Cruz-Guzman, Skeen, and the Charter Intervenors' New Expert Report
Part 1 of a series on the Malatinszky expert report in Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota
Setting the Stage
On July 28, 2026, counsel for Higher Ground Academy — one of the charter school intervenors in Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota — filed the amended expert witness report of Aron Malatinszky. This report is now a central piece of evidence in one of the most consequential pieces of education litigation in Minnesota history, a case that has been working its way through the courts for over a decade. To understand the legal context of that report, we need to understand the Supreme Court's Skeen and Cruz-Guzman decisions.
Skeen: The Funding Case
In Skeen v. State, 505 N.W.2d 299 (Minn. 1993), the plaintiffs — 52 school districts and ten parents — challenged Minnesota's school funding formula, arguing that wealthy districts could raise far more local revenue than poor ones, creating disparities the Education Clause of the state constitution didn't allow.
What the parties agreed to before trial. Early in the litigation, the parties entered into a formal stipulation — a set of facts both sides agreed were true for purposes of the case. That stipulation matters enormously to understanding what Skeen actually decided. The parties stipulated that Minnesota's K-12 system was "a system of education which meets contemporary standards for the accomplishment of all objectives associated with formal K-12 education," and, more specifically, that "all school districts in Minnesota meet state requirements set forth in statutes, rules, and policies." In other words, everyone agreed going in that the plaintiff districts were already delivering an education that satisfied every standard the state itself had set. Nobody was arguing the schools were failing to teach what Minnesota required them to teach. This stipulation occurred at a time when Minnesota had notoriously weak standards — standards that merely required students to attend a given number of hours allocated to various required subjects. Unlike today's standards, actually learning — proficiency — was not a state standard.
So what was actually being fought over? If the districts already met every state standard, where was the line between an adequate education and an inadequate one? That was the central question in Skeen, and the two sides answered it very differently.
The plaintiff districts argued that meeting minimum state standards wasn't enough. Yes, they said, we're teaching what the state requires — but because of funding disparities, we can't offer anything beyond that baseline the way wealthier districts can: no enrichment programs, no equivalent facilities, no equivalent opportunities. That gap, they argued, violated the constitution's uniformity and equal protection guarantees even though every district was technically compliant with state standards.
The State's answer was that equal funding was simply the wrong test. The State — not the courts, and not comparative wealth — gets to define what an adequate education consists of. Once the Legislature sets those standards and funds districts sufficiently to meet them, the constitutional duty is satisfied; anything beyond that is a matter for local choice and local tax effort, not a constitutional entitlement.
The Court sided with the State — but on the State's own terms. The "all state standards" language that now anchors this entire body of law comes directly out of that stipulation — the parties' own agreed language became the measuring stick the Court adopted. The Minnesota Supreme Court held that the Education Clause requires the Legislature to "provide enough funds to ensure