Twenty Years of Not Asking: Minnesota Has Never Determined What an Adequate Education Costs
Under Skeen v. State, Minnesota children have a fundamental right to an education funded sufficiently to meet the standards the State itself imposes. That raises an obvious question, and it is a question with a number for an answer: how much does it cost to deliver that education to every Minnesota student, including the student who arrives at kindergarten without school readiness skills, the student in poverty, the student with a disability, and the student still learning English?
Minnesota does not know. Not because the question is unanswerable — other states have answered it, by several well-established methods — but because Minnesota has never finished asking. For more than two decades the State has convened task forces, commissioned studies, and passed legislation aimed at determining the cost of an education that meets state standards. Every one of those efforts ended before it produced a full-dollar figure. A Governor ended one and vetoed the funding for another. The later efforts were limited in charge, in time, or in resources.
This series is about what it would take to finally answer the question: what "costing out" an adequate education means, how the major methods work, what other states have found, what the evidence suggests about the added cost of educating Minnesota's highest-need students, and what a court or the Legislature should require. But it begins with the history, because the history is itself the most important fact. Much of it is drawn from the research summary I prepared for the 2025 MDE Task Force, which appears as Appendix D to the Task Force's final report, and from the legislative record.
2004: The task force that was not allowed to finish
In his 2003 State of the State address, Governor Pawlenty warned that Minnesota was leaving too many children behind, and that those children tended to be poor, disabled, or children of color. In June 2003 he appointed a 19-member Education Finance Reform Task Force, chaired by then-Superintendent Ric Dressen.
The Task Force's July 2004 report, Investing in Our Future, acknowledged that Minnesota had one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation. It recommended a funding system that is cost-based, learning-linked, and sufficient to cover the "full dollar costs" of giving students an opportunity to achieve state academic standards. Its recommendations rested on four principles:
- funding the full dollar cost;
- tailoring funding to student characteristics such as disability, poverty, school readiness, and English learner status;
- using research-based weights for those characteristics; and
- holding local officials accountable once costs are determined and funded.
The Task Force also made a finding that Minnesota has spent the last twenty years ignoring: simply raising the basic formula across the board cannot remedy the deficits affecting special education, lower-income students, and English learners.
By its own account, the Task Force was charged with recommending a framework, not with setting the final funding level. The number was to come from a costing-out study, and the Task Force was authorized to retain a nationally recognized consultant to conduct it. It retained Management Analysis & Planning, Inc. (MAP), which used the professional-judgment approach.
MAP's preliminary results were not a single figure. Its three study teams produced results implying statewide expenditure changes of 1.42%, 2.82%, and 14.75%, and the Task Force was shown two further scenarios (6.85% and 6.89%) produced by modifying the highest team's results. MAP did not recommend an adequacy level. A contemporaneous review commissioned by Schools for Equity in Education (SEE) criticized that outcome, observing that MAP should have provided a base student cost and special-needs adjustments that would have given the Task Force "a single bottom line."
Then, as the adequacy study neared completion, Governor Pawlenty ended the Task Force's work. The study was left unfinished. The Task Force never received a determination of the full-dollar cost. Minnesota is perhaps the only state that terminated its funding study before it was concluded.
2005–2006: The districts tried to finish the job
The school districts did not let the matter drop. Three organizations representing about 80% of Minnesota's public school students — the Association of Metropolitan School Districts (AMSD), the Minnesota Rural Education Association (MREA), and SEE — decided to act on the Task Force's recommendations. In September 2005 they contracted with national school finance expert John Myers of Augenblick, Palaich and Associates (APA) to examine the Task Force results and, using APA's costing methodologies, to determine what it would cost to educate each Minnesota student to state academic standards. The effort is also associated with the citizen group P.S. Minnesota, which, as Pat Welter explained in her SCERAC affidavit, commissioned a finance consulting firm to estimate the cost of an adequate education.
Myers presented the first phase, Determining the Cost of Education in Minnesota, to the Senate K-12 Education Budget Division on April 4, 2006. That phase concluded that an adequacy study still remained to be done, and it described a second phase intended to fill the void. But this was a privately financed effort, and the State never adopted or acted on a cost figure from it.
2007: The Legislature tried. The Governor vetoed the money.
In 2007 the Legislature passed the omnibus E-12 education finance act (Laws 2007, chapter 146). Article 1, section 23 established a school finance reform task force of four House and four Senate members, charged with creating an "adequacy index," simplifying the formulas, examining categorical funding programs, and examining the role of the regional delivery system. It was to report by January 15, 2008.
Governor Pawlenty vetoed the appropriation for the study. An adequacy index is not itself a full-dollar cost estimate. But it was a step toward the determination the 2004 Task Force had never been allowed to complete, and the veto took away the money to do it.
