Remembering the Pawlenty Education Task Force Finance Report

The purpose of this post is to summarize some of the key points one can derive from the 2004 Minnesota education finance commission report, Inve$ting in our Future (2004) and the costing study which followed, Estimating the Cost of an Adequate Education in Minnesota (2006).   Together, the two reports provide powerful ammunition to support the conclusion that Minnesota’s public education finance system is constitutionally inadequate. 

• The two reports taken together suggest that the deficit in special education funding is only part of the total shortfall in state funding required to meet constitutional standards and the actual K-12 education budget.  The shortfall in special education funding is $1.5 billion per biennium, and the Task Force Report is convincing evidence that the constitutional shortfall is greater than that.   
• The two reports support the conclusion that even as of 2006, the shortfall in constitutionally adequate funding was over $2 billion per biennium.  Since 2006, the legislature has added major costly requirements to mandatory requirements in the world’s best workforce, LEAPS Act, and dyslexia law, and there is every reason to believe that the under-funding deficit is even higher today.   
• The two reports support the position that to educate students with higher educational needs, the state must fund additional learning time – more learning time during the school day, and summer learning – for the students with higher educational needs. 
• The two reports support a conclusion that districts with high concentrations of students with higher learning needs disproportionately carry the burden the state's  inadequate funding.
 

In the 1990's there had been a growing recognition that when a state converts to a proficiency based education system, it is essential to adjust state funding to meet the financial challenges required to educate students with higher educational needs to higher levels of proficiency.   In 1998, the National Conference of Legislatures urged its members to shift school finance to an adequacy approach which would require substantially  more funding to educate children with higher educational needs.  (Educational Adequacy: Building an Adequate School Finance System).   

Equal funding among school districts was not a sufficient measure of constitutional adequacy, the Report explained:

An adequate school finance system should provide for and ensure the use of sufficient funds necessary to develop and maintain the needed capacity to provide every student with a reasonable opportunity to accomplish expected education objectives that are clearly articulated and measurable.

 Shortly after assuming the governorship, Governor Pawlenty initiated a school funding task force to study Minnesota's current funding system and to make recommendations on the changes in our school finance system necessary to support a proficiency based regimen. 

In 2004, the Minnesota Task Force issued its report “Inve$ting in our Future.”   (You can read the report itself by clicking on the hyperlink. ) Among other things the Investing in our Future report called for “a rationally determined, learning-linked, student-oriented and cost-based Instructional Services Allocation”.  The Report explained:

The Instructional Services Allocation (ISA) should be an annual revenue amount sufficient to cover full dollar costs of ensuring Minnesota public school students have an opportunity to achieve state specified academic standards. These standards are connected to a comprehensive instructional program offered by schools.

This formula should take into account the added costs included with relevant characteristics of each student (e.g., disabilities, poverty, school readiness, English language learners, and student mobility). In addition, Minnesota’s new funding formula should compensate districts for cost factors beyond their control (e.g., student population sparsity, technology access, and higher costs of living).

If the Governor had followed the task force recommendation, he might have led Minnesota's executive and legislative branches to transform Minnesota's school finance system to a cost based system.  To do that, it would have been necessary to develop data to determine the costs requisite to teach students with higher educational needs and then to advance budgets that included that cost information.  But the Governor, who by then had Presidential ambitions, chose to terminate the Commission's work and pursue a very different course.  In the next post, we'll look in more detail at the Task Force's findings and their implications for Minnesota's current school finance system.  

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Minnesota's Adequate Education Laws

What is an Adequate Education under Minnesota Law (Part I)

Jvonkorff on Education has been on vacation, but recent developments has encouraged its return.  In two cases, Governor Dayton and Commissioner Cassellius have taken the position that litigants seeking to enforce Minnesota's constitutional education clause cannot rely upon a claim that children are not receiving an adequate education, because it is the legislature's responsibility to define adequate education, not the courts.  This contention seems strange, because the Minnesota legislature has passed a  series of robust and comprehensive laws designed to tell the public and school districts what a Minnesota adequate education is.  

