Who's Missing From the Courtroom? Cruz-Guzman and the Case for Active Stakeholder Involvement
Part 6 of a series examining the Cruz-Guzman litigation and Minnesota's constitutional obligation to provide an adequate education
Minnesota's courts are in the process of deciding whether the State is meeting its constitutional obligation to provide every child with an adequate education — one that meets, in the words of Skeen v. State, “all state standards.” That is not a modest question. Depending on how the case is ultimately resolved, the answer could reshape school funding, staffing, and instructional practice across the state for a generation.
And yet the people with the deepest stake in the outcome — metro-area school districts, educator organizations, parent groups, and a substantial share of the very families in the plaintiff class — are, for the most part, nowhere to be found in the litigation. Of particular concern is the apparent lack of involvement of experts in educational improvement and reform. Where are the leading experts in what works for the students we are leaving beind? Where are the parent groups who are spearheading efforts to reform? That silence should worry everyone who cares about how this case comes out. A class action is designed to represent those in the community, and lawyers can't represent their clients properly without maintaining a rigorous communication with the clients, their families and those who serve them and understand their needs. The Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs have quality attorneys, in comparison to many other similar litigations, efforts to work with the community seems lacking. The danger is that the plaintiffs lose touch with the objectives most important to the clients and communities they serve.
A case conducted without collaborating with stakeholders
This is not how many of the most effective education litigations typically work. They engage in transparent active communication with the communities they serve. For example, in Kentucky's landmark case, the lead plaintiff was itself a coalition — the Council for Better Education, a nonprofit whose membership consisted of sixty-six local school districts, joined by additional district boards and twenty-two named students suing through their parents.
Ohio's litigation was organized the same way: the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding grew from five districts into a council of governments representing nearly every school district in the state, and drew twelve amicus briefs from sixteen organizations — including one filed on behalf of 37 state legislators — when the case reached the Ohio Supreme Court. New York's Campaign for Fiscal Equity was built the same way from the outset: a coalition of community school boards, parent advocacy organizations, and individual citizens, joined in the complaint by fourteen of New York City's thirty-two school districts as co-plaintiffs, with the ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center, and the Alliance for Quality Education weighing in as amici. In each of these cases, the districts, families, and institutions whose obligations a remedy would ultimately reshape were part of building the record from the start. Cruz-Guzman has none of that.
In California, the students whose testimony drove Williams v. California had documented the conditions themselves, and after the 2004 settlement, the plaintiffs' counsel trained parents and students statewide to monitor implementation through community conventions and a published organizing guide. In New York, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity and the Alliance for Quality Education toured school districts directly, gathering firsthand accounts from superintendents and communities to inform both the litigation and the compliance fight that followed the state's initial noncompliance. In New Jersey, implementation of the Abbott v. Burke remedy was paired with a grant-funded organizing collaborative built specifically to give parents in Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson an active hand in shaping how the court-ordered reforms were carried out on the ground, not merely a seat as passive beneficiaries. None of that — no youth conventions, no district tours, no organizing collaborative — has any counterpart in Cruz-Guzman.
A case decided without the districts it will affect
When the State first moved to dismiss Cruz-Guzman for failure to join the school districts and charter schools as necessary parties, the Minnesota Supreme Court rejected the argument. The plaintiffs were seeking relief solely against the State, the Court reasoned, and “many non-parties are bound to be affected by a judicial ruling in an action regarding the constitutionality of state statutes or state action, but they cannot all be required to be a part of the suit.” Cruz-Guzman v. State, 916 N.W.2d 1 (Minn. 2018). But that issue should not have been presented to the Supreme Court in the first place. This failure to involve the school districts represents a mutual abdication of responsibility by the districts and by the plaintiffs, who should have found a way to come together for a common goal. In all of these districts there are powerful players who advocate for the status quo. But throughout the metro districts their are visionary advocates for finance reform, for supportive accountability, and for implementing effective practices. If the Cruz-Guzman leadership reached out to them, and energized them, they could be a powerful force for constitutional change.
The Supreme Court's decision that school disticts need not be compelled to participate, may have been marginally defensible for the claim as it then stood — a request for a declaration that the State had violated the Education Clause. But it is worth pausing on what it did not decide. It did not decide that districts, teachers or other stakeholders have no legitimate interest in how the case comes out. It did not decide that a remedy — if one is ordered — can be crafted without their participation. It decided only that, at the pleading stage, plaintiffs could proceed against the State alone.
To be successful, Cruz-Guzman must find a way to communicate with the absent districts, absent experts and absent advocacy organizations, and particularly those on the cutting edge of reform. Producing a high quality education requires expertise and experience. As I discussed in Part 3 of this series, the operative Amended Complaint reaches well beyond school assignment and integration — it implicates funding adequacy, staffing, and instructional practice. If the case proceeds toward a remedy on that scale, the interests of non-party districts, unions, and schools look a great deal more like the interests the Court of Appeals found dispositive in SCERAC than like the diffuse “everyone is affected by every declaratory judgment” interest the Supreme Court dismissed in 2018.
