This is a linked table of contents to a series advocating that the Cruz-Guzman class action must activate the full force of the constitution by articulating a broad comprehensive vision calling for educational reform. Each post in the series is linked and summarized. Minnesota's courts are deciding whether the State is meeting its constitutional obligation to give every child an adequate education — one that, under Skeen v. State, meets “all state standards.” Over the past several months, this blog has worked through that question from a number of angles: the history of the litigation, the Malatinszky and Higher Ground expert reports, the research on what actually works for high-need students, and the missing voices in the courtroom. Below is a short guide to that series, in order, for anyone who wants to catch up or dig into a particular piece.
1. Setting Up the Constitutional Question
Integrated Schools Must be Properly Funded to Deliver an Adequate Education (Part I)
Cruz-Guzman is often read as Minnesota's version of Brown v. Board, but the two cases rest on very different constitutional theories. Brown's litigation team deliberately set aside a claim for equal resources in favor of the argument that segregation itself is inherently unequal — a strategic choice with real costs to Black educational infrastructure that the post traces in some detail. Minnesota's Education Clause, by contrast, requires the Legislature to deliver an adequate education meeting all state standards, which means the Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs need more than an integration order — they need a plan for the funding, accountability, and effective practices that will actually get students to proficiency.
2. Funding and Integration Are Not a Choice
Baker and DiCarlo's New Book Calls for a Unified Strategy to Combine Funding Reform and School Integration
Introduces Bruce Baker and Matthew Di Carlo's Segregation and School Funding, which argues that Minnesota's failure to educate its highest-need students traces to three interlocking causes — inadequate funding, racial and poverty concentration, and a lack of accountability for using effective practices — rather than to any single lever like integration or spending alone.
Lessons from Baker and DiCarlo: Combine Adequate Funding with Integration
Draws six lessons from the book: equity is not the same as equal funding; adequate funding must be defined by the actual cost of meeting standards; segregation concentrates educational need; integration by itself is not enough; money matters; and funding reform and integration must be pursued together. The post ties several of these directly back to the Minnesota Supreme Court's reasoning in Skeen.
3. What the Evidence Already Shows
Expert Report in Cruz Guzman Case Documents MSP and St. Paul's Unconstitutional Failure to Provide an Adequate Education
Higher Ground Academy's expert report, filed to rebut a causal link between racial composition and outcomes, ends up documenting something else entirely: majorities of students in Minneapolis and St. Paul failing to meet state standards, dozens of schools identified as low-performing under Minnesota's North Star system, and that failure falling disproportionately on students of color and low-income students. The post argues this is independent evidence of a Skeen violation, regardless of what the report concludes about integration.
Twenty Years of Unheeded Warnings: Leaving Children Behind
A survey of two decades of task forces, studies, and audits — from Governor Pawlenty's 2004 Blue-Ribbon Task Force through the 2025 MDE Task Force — all reaching the same diagnosis: Minnesota's school finance system is structurally inadequate for its highest-need students. Part of an eight-part finance-reform series drawn from the Research Appendix prepared for the 2025 Task Force.
4. The Malatinszky Report, Close Up
Cruz-Guzman and the Malatinszky Report, Part 3: The Cruz-Guzman Defendants Ignore the Broad Scope of Plaintiffs' Complaint
Contrasts how Minnesota tort law ordinarily allocates the burden of proving that a multi-caused harm is divisible — placing it on the party trying to limit its own liability — with the Minnesota Supreme Court's Cruz-Guzman “substantial factor” standard, which places a version of that same burden on the plaintiffs. The post then shows that the operative Amended Complaint, filed June 27, 2024, seeks far more than an integration remedy: it pleads funding, staffing, and instructional-capacity claims that stand on their own.
Cruz-Guzman Experts Have a Duty to Inform the Court What Strategies Will Provide Minnesota Students with an Adequate Education
Walks through Malatinszky's own proficiency tables — district-wide, school-by-school, and disaggregated by non-ELL Black subgroup — and finds an overwhelming, five-year pattern of constitutional inadequacy across both district and charter schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Higher Ground Academy's results for the same subgroup, three to five times higher, sit unused in the record as proof that better outcomes are achievable. Argues the Court should require every expert to answer what a remedy should actually contain, not just what didn't cause the problem.
5. What Actually Works
Cruz-Guzman Series, Part 5: Beginning With the End in Mind — What an Adequate Education Actually Requires
Four independent lines of research — Fryer and Dobbie's charter-effectiveness studies, Michigan's evidence-based cost model, Illinois's itemized Evidence-Based Funding brief, and Karin Chenoweth's qualitative case studies — converge on the same bundle of practices: more instructional time, coaching-paired feedback, data-driven instruction, high-dosage tutoring, and a genuine culture of high expectations. The post shows how Brooke Charter Schools and Higher Ground Academy each weave those practices into a coherent, mutually reinforcing system, rather than treating them as an à la carte menu.
6. Who Isn't at the Table
Who's Missing From the Courtroom? Cruz-Guzman and the Case for Active Stakeholder Involvement
Compares Cruz-Guzman's decade of litigation — conducted with little participation from metro districts, educator organizations, or parent groups — to Kentucky, Ohio, New York, and New Jersey's school-finance cases, each built around broad coalitions from the outset. Warns that a remedy shaped without the districts, unions, and schools that would have to carry it out risks being unworkable, resisted, or never meaningfully ordered at all.
