McCleary v. State: what level of scrutiny is appropriate for legislative funding decisions

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the recent Washington Supreme Court decision,  McCleary v. State, enforcing the State's constitutional requirement to assure appropriate funding for public education.  You can jump to prior posts in the series using links below.  McCleary v. State deals with a number of important issues in education finance jurisprudence.  But I've been posting on one aspect of the decision, the part that holds that the State does not meet its constitutional obligation to public education, when it sets funding based on politics rather than a data based costing system.  Unless the state legislature bases funding on credible efforts to determine the cost of required programs, it is acting irrationally and irresponsibly.

We can agree, can't we, that respect for the constitutional requirement to provide a "thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state" as the Constitution provides, should afford some level of due diligence, some factual basis, to support the connection between the cost of  education and the revenues provided.   If the legislature were to mandate the construction of a bridge across the Mississippi River, and order that it be built for half of the cost necessary to keep that bridge from collapsing under the weight of traffic, surely we would all recognize that the legislature would be failing to meet its public responsibilities.   When the bridge collapsed, it would hardly be a defense to say, that the bridge was built at half price, because of political considerations.  How would we feel if legislators said,   "We couldn't build a safe bridge in Minneapolis, because we had to spread the money around to St. Paul and Mankato."   If the State orders a bridge built, it had better appropriate enough money to build it to state standards.  

If there is a role for the judiciary to play in policing this concept:  that the state must fund the cost of education that it mandates as part of the "general and uniform system of public schools,"  how should that scrutiny be exercised.   When judges review a law to determine that it is constitutional, they apply different levels of scrutiny, depending on the circumstances.   Suppose for example that the legislature sets the speed limit on trunk highways at 65 miles per hour.  Suppose a citizen is arrested for speeding at 67 miles per hour, and the citizen attacks the speed limit as arbitrary and capricious.  Suppose the citizen claims that the legislature had no reasonable basis to set the speed limit at 65, that the legislature held no hearings, performed no studies, had no data showing a lower accident rate at 65 miles per hour than 70 miles per hour.  Constitutional jurisprudence requires us to apply what is called the "rational basis test."

A memo prepared by the Minnesota legislative House Research explains:   "A rational basis test applies to economic regulation not involving suspect classifications and, thus, to most of the classifications involved in the tax laws.  In general, a classification has a rational basis and is constitutional, if it reasonably related to or has some rational relationship to the objective the legislature sought to achieve.  The rational basis test gives the legislature considerable flexibility in creating classifications."  

This rational basis test, if it applies, has several aspects to it.  One aspect is procedural.  We don't require the legislature to make specific findings to demonstrate that 65 miles per hour is a really good speed limit.  We don't require the legislature even to hold hearings on the speed limit, or to make a record of the data that supports the speed limit adopted.    We don't require that the legislature reviewed specific reports, or that it interviewed specific experts.  When the legislation is challenged in Court, the State can defend by offering evidence that the legislature did not consider.  As an on line law journal article explains, "In Beach Communications v. FCC, for example, the Court explained that “if there is any conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis” for a challenged law, it will survive rational basis review. And because the Court “never require[s] a legislature to articulate its reasons for enacting a statute, it is entirely irrelevant . . . whether the conceived reason for the challenged distinction actually motivated the legislature.”  Thus, not only is the government invited to dream up entirely post hoc rationalizations for challenged legislation, it has “no obligation to produce evidence” in support of those rationalizations either".

Now at in a later post, I am likely to argue that Minnesota's current funding process does not even pass muster under this minimum test, the lowest of all low levels of scrutiny, save the level that says, the Courts don't even afford judicial review of any kind.   But in Minnesota, as in the State of Washington, public education is a fundamental right.   The Constitutional education clause calls upon the judiciary to scrutinize legislative funding decisions more closely than that.   And so, one of the most important topics of discussion that we can have in this arena, is to examine levels of scrutiny that seem to make sense... that assure that the constitutional mandate is enforced, without the judiciary completely supplanting the legislative role altogether.  
We'll discuss some ideas for how the judiciary in Minnesota might exercise that function appropriately in the next post.

