Cruz-Guzman and the Malatinszky Report, Part 4: Cruz-Guzman Experts Have a Duty to Inform the Court What Strategies Will Provide Minnesota Students with an Adequate Education
Recap
We've been focusing on the expert report offered by Intervenor Higher Ground, because it has been made publicly available. In this post we show that Higher Ground's expert has actually documented that Minnesota public schools are failing to an adequate education to large segments of our students. But that report utterly fails to provide any assistance at all in answering the question, what reforms are necessary to deliver the education that the constitution requires. The Court should demand an answer to that question from every party and every expert. In Part 1 of this series, we argued that no single reform lever — integration, funding, staffing, or curriculum — can by itself deliver a constitutionally adequate education. Part 2 applied that framework to the Malatinszky report, showing that its causal question (does racial composition affect achievement?) is not the question Skeen asks. Part 3 went further: the Cruz-Guzman Amended Complaint itself is not limited to an integration remedy. Its prayer for relief asks the Court to order defendants to provide “an adequate and desegregated education” — two distinct things, joined conjunctively. The complaint pleads a freestanding strict-liability count for deprivation of an adequate education “regardless of whether or not [defendants] have caused or contributed to the deprivation.” It pleads resource-adequacy allegations on staffing, facilities, and instructional materials. It pleads a due process count. None of these theories depends on proving that racial imbalance is a “substantial factor” in anything.
This post turns from what the complaint asks for to what the record already shows. Taking Malatinszky's own reported figures at face value — his own tables, in his own amended report — the evidence of a Skeen violation is not thin. It is overwhelming. And it is not confined to the traditional public school districts the litigation has focused on; it runs straight through the charter sector as well, including many of the charter schools nominally aligned with the Intervenor's position in this case. Then, we argued that after ten years of litigation, the parties have a duty to provide the Court with a vision of what reforms are required to finally deliver each student with an adequate education that meets all standards, as both the Skeen and Cruz Guzman decisions required.
What Malatinszky's own data shows
Skeen holds that the Education Clause requires the Legislature to fund an adequate education — one that “meets all state standards.” Minnesota's statewide MCA proficiency standards are among the clearest statutory embodiments of that requirement. Malatinszky's Section 3 reports MCA/MTAS proficiency data for the 2024-25 school year. He was not asked to evaluate this data against Skeen, and he does not. But the numbers speak for themselves.
District-wide, both districts are failing most of their students:
| District | Math Proficient | Reading Proficient |
|---|---|---|
| Minneapolis Public Schools | 35.79% | 40.79% |
| Saint Paul Public Schools | 26.55% | 34.82% |
On Malatinszky's own figures, somewhere between roughly 60% and 75% of tested students in both districts failed to meet state proficiency standards in math or reading in the 2024-25 school year. That is not a marginal shortfall against a demanding benchmark. It is most students, in the state's two largest urban districts, not meeting the standards the state itself has set. Those statistics include all students, white and non-white, regardless of income. But the statistics on non-white and lower income students tell an even grimmer story.
The district averages understate how bad it is at the school level. Malatinszky's own Tables 5 and 7 report dozens of schools posting proficiency rates in the single digits:
| School | District | Math Proficient | Reading Proficient |
|---|---|---|---|
| North High | MPS | 1.43% | 14.52% |
| Bethune Elem | MPS | 3.88% | 9.71% |
| Anishinabe Academy Elem | MPS | 7.29% | 11.46% |
| Franklin Middle | MPS | 6.64% | 14.69% |
| Olson Middle | MPS | 5.96% | 13.77% |
| Hmong International Academy Elem | MPS | 8.70% | 9.40% |
| Folwell Elem | MPS | 9.04% | 11.89% |
| Lucy Laney Elem | MPS | 10.06% | 17.03% |
| Benjamin E Mays IB World School | SPPS | 4.44% | 5.15% |
| Bruce F Vento Elem | SPPS | 5.29% | 12.08% |
| Four Seasons Elem | SPPS | 6.25% | 3.91% |
| Battle Creek Middle | SPPS | 10.79% | 13.95% |
| Harding Senior High | SPPS | 9.87% | 28.62% |
This is an illustrative sample, not the full list. Several of these schools are independently identified by MDE's North Star accountability system as in need of comprehensive or targeted support — a designation MDE reaches through its own achievement-based indicators, entirely apart from anything Malatinszky did.