The dispute over who defines a Minnesota adequate education arises in the following context.   In the Cruz-Guzman case, plaintiffs  from urban districts alleged that de facto segregation of Minnesota school districts prevents disadvantaged students from receiving an adequate education.    There is, they claim, a direct connection between integration and educational quality, and they urged that Minnesota's constitutional education clause requires the Governor, the Commissioner of Education, and the legislature to fix that problem.   In the Forslund case, plaintiffs from urban districts alleged that tenure and seniority laws had the effect of allocating incompetent teachers to students and classrooms who desperately need outstanding teachers.  They contended that those students were not receiving an adequate education as a result.

For some reason, the State of Minnesota defended these litigations, in part, by contending that the legislature, not the courts, must define what an adequate education is.    This defense seems to JvonKorff on Education to be passing strange, especially coming from Governor Dayton and Commissioner Cassellius, because Minnesota has a robust and demanding definition of educational adequacy.  This is a first in a series of posts examining each of the laws  that prescribe Minnesota's school districts educational responsibilities.  

Minnesota's World's Best Workforce Law (WBWF)

The MDE World’s Best Workforce webpage explains that:

The World’s Best Workforce1 bill was passed in 2013 to ensure every school district in the state is making strides to increase student performance. Each district must develop a plan that addresses the following five goals:

• All children are ready for school. 
• All third-graders can read at grade level. 
• All racial and economic achievement gaps between students are closed. 
• All students are ready for career and college. 
• All students graduate from high school.

This requirement is found at Minnesota statutes § 120B.11(c), and you can click on the link here to read this important statute.  The WBWF statute is not mere puffery.   It requires every school district to incorporate efforts to achieve these goals into its strategic plan.   The statute provides:

A school board, at a public meeting, shall adopt a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan to support and improve teaching and learning that is aligned with creating the world's best workforce and includes:

(1) clearly defined district and school site goals and benchmarks for instruction and student achievement for all student subgroups identified in section 120B.35, subdivision 3, paragraph (b), clause (2);

(2) a process to assess and evaluate each student's progress toward meeting state and local academic standards, assess and identify students to participate in gifted and talented programs and accelerate their instruction, and adopt early-admission procedures consistent with section 120B.15, and identifying the strengths and weaknesses of instruction in pursuit of student and school success and curriculum affecting students' progress and growth toward career and college readiness and leading to the world's best workforce;

(3) a system to periodically review and evaluate the effectiveness of all instruction and curriculum, taking into account strategies and best practices, student outcomes, school principal evaluations under section 123B.147, subdivision 3, students' access to effective teachers who are members of populations underrepresented among the licensed teachers in the district or school and who reflect the diversity of enrolled students under section 120B.35, subdivision 3, paragraph (b), clause (2), and teacher evaluations under section 122A.40, subdivision 8, or 122A.41, subdivision 5;

(4) strategies for improving instruction, curriculum, and student achievement, including the English and, where practicable, the native language development and the academic achievement of English learners;

(5) a process to examine the equitable distribution of teachers and strategies to ensure low-income and minority children are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, ineffective, or out-of-field teachers;

(6) education effectiveness practices that integrate high-quality instruction, rigorous curriculum, technology, and a collaborative professional culture that develops and supports teacher quality, performance, and effectiveness; and

(7) an annual budget for continuing to implement the district plan.

Ironically, the WBWF demands that school districts include in their strategic plan a strategy equitably to distribute quality teachers, thus supporting the goal, if not the means to reach that goal, propounded by the plaintiffs in Forslund.   In the next posts, Jvonkorff on education will discuss other rigorous requirements in Minnesota law defining the Minnesota legislature's vision of an adequate education.  

Next Post:  Minnesota's Special Education law is part of Minnesota's adequate education framework.

• Minnesotas Adequate Education Laws--Special Education 

• Academic Standards Law is Part of Minnesota Adequate Education Framework

• Minnesota's Academic Content Standards Form Part of the Definition of Adequate Education. 

Past Series on Education and Constitutional Law

McCleary v. State, Part I   McCleary v State Requires Legislature to Base Funding on Actual Cost
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part II
McCleary v State and Determining the Cost of Education
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part III
 McCleary v. State: what level of scrutiny is appropriate for legislative funding decisions
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part IV
Correlating the cost of education: fund the child.
Jvonkorff on Education  McCleary V. State Part V
Summary of Decision Network for Excellence
Washington Supreme Court Blog  
JvonKorff on Education, The Rose Decision 
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part I
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part II
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part III
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part IV