Links
McCleary v State, Washington's Groundbreaking School Finance Decision

 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

School Choice Will Not Close the Achievement Gap

Private education performs a vital role in our society. And, it has been a pillar of central Minnesota throughout the twentieth century. Products of private education, parochial and secular, have made major contributions to our community to the nation and the world. My own masters in teaching and law degree come from two Catholic institutions in Washington, D.C. Parochial schools afford families the choice to send their children to schools which integrate religious and secular education in ways that the US Constitution would not allow in public schools. They offer the choice to found schools and fund them with private resources, organized on educational and philosophical choices determined by the founders. A group can found a Catholic, Baptist, Quaker, Hasidic, Conservative Jewish, Amish, Islamic and many have.

But school choice, and especially voucher credits, is not a solution to the achievement gap. School choice can be a solution for a small select fortunate students who escape a dysfunctional school in their neighborhood (instead of demanding that their school do its job). But school choice, as a strategy to attack the achievement gap has been an unmitigated failure and proposals to increase the amount of school choice are likely to make things worse, not better.

After an intensive review of the performance of Minnesota charter schools, the Legislative Auditor found:

As a group, charter students posted lower test scores and their schools were more likely to wind up on a watch list dictated by No Child Left Behind goals. Half of active charter schools failed to make adequate yearly progress and were subject to federal sanctions, compared with 32 percent of district-run schools.

The Auditor's report squares with a number of other studies across the country that strongly suggest that the school choice movement is not proving to be a large scale solution to closing the achievement gap. Notwithstanding this evidence, spurred by the advocates for private and parochial schools, school choice has attracted a huge fan-club at the legislature. Many of these legislators believe, based on ideology, that school choice certainly must be a solution to the achievement gap, because certainly open competition always produces positive results. But actual results prove otherwise. School choice is destined to fail as a gap-closing experiment for several reasons:

• Students cost vastly different amounts to educate. The students who we want to target when closing the achievement gap are typically among the highest cost students to educate. Don't take my word for this. This is the conclusion of the Thomas Fordham Institute -- a leading voucher advocate. The Fordham Institute, with Catholic roots, has authored an important study "Fund the Child" which makes this clear. Voucher and school choice initiatives typically allow private schools to cherry-pick transferees, accepting only the children who need help the least, leaving the rest behind. Often the transfer students are already doing quite well in their public schools, and the result of the transfer is simply to leave the public school with a larger percentage of students who are costly to educate.
  

• In Minnesota, special education, on the average, costs over one-half billion dollars statewide more than the legislature pays for these students. School choice does not share this deficit: it merely increases the proportion of students in the public school who produce the deficit, and increases the deficit load carried by the remaining students. Our funding system does not reimburse public schools based on the number of special education students they serve, but rather on the number of students, disabled and non-disabled, that they serve. That means that the more students who transfer out, the higher the percentage of high cost students with disabilities left behind, and the greater the deficit in public school operations. If a costly special education student transfers to a private school, the public school still pays for that education, and pays for the deficit in reimbursement out of regular education funds. As a result, the more students who transfer out of a public school, the greater the deficit. In Minnesota, school choice is a cherry picking operation, in which the transferee school gets full funding for the student transferred, but the public school is left with an increasingly large number of students who must be educated at a cost greater than state reimbursement. School choice is not based on fair competition or fair funding.

• School choice has simply not proven effective in closing the achievement gap. While there are many good charter and private schools, the overwhelming evidence across the country is that state funded school choice has simply not proven effective.
  

• School choice affords policy makers an excuse for not doing their job -- to demand that ineffective public schools follow best practices. If a school is not measuring up, we have a public responsibility to make the changes that need to be made. But the last several decades under Minnesota's school choice system has shown that charter choice has served as a safety valve for parents and community leaders who otherwise would have demanded reform in their own public schools. The result has been that instead of forcing public school change, they have delivered school choice, and the result has not benefited students at large. Measures of performance in the metro area have instead shown that charter schools are doing no better, and often vastly worse, than their public school competitors. When the charter school fails, the public is left with a mess, and the former charter operator retains the profits. At the same time, the transfer out through a cherry picking process has impoverished the remaining public schools, vastly increased their average costs of operation, and made school reform significantly more difficult to accomplish.