The same pattern runs through the charter sector — including charters that are, in this litigation, on the Intervenor's side of the table. Malatinszky's Tables 6 and 8 report proficiency for charter schools physically located in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The results are, in places, worse than the district schools:
| Charter School | Math Proficient | Reading Proficient |
|---|---|---|
| Bdote Learning Ctr (Mpls) | 0.00% | 4.00% |
| KIPP North Star Academy (Mpls) | 0.97% | 18.81% |
| Aurora MS (Mpls) | 3.37% | 20.67% |
| Minnesota Transitions Charter Elem (Mpls) | 2.38% | 9.30% |
| Venture Academy MS (Mpls) | 1.33% | 7.14% |
| Lincoln International HS (Mpls) | 15.69% | 4.65% |
| St. Paul City HS (SPPS) | 0.00% | 13.89% |
| Academia Cesar Chavez ES (SPPS) | 1.99% | 5.96% |
| Career Pathways (SPPS) | 4.17% | 5.88% |
| Metro Deaf School (SPPS) | 14.00% | 10.20% |
| MMSA ES (SPPS) | 10.32% | 21.26% |
This matters for a reason independent of Skeen. It forecloses the easiest explanation for why any one school does well or poorly — that charters as a category select more capable or more motivated families out of the district pool. If that were the whole story, charter proficiency would cluster above district averages. It does not. Most Minneapolis and Saint Paul charter schools post proficiency rates that track, and in some cases fall well below, their host district's own numbers. Whatever is driving school-to-school variation, it is not simply “charter versus district.”
Disaggregating further sharpens the point. Minnesota Report Card data on non-ELL Black students — a subgroup where the English-acquisition confound built into district-wide averages is removed entirely — tells the same story in miniature. Minneapolis: 10.1% math proficiency, 17.8% reading proficiency among non-ELL Black students. Saint Paul: 10.2% math, 20.2% reading — and Saint Paul's rate for this subgroup has been essentially flat since 2021 (8.2% math / 20.1% reading that year), never once reaching the low-30s-percent range on either measure across five years of data. Hopkins, a considerably lower-poverty suburban district: 13.1% math, 27.3% reading. St. Cloud, a district with poverty and enrollment demographics close to Minneapolis's: 15.4% math, 30.5% reading. Every one of these numbers is a Skeen violation on its own terms — a large majority of a defined group of Minnesota schoolchildren not meeting the state's own standards, year after year, in ordinary, non-selective, comprehensive public schools with no claim to be doing anything unusual.
Math and Reading Proficiency Rates for Non-ELL Black Students
| Minneapolis | Math | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 9.20% | 20.10% |
| 2022 | 8.90% | 18.80% |
| 2023 | 8.30% | 17.10% |
| 2024 | 8.40% | 16.90% |
| 2025 | 10.10% | 17.80% |
| Saint Paul | Math | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 8.20% | 20.10% |
| 2022 | 11.50% | 21.80% |
| 2023 | 11.30% | 20.20% |
| 2024 | 10.90% | 20.50% |
| 2025 | 10.20% | 20.20% |
| Higher Ground Academy | Math | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 31.80% | 62.50% |
| 2022 | 40.60% | 67.70% |
| 2023 | 40.80% | 61.80% |
| 2024 | 40.10% | 63.50% |
| 2025 | 46.50% | 66.30% |
Source: Minnesota Report Card, non-ELL Black student subgroup, 2021–2025.
Five years of data, not one, and the pattern never breaks. Minneapolis and Saint Paul have each spent five consecutive years failing to get even one in eight non-ELL Black students to proficiency in math, and barely one in five to proficiency in reading. Higher Ground, serving a comparably poor and entirely nonwhite population, has spent those same five years posting proficiency rates three to five times higher — and rising, not falling.
Put together, Malatinszky's own data — read against the standard he never mentions — proves the constitutional violation this litigation exists to remedy. It does so without needing his Section 4 causal analysis at all, and without regard to whether racial composition contributed anything to it.