What happens when the right voices aren't in the room
A federal court in Minneapolis offered a vivid illustration of the risk just last week. In United States v. Board of Directors of Special School District No. 1, the Department of Justice sued Minneapolis Public Schools over race-based provisions in its teachers' contract — provisions the district had negotiated jointly with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. The court made clear it had serious doubts about the legality of what MPS had agreed to. But it never reached that question. Because the Union — the other party to the very contract being challenged — had not been joined and could not be joined under the statute DOJ was suing on, the court dismissed the case. Ruling on the legality of a bargain, the court held, without hearing from the party who struck it, was not something equity and good conscience would allow.
That case turned on the formalities of federal Rule 19, in a context not identical to Cruz-Guzman's procedural posture. But the underlying instinct — that courts make better, more durable decisions about complex institutional arrangements when the people who actually run and staff those institutions are able to be heard — applies with full force here. A remedy in Cruz-Guzman that reallocates funding or mandates instructional practices without ever hearing from the districts who will implement it, the unions whose contracts it will touch, or the schools already succeeding with the state's highest-need students is a remedy built on an incomplete record. That is true whether or not Rule 19 formally requires anyone's presence.
Where everyone has gone instead
The most striking thing about the current landscape is not that districts and educator groups -- especially those with expertise in implementing effective practices -- lack a mechanism to be heard — Minnesota's rules allow intervention, amicus participation, and, in appropriate cases, court-appointed experts. It is that almost no one has used any of them.
Start with the metro districts. The Association of Metropolitan School Districts has been aware of Cruz-Guzman from the beginning — its own materials trace the origin of its “Reimagine Minnesota” initiative to a March 2016 meeting of superintendents held explicitly against the backdrop of the newly filed suit. By AMSD's own account, a number of superintendents were approached and encouraged to have their districts join the litigation “on behalf of the state in order to defend our local control, our school district boundaries, and our financial stability.” They chose a different path: rather than participate in the case, they built a parallel initiative focused on cultural competency, staff diversification, and personalized learning. Whatever the merits of that initiative, the effect has been that the districts whose funding, staffing, and boundaries the litigation could ultimately reorder have spent nearly a decade adjacent to the case rather than in it.
The absence of educator organizations are harder to explain. If a remedy in Cruz-Guzman reaches staffing practices, professional development requirements, or instructional mandates — all squarely within the scope of what the Amended Complaint seeks — the unions representing the teachers who will carry those mandates out have as direct an interest as the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers had in its own contract in the DOJ case above. They have not sought to intervene, filed no amicus brief, and have not, so far as the public record shows, engaged with the litigation at all. Again, while certain educator organizations are advocates for the status quo, there are many educators in these organizations who could eloquently assist the plaintiffs and their experts in understanding what Minnesota's education system requires.
Charter schools have one voice in the case — Higher Ground Academy, participating as an intervenor. HGA is a genuinely important data point: it serves an entirely non-white, overwhelmingly low-income population and posts non-ELL proficiency rates roughly double the statewide average, powerful evidence that the plaintiffs' and the State's shared assumption — that racial and socioeconomic composition alone drives outcomes — is incomplete. But one school's intervention is not a substitute for the charter sector's collective voice, and it leaves the case's evidentiary record thinner than it should be on exactly the question — what actually works for high-need students — that ought to be central to any adequacy remedy.
And then there are the families. A meaningful number of parents and students within the certified class — in my own conversations with educators and parents around the state — do not agree with the litigation strategy the named plaintiffs and their counsel have pursued, particularly its emphasis on racial and socioeconomic balancing to the exclusion of the broader menu of evidence-based practices that Part 5 of this series discusses. Those voices, too, have no organized presence in the case.
The stakes of staying silent
None of this means Cruz-Guzman's current parties are acting in bad faith, or that the case should have been dismissed for non-joinder in 2018. It means that a case with the potential to restructure how Minnesota funds, staffs, and delivers education to its highest-need students is being litigated and will likely be decided without hearing from most of the people who understand, from the ground, what would actually improve outcomes for those students.
That is a recipe for one of two bad results. Either the case produces a sweeping remedy built on a record that never heard from the districts, NGO advocates, and leading education experts and from educators who will have to carry it out — and that remedy proves unworkable, is resisted, or gets undone in a second round of litigation the way the DOJ's case against Minneapolis was. Or the case produces no meaningful remedy at all, and the students the Education Clause was written to protect are left exactly where they started, this time with a judicial record that will make it that much harder to try again.
Minnesota's rules give districts, educator organizations, parent groups, and community stakeholders real ways to be heard — as intervenors, as amici, or by urging the court to appoint a neutral expert capable of evaluating the full range of evidence about what works. Those doors have been sitting open for nearly a decade. It is well past time for the people who actually run Minnesota's schools, teach in its classrooms, and send their children to it, to walk through them.
Strategies for influencing the Cruz-Guzman parties toward a broad, multi-factor adequacy framework.