The choice movement in Minnesota has been a major factor in the destruction of public schools in the twin-cities. The two major metro school districts share much of the blame for their problems, of course, but the choice movement has significantly limited their ability to recover and overcome their challenges. That might be worth the price, were it not for the fact that the choice movement has made no discernible impact on the achievement gap, and has probably made it worse.

One understands the reason why folks who operate private schools support a voucher system. It allows them to increase their enrollment at public expense. They can accept public money without accepting the public responsibilities and costs that go along with it. It's a great business deal for them. They can hire teachers at non-union rates; deny admission to students who they judge more costly than the state funded tuition justifies, and expel them if they discover that their cost margin expectations do not prove correct. If the advocates for vouchers were truly interested in closing the achievement gap, they would advocating that private schools must accept all students eligible at the same cost, but amendments at the legislature to do just that were defeated by voucher advocates.

In this connection, I want to distinguish the choice movement as a device to help a few lucky students as compared to a device systemically to close the achievement gap. I taught in the District of Columbia school system. That system has a long history of dysfunctionality; it has been so dysfunctional for so long, that it is difficult I think for Minnesotans even to envision the depth of the systemic failures in that system. The parochial system in Washington DC provided a safety value for those students who were fortunate to escape deeply dysfunctional schools. No one can deny the benefits to those individual students.

But we are talking here of closing the achievement gap, which means creating a system that works for all students. If we are not going to make the reforms and provide the funding necessary to assure quality educations for all students, then I suppose providing an escape for some students -- the lucky ones, the cherry picked students -- is better than nothing. But actually, the result of the voucher system is exactly the opposite. It removes pressure for reform, inflicts growing financial penalties on the publics, and allows legislators to rationalize their failure to provide funding and demand reform. They can throw up their hands and claim that they fixed the problem with choice.

The claim that privates and parochials are trying to help us close the achievement gap is a well-intentioned rationalization. Their proposal will make gap closing more difficult; will cripple our ability to do that by transferring out the lowest cost students and leaving us with the most expensive. God bless parochial education. I owe my professional career to a great Catholic institution of learning. But the voucher proposal would destroy public school efforts to make progress on the achievement gap and should be defeated.

Minnesota's Education System Is Unconstitutional--the Change in State Minimum Basic Education

Yesterday, I began writing about the reasons why I believe that the current legislative provisions for education in Minnesota are unconstitutional. I said that this is a complicated subject. Its one of those issues that cannot be tied up into a neat little sound-bite. I promised to try to provide a series of articles explaining the legal theory that I expound that could be understood by non-lawyers. But I didn't promise that I could do it in a few sentences, nor did I promise that the issues could be understood without a bit of hard work. Today, I write the second post in the series. My goal today is to argue that the first job of the legislature is to define what is the basic education that all Minnesotans should receive.

This is a critical step in understanding the constitutional question. I did not say, nor would I ever argue, that it is unconstitutional for one school district to provide more programs, or different courses, than another school district. You cannot think clearly about this question, I believe, until you recognize that the legislature has a responsibility to define what education each district must provide. Once that requirement has been met, local districts can do more. I contend that the Skeen decision starts with that proposition: that it is primarily a legislative function, subject to public accountability of the democratic process, to tell local school districts what the definition of a state mandated education is. Now, if the legislature were to decide that school districts need not teach all students to read and write in basic English, that might present a constitutional problem of a different kind. But that is not a problem that we have right now. Our first job in understanding how the Constitution applies to the matter of public education is to recognize that the Constitution expects that the legislature will define what education is required.

Beyond that, I would argue, a district can decide to spend more money and offer more programs. The constitutional scrutiny applied to such differences is on an entirely different level than when some districts provide the mandated education and some do not, and when that difference results from the failure of the legislature to make provision for sufficient funding and sufficient power within the school board, to actually achieve that objective.

Now Minnesota's open enrollment system creates special problems in this analysis. Under an open enrollment system, a district that fails to offer amenities like football, baseball, yearbook, and a broad array of activities pays a huge penalty in student enrollment. And, the penalty it pays is the loss of students from families who care enough to invest in the time and effort to send their child to another district, and quite often, that creates an exodus from a district with financial challenges of the very students that the district needs to stay financially viable. This problem must be considered as part of the system that the legislature has created, and which it has failed effectively to address--the danger of the downward spiral. But this is something we can discuss in another post.

