the same convergence Fryer/Dobbie, Michigan, and Illinois reach from statistical and cost-modeling directions.

4. Coherent systems, not a menu of practices

Before turning to specific schools, one caution drawn from the same literature deserves emphasis, because it is easy to miss: effective schools do not simply adopt a smorgasbord of these practices independently. The schools that show up as outliers in the research weave the practices together into a coherent, mutually reinforcing system — one where the tutoring program is targeted using the same data the teachers use to plan instruction, where the feedback teachers receive is calibrated against the same instructional expectations the curriculum was built around, and where the culture of high expectations is the thread that holds the other pieces together rather than a poster on the wall. And, critically, these schools treat the system as a hypothesis to be tested, not a finished product: they evaluate continuously and revise what isn't working. A district that bolts a tutoring vendor onto an otherwise unchanged instructional program, without integrating it into a coherent system, should not expect Brooke- or HGA-level results — and shouldn't be surprised when it doesn't get them.

5. The practices, and how two high-performing schools use them

The evidence-based practice set

Drawing on the Fryer/Dobbie line of research and the broader charter-effectiveness literature, the recurring components are:

1. Increased and better-used instructional time — not simply a longer day, but time protected for actual instruction rather than logistics or discipline.
2. Human-capital investment in teachers — frequent, structured feedback and coaching, not annual evaluation; deliberate development of teachers over a career, not just at hiring.
3. Data-driven instruction — frequent interim assessment, with results actually used to regroup students, adjust tutoring, and modify instruction, not merely reported up the chain.
4. High-dosage tutoring — intensive, data-targeted small-group or one-on-one support for students identified as behind, rather than generic “extra help.”
5. A schoolwide culture of high expectations — a shared, explicit belief (reinforced structurally, not just rhetorically) that all students, including high-need students, are capable of meeting rigorous standards.

Brooke Charter Schools (Boston)

Brooke is a useful comparison point because it serves a population that is overwhelmingly low-income and over 90 percent Black and/or Latino, with families concentrated in Dorchester, Hyde Park, East Boston, Mattapan, Chelsea, and Roxbury, and it has posted results that place it among the strongest performers in Massachusetts — ranking in the top five in the state for student growth in both ELA and math on 2024 MCAS testing. Notably, an MIT study found that Brooke's English learner and special education students were making substantially more academic progress than in Boston's district schools, and were outperforming Brooke's own general-education students.

Brooke's own account of its model maps closely onto the research bundle above. It provides teachers with a shared, rigorous curriculum, including lesson plans and materials, freeing prep time for execution and student conferencing rather than lesson design from scratch. Every teacher — including veteran teachers — receives weekly classroom observation and direct feedback from a principal functioning as an instructional leader, not merely an administrator. Teaching teams and instructional leaders consistently use data to drive practice. A dedicated operations function handles most of the logistical work of running a school so that teachers and principals can concentrate on instruction. And the network builds its own pipeline of talent through an Associate Teacher/mentorship structure, rather than relying solely on the outside labor market.

Higher Ground Academy (Saint Paul)

HGA's own recent World's Best Workforce reports lay out its operating system in unusual detail for a charter of its size. Three points stand out.

First, instruction is organized around a specific, named instructional model — Robert Marzano's “scales and targets” framework — under which every standard is broken into leveled learning targets (1.0 through 4.0), students work at their own readiness level within a given lesson, and both students and teachers can see exactly where a student sits on the progression toward mastery. This is the district's operational definition of “student-centered learning,” and it doubles as HGA's data-driven-instruction mechanism: students are placed and re-placed on the progression using ongoing formative data, not a single annual test.

Second, HGA runs an explicit multi-tiered system of support built on the same “high-dosage, targeted intervention” logic the research literature identifies. Students are screened with the FastBridge assessment (administered at least twice a year, more often for at-risk groups) and sorted into risk categories that determine the intensity of support they receive — from classroom-level Tier I instruction, through Title I and EL-teacher-delivered Tier II support, to one-on-one Tier III intervention from a reading specialist for the highest-risk students. The same data infrastructure that identifies struggling readers also identifies students ready for acceleration.

Third, the culture-and-expectations piece is structural, not aspirational: HGA requires college acceptance as a graduation requirement, backs it with a scholarship fund that converts academic achievement into tuition credits, and reports that a considerably higher share of its graduates remain enrolled in college well after entry than the statewide average. On the discipline side, a multi-tiered PBIS system — staffed with outside mentors and in-house social workers — is credited with a sustained within-year decline in out-of-class discipline referrals, addressing the behavioral prerequisites for the academic system to function.

The results are consistent with what the research would predict from a coherent system rather than isolated interventions: on the state's most recent accountability measures, HGA's low-income (FRP), EL, and special-education subgroups substantially outperform the same subgroups both statewide and in the resident district (St. Paul Public Schools), even though HGA's overall proficiency rate — driven in part by a large and rapidly growing recent-immigrant EL population — still trails the state average. That is precisely the pattern one would expect from a school that is comparatively effective at educating its actual population rather than one that is simply serving an easier population than its comparison group.

6. How each school organized itself to be a system

The instructive part, for legislative and district-finance purposes, is not the list of practices in isolation — it's how each school built organizational structure around the list so the practices reinforce each other instead of competing for the same scarce minutes of a teacher's day.

Brooke's system is built around removing variance from the instructional core so adults can focus their energy on execution and feedback. By providing a shared curriculum network-wide, Brooke eliminates the need for individual teachers to build lessons from scratch — that time is redirected into a weekly cycle of observation and coaching. A dedicated operations function absorbs the logistical load that would otherwise compete with instructional leadership for a principal's time. Compensation and an internal teacher-pipeline (the Associate Teacher Program) are structured to retain and grow instructional talent within the network rather than losing it to turnover. In organizational terms, Brooke is a tightly coupled instructional system: curriculum, coaching, data, and staffing are all built around a single, shared definition of high-quality instruction, and very little is left to individual-classroom discretion.

HGA's system is built around a common instructional framework paired with a tiered, data-driven safety net, layered onto a population with far more linguistic and immigration-status variability than Brooke's. The Marzano scales-and-targets model gives every teacher and student a common language for where a student sits on a learning progression, which is what allows the multi-tiered support system to function — Tier II and Tier III staff can pick up precisely where a classroom teacher left off, because the framework and the data are shared. The PBIS/social-work infrastructure exists because HGA's leadership recognizes, correctly, that instructional practices cannot work in a classroom where behavioral and social-emotional needs are unaddressed — so that infrastructure is treated as a precondition for the instructional system, not an add-on. And the college-admission graduation requirement functions as HGA's structural expression of “high expectations,” operating on the output side the way Marzano's model operates on the instructional side.

Neither school's results should be read, as the Malatinszky report implicitly invites, as evidence that a single lever — integration, or funding, or curriculum — explains the outcome. Both schools show that funding plus a coherent, evidence-aligned instructional and support system produces outcomes for high-need students that neither element alone would predict. That is the Skeen question the legislature actually has to answer: not “how much money,” but “money for what system,” followed by “how much does that system cost.” Parts to come in this series will turn to that costing question directly.

Next in this series: strategies that Minnesota educators, experts, and advocates could use to influence the parties in Cruz-Guzman to focus on all of the factors necessary to deliver an adequate education.