What the complaint actually demands — and what a decade of litigation has actually produced
As Part 3 detailed, the plaintiffs are not merely asking this Court to referee a debate about school racial composition. They are asking for an adequate education — full stop, and by whatever means it takes to deliver it. The strict-liability count does not require them to identify a cause at all, but the causes are well known: inadequate funding, failure to implement effective practices, a lack of supportive accountability of the kind that deployes financial and high quality support. The resource-adequacy allegations reach staffing, facilities, and instructional materials. The due process count stands independently of the racial-imbalance theory. The constitution, as Skeen held and as Justice Hudson's opinion for the Court in this case reaffirmed, imposes a high bar: an adequate education, for every student, measured against all state standards — not a negotiated compromise, and not a showing that things would be worse under some counterfactual arrangement.
This case has now been to the Minnesota Supreme Court twice. It has consumed a decade of judicial resources on a question central to the state's future. And after all of that, the litigation — as framed by the experts retained to inform it — risks producing an answer to a narrower question than the one the constitution actually poses: whether racial imbalance, considered in isolation, is a substantial cause of inadequate outcomes. Even a definitive answer to that question, in either direction, does not tell the Court, the Legislature, or the families who are plaintiffs in this case what an adequate education requires or how to deliver it. History will not look kindly on a decade of litigation that tells us only what doesn't work, while the schools these children actually attend continue producing single-digit proficiency rates, year after year, unremedied.
The record already contains proof that better is possible
The most striking feature of Malatinszky's own data is one he does not develop: not every school serving this population is failing. Higher Ground Academy — a charter school and Intervenor in this very case — serves a student population that is 94.9% nonwhite and more than 90% eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, comparable in poverty concentration to the lowest-performing schools in Malatinszky's tables. On the same non-ELL Black student subgroup where Minneapolis posts 10.1% math proficiency, Higher Ground posts 46.5%. On reading, where Minneapolis posts 17.8%, Higher Ground posts 66.3% — roughly double the statewide average for the same subgroup, and four to five times the Minneapolis and Saint Paul rates. HGA is not a selective school; it admits by lottery, serves EL and special education students, and does not screen its population. Its results cannot be explained by skimming the strongest students out of the pool.
That is exactly the kind of evidence this Court needs and has not been given. Higher Ground has direct, first-hand experience delivering constitutionally adequate outcomes to the very population this litigation is about. It should be contributing that experience to the Court's understanding of what an adequate-education remedy looks like — not merely using its own success as a rebuttal witness against the plaintiffs' integration theory, as its briefing has done to date. The Court does not need another study of what integration does or does not cause. It needs a demonstrated, replicable account of what works.
That account exists in the research literature, and it exists in practice. Karen Hawley Miles and Karen Chenoweth's work on high-performing, high-poverty schools — most directly Chenoweth's It's Being Done and It Can Be Done, It's Being Done — catalogs schools that, like Higher Ground, serve overwhelmingly low-income students of color and post proficiency rates far above their peers, and identifies the common instructional and organizational practices that get them there. Allan Odden and Lawrence Picus's work on evidence-based school funding models translates that same research into concrete, costed staffing and program models — showing not just that effective practice exists, but what it costs to fund it at scale. And Brooke Charter Schools in Boston — a network serving a population that is over 90% Black and Latino and roughly three-quarters low-income, admitted by lottery with no academic screen — has for years posted some of the highest math proficiency rates of any school in Massachusetts. Brooke's results rest on specific, well-documented practices: extended instructional time, an intensive teacher-support and observation structure, and a relentless focus on classroom instruction over programs or technology. None of this is a mystery. It has been studied, costed, and replicated elsewhere. Minnesota's courts and Legislature do not lack a roadmap; they lack a record that puts one in front of them.
What the Court should demand — and what the constitution then requires
The Court deserves better from the experts than a record confined to the narrow question of whether integration, standing alone, causes inadequate outcomes. It should expect the parties' experts to bring it a vision for how effective practices, properly resourced and paired with real accountability, can deliver the adequate education the constitution promises — not simply a null result on one candidate explanation among many. Higher Ground's own results, sitting unused in the record of this case, are direct evidence of what that vision looks like in a Minnesota school with a demographic profile matching the schools Malatinszky found failing.
Once that record exists, the constitutional obligation is not discretionary. Skeen held that the Education Clause secures a fundamental right — enforceable in the courts, entitled to the same constitutional status as freedom of the press or freedom of religion. If the record shows what works, the Legislature does not have the option of funding something less. It must implement those effective strategies, fund them adequately, and do so in integrated schools — because the complaint, read in full, asks for nothing less than that.