To think clearly about this question of what is the basic mandated education, one should begin with the education that the state required back when the Skeen case was being litigated in the District Court in Buffalo Minnesota. What we are going to discover is that there has been a radical change in the legislative definition of the basic education required for all students. I think that even long time educators have forgotten the magnitude of the difference. (Now as I use the word "basic" education, I am not here referring to the idea of a simple McGuffy's reader type education or a "back to basics" education, whatever that means. I use the term basic here as the education which the legislature defines as required of students across the state.)

At the end of the 1980's, the State of Minnesota had a very low minimum requirement for a 12th grade education! Most of us have no idea how little the State actually required of local school districts. Under the regimen that existed at that time, the state's mandatory graduation requirement consisted of three basic components:

• A "Must-Offer" rule that required that every school district offer a certain set of courses to its students. This "must offer" requirement granted great latitude to local districts to offer a broad array of courses in the social studies, language, math and science, or a much narrower range of courses. It also granted great latitude to local districts as to whether it would offer challenging courses with great rigor, or whether the courses offered would be less demanding. If you don't believe me here, I suggest that you do some digging around and look at the State's statutes and rules at this time.
  
• A "Must-Take" rule that required that every student must take certain courses in certain disciplines. But the course content requirements of these courses were almost entirely left open to local option, and students could meet this requirement by taking and passing the course at a very low level, a level that was locally defined.
  
• A "Seat-Time" rule that required that every district require its graduates to take a certain number of course hours spread across certain disciplines. Although we tend to look back in hindsight believing that Minnesota was the "education state," and that surely the State of Minnesota required all of its students to take a rigorous set of courses and to demonstrate mastery of a common core of critical knowledge and skills, in fact, this is not true at all. By the end of the 1980's, it was lawful in Minnesota for a school district to graduate students who didn't know that there were two world wars, or the causes of the civil war, or who couldn't do more than cash register arithmetic. Local school districts could grant diplomas to persons who lacked minimal knowledge, or they could require high levels of proficiency. Minnesota was a radical local option state as a result of a decision of the Minnesota legislature that the State should not impose requirements of great rigor on local districts.

Now this meant that under state law as it existed when Skeen was decided, local districts were not required at the state level to produce graduates literate in math, science, literature, reading and writing. You cannot understand the Skeen decision without understanding this. In the next post, I will tell you that when the plaintiffs argued their case to the Supreme Court, all of the school districts seeking relief told the Supreme Court that their districts were meeting the minimum requirements of the State of Minnesota. They said, look, all of our students are doing well enough to meet state standards (which incidentally were extremely low). The Skeen plaintiffs were not arguing that they could not comply with State standards. They were arguing something quite different. They were arguing that an unequal taxation and finance system made it more difficult for them to comply. Skeen was at its core, an equality of financial resources and equality of taxation effort case, rather than a case challenging the State's failure to provide sufficient resources and local power to provide the State's mandated basic education at all.

Now, since Skeen, a number of major changes have happened in the legislative definition of what local school districts must provide. Today, in Minnesota, about half of the schools in the State are not meeting state defined proficiency standards, standards implemented in law. And the primary reason that this is the case is not, as some suggest, a deterioration in the level of education that students are receiving. The primary reason is that Minnesota law has set a vastly higher minimum state standard required for all students. And so, our constitutional analysis must begin with the fact that in Minnesota today, the state minimum requirements are fundamentally different than they were back when Skeen was decided. Now we still have a long way to go to understand this complicated issue. We need to look at these issues and quite a few more:

• What are the state laws which today define the minimum required education that all school districts must provide. We will see that these laws are vastly more demanding than the laws that existed in the 1980's?
• What is the third kind of constitutional litigation, called the "adequacy litigation," and is that really the right approach to understanding the constitutional infirmity in Minnesota today?
• How are Courts dealing with the problem of local funding that depends on a referendum vote of the citizens of that District? Is it really constitutional for the legislature to let local citizens decide whether to provide funding sufficient to meet state standards? If it is, then what really is the meaning of the Constitutional guaranty?
• What are we to make of a legislative system which purposely imposes mandates that intentionally cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than the legislature appropriates for this purpose?
• Is there any requirement that when imposing mandated educational service, that the legislature can refuse to provide funding for that service and simultaneously deprive local school districts the power to raise the revenues that the State recognizes are required to provide that service?
• Why is it commonly contended that launching a constitutional challenge is vastly expensive in legal and expert witness fees? Who is defining the strategy to launch a constitutional challenge, and is it possible that we are overlooking simpler less costly and more straightforward approaches?
• What are recent cases in other States saying, and do they offer any guidance for Minnesota? What does the Skeen case say, and does it suggest that plaintiffs today might have a strong chance of prevailing, and if so under what circumstances?