2011–2012: Told not to ask for more
During the Dayton administration a task force again examined the funding system, producing Funding Education for the Future (MDE, May 2011) and the Education Finance Working Group's recommendations and report (November 2012). It repeated the warnings of the earlier reports: wide gaps in reading and math proficiency by race and economic status, and little progress in closing them between 2006 and 2010. Its recommendations included funding all-day kindergarten, reforming the compensatory revenue calculation to target funding more directly on need, rolling integration funding into the general fund, and rewarding districts that achieve high growth.
But the State was facing significant structural financial challenges, and the Task Force was specifically warned that it should not recommend significant additional funding. Its report largely addressed how to allocate existing resources. It did not attempt to determine the full-dollar cost of an adequate education.
2020: The money went to the base
In September 2019 the Commissioner of Education convened a 24-member School Finance Working Group. After twenty meetings it issued 80-20-10: Bringing Equity to Minnesota's School Finance System on November 5, 2020, with 46 recommendations estimated to require between $2.533 billion and $2.755 billion in new revenue. The report documents that the basic formula had lost 10% ($658 per student) of its buying power since 2003 (p. 12). It acknowledges the State's constitutional responsibility under Skeen (p. 7). And it states as a principle that basic funding "should be supplemented by categorical revenue sufficient to cover added costs related to unique student and district characteristics" (p. 10).
Yet the report's central recommendation was aimed at the basic formula, which pays the same amount for every student regardless of need:
The fundamental and largest single recommendation is to improve the adequacy and stability of pre-K through grade 12 education funding by restoring the equal basic revenue per pupil regardless of zip-code to 60%. (p. 12)
The report does caution that "[a]ll 10 topical areas need to be addressed, not topic A before B before C" (p. 59). But the dollars follow the emphasis. The report estimates $550.1 million in new basic revenue for FY 2023 (p. 13), compared with $38.3 million for English learners (p. 19) and $121.4 million for special education (p. 21). For English learners, its stated goal is only to reduce the cross-subsidy "to approximately 50%" (p. 19). And for compensatory revenue — the State's largest categorical program for low-income students — the report says: "No costing has been done for these recommendations above." (p. 29)
That choice matters, because the 2004 Task Force had already found that across-the-board increases to the basic formula cannot remedy the deficits facing special education, lower-income students, and English learners. A uniform allotment is blind to need. New money placed in the basic formula goes in equal amounts to the student who is on grade level and the student who is two years behind. It does nothing to supply the extra funding high-need students require — which research reviewed by the 2025 Task Force suggests is roughly equal to the base itself. Worse, the report's own Appendix C recognizes that unfunded English learner and special education costs put "added pressure on unrestricted general revenues (basic formula, referendum, LOR)" (p. 63). Part of any increase in the base is consumed backfilling those costs rather than expanding services. By making the need-blind basic formula its largest single recommendation, while leaving need-based programs partly funded or uncosted, the report perpetuated, and compounded, Minnesota's failure to provide the additional funding that students with greater needs require.
The pattern
| Effort | Period | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Governor's Education Finance Reform Task Force | 2003–2004 | Recommended full-dollar-cost, learning-linked funding; set no funding level; ended by the Governor |
| MAP professional-judgment costing study | 2003–2004 | Five scenarios ranging from 1.42% to 14.75%; no adequacy level recommended; study left incomplete |
| AMSD/MREA/SEE study by APA (John Myers) | 2005–2006 | Phase I presented to the Senate; adequacy determination still outstanding; no State action |
| 2007 school finance reform task force (adequacy index) | 2007 | Passed by the Legislature; appropriation vetoed |
| Dayton-era task force | 2011–2012 | Warned against recommending significant new funding; focused on allocating existing resources; no cost determination |
| School Finance Working Group (80-20-10) | 2019–2020 | Largest recommendation directed to the need-blind basic formula; compensatory recommendations not costed |
Across three governors and more than twenty years, no official body has produced a determination of the full-dollar cost of an education that meets state standards. The reasons change; the result does not. A Governor ended the first effort and vetoed the funding for a later one. The budget conditions of the Dayton years redirected attention to existing resources. The 2020 working group put its largest recommendation into the one formula that ignores need.
The consequence is simple to state. The amount Minnesota appropriates for general education has never been tested against the cost of meeting the standards Minnesota imposes. Every funding debate at the Capitol is a debate about how much more, or how much less, than last year — never a debate about how much is enough.
Why it matters
Skeen establishes a fundamental right to funding sufficient to meet all state standards. The State cannot demonstrate that it is meeting that obligation if it has repeatedly declined to determine what meeting it costs. You cannot know whether you have paid a bill you have refused to read.
That is why the cost question belongs in the courtroom as well as at the Capitol, including in Cruz-Guzman. A court asked to enforce the Education Clause can order the State to do what the 2004 Task Force began and was never allowed to finish: determine the full-dollar cost of an adequate education, with the added costs of serving students in poverty, students with disabilities, and English learners identified rather than assumed away. The record above shows that, absent such an order, the ordinary political process is not likely to complete the work. It has had twenty years.