We are a long way from being done. I want to come back to this fundamental point, however. I believe that the Constitution requires the legislature to follow a rational tiered approach to providing a quality education in Minnesota. The first step is to decide what a 21st education must require. This is a legislative function to which the Courts are going to afford substantial deference. The cost of public education, that is the education mandated by the State, will rise and fall to a significant extent based upon that legislative definition. As I write on this topic, some folks are going to say, oh, oh, he is trying to get the courts to raise our taxes. And the answer is no, I am trying to get the legislature to fund what it mandates and to give local school districts the power to deliver what the State mandates with the funds that the State provides. I'll talk about the next tiers in a future post.

What is not constitutionally acceptable, I believe, is for the legislature to mandate that all school districts provide a particular level of education to all students, but then to grant some school districts more than adequate funding to meet that objective, while depriving other districts of that same ability by providing insufficient funding.

Atlantic Century Report warns of Competitiveness Decline

Yesterday, CNN's outstanding Sunday news magazine, GPS with Fareed Zakariah, referenced a new report on global competitiveness, the Atlantic Century Report. There are many such reports, and so you have to take each such report in context, considering whether the report has any bias and drilling down to determine its methodology. Above all, one must be ultra cautious in sezing on a study or report that seems to vindicate views that you always hold.

This new report sounds an alarm regarding a possible decline in United States competitiveness, especially in the areas of technology, innovation, and the role of advanced science and engineering degrees in maintaining our competitive edge. The port points out that some recent reports have argued that our competitive edge remains strong. But, the authors argue, that there are disturbing signs that in recent years, other nations are catching up with us. The report uses a scoring system to report competitiveness (see at the bottom of this post);

In the last few years a number of studies have assessed countries’ global competitiveness. Many of these have found that the United States is the world leader in international competitiveness. Such rankings have led many observers to claim that calls for concern or questions about the U.S. competitiveness position are unwarranted. For example, the World Economic Forum’s report, The Global Competitiveness Report 2008-20097, ranked the United States first in global competitiveness two years in a row.
Innovation and productivity are supported by a highly educated workforce, so higher education attainment has become an important component of economic success, particularly in higher wage nations that can compete less effectively in lower skilled, routinized work.......

For example, the United States leads Europe in terms of higher education attainment, with EU-15 (the broadened definition of the European Union) levels 77 percent of U.S. levels and EU-10 levels just 57 percent. But the report argues that in the last decade, the trends are in the opposite direction:

When it comes to trends, however, the picture is quite different. The United States ranks last, with almost no increase since 1999. In contrast the share of 25- to 34-year-olds in the EU-15 with a tertiary degree increased by 25 percent, in part because of very strong growth in nations like Ireland and the United Kingdom. In addition, some EU-10 nations increased even faster, including Poland (117 percent).

The report continues:

"Europe and the United States vs. the Rest of the World: Despite the fact that the United States led for many years in higher education attainment, it no longer does. In fact, Russia leads with an over 40 percent higher rate, while Canada, Japan, and South Korea lead the United States by over 30 percent. And all four have attainment rates over 70 percent higher than EU-15 rates. Most developing nations have much lower rates, with rates in Brazil and India below 30 percent of U.S. rates. Europe vs. the United States: Europe lags behind the United States in the number of researchers, with the U.S. researcher intensity over 55 percent higher than the EU-15 and twice as high as the EU-10. The strong science and technology base of the United States economy established after World War II and reenergized with strong IT and biotechnology leadership more recently means that the United States is among the world leaders."

When it comes to trends, most other nations are making faster progress than the United States. Perhaps not surprisingly given its concerted push to be a more technologically-based economy China grew the fastest, with its share of researchers more than doubling. But other lagging nations also experienced rapid growth, with Mexico almost doubling (98 percent); Brazil up two-thirds, and India up 50 percent. A few nations such as South Korea and Singapore that had relatively high levels of researchers in 1999 made rapid progress, increasing by approximately 70 percent. Finally, Japan and Canada both outpaced the EU-15 and the United States.

Here in Minnesota, one manifestation of the competitiveness crisis is the fact that Minnesota's labor force growth is shrinking radically at the same time that the number of older Americans is increasing. From 1970 to 1980, Minnesota's labor force grew by about 450,000 according to the State Demographer and State Economist. (Click on link for slide show with charts). In the following three decades, net labor force growth was between 325,000 and 400,000. But now comes crunch time. But the State demographer and economist estimate that net labor force growth will fall to about 150,000 in the decade 2010-2020, and to about 100,000 in the following decade. During the same period, the population and percentage of the population over age 65 will grow significantly.

From 2006-2011, for example, the number of Minnesota workers turning 62 will jump from about 38,000 to 60,000. The number of people who will be doing productive labor will be falling over the next several decades as compared to the number of senior citizens. (This growth in the elderly is offset somewhat by the lower number of children). But still, the rising number of elderly will be a significant challenge will have more people to support than prior generations. To make this work, it is absolutely critical then that we invest in education that allows you, and your children to be productive.

In a prior post, I argued that our failure to maintain a strong education infrastructure endagers our competitiveness as a nation.

One manifestation of the crisis in education may be illustrated by thinking back to what has happened to the cost of going to college. Back in 1957, tuition at the University of Minnesota for the whole year, 1957, was $111. By the time I graduated from high school in 1963, tuition for the full year had rise to $255. If you take that inflation adjusted $255 into today's dollars, the tuition would be only $1744. It's actually over $10,000. The cost of attending Minnesota's major public university, which was founded to provide a quality college education to average citizens, has grown by over 5 times, in terms of constant dollars. We are making it vastly more difficult for this generation of young people to attend college than for my generation. How did this happen.

By the time that I graduated from college, one year tuition was $294. When I enrolled in Georgetown Law school, tuition at U of M had risen to about $504. The tuition at my private university law school was about $2600. I could work my way through law school on summer jobs. Minnesota's spending per capita on higher education peaked in that year, 1972 and has been falling ever since. Minnesota's ranking among states in state funding for higher education dropped from 12th in FY 2001 to 35th in FY 2006, as a share of personal income. And although Minnesota is below-average in state funding for higher education, it is above average in the cost of attending public institutions.

The current full year tuition for undergrad at the University of Minnesota $10,320, Law School. It costs $21,000 to attend the law school for a year, and at my alma mater, Georgetown Law it now costs $39,000 per year. According to MNSCU statistics, the state appropriation per MNSCU sudent, adjusted for inflation, has decreased since 1999 while tuition has increased 57%

What was the University of Minnesota like when tuition was only $255 per year. In those years, Dr. Lilihei's team there completed the first open heart surgery using hypothermia. Their efforts led to cross circulation techniques, then to a heart-lung machine and ultimately to techniques that now make open heart surgery almost mundane. Lilihei's expertise led him to train more than 150 cardiac surgeons from 40 nations, including Christiaan Barnard (a fellow University of Minnesota Ph.D. recipient in the 1950s who went on to perform the world's first heart transplant in South Africa). At the University of Minnesota Lillihei and his coworkers also developed the first electronic pacemaker. At the University, when tuition was under $255, the school of medicine did the first pancreas transplant; pioneerered the development of the mechanical heart valves; conducted the first implementation of artificial blood; and implemented the first clinical use of cortisone, the great anti-inflammatory. Without these advances, our medical technology industry, which employed 20,400 workers in 2000, would not exist without the people and the basic research coming out of the university. In fact, from 1990 to 2000 the number of medical technology employees grew 67 percent in Minnesota, while increasing only 17 percent nationally.

During this time, the university spawned and supported growth of other areas of technology. That era witnessed the growth of Control Data, the establishment in the Twin Cities of Cray Supercomputers. U of M grads populated the laboratories of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing .

Over the last two decades, and especially during the last 8 years, there has been a fundamental change in our ability to sustain the vital educational infrastructure that made Minnesota a center of growth in technology and in the next decades, unless this is reversed, we will pay a heavy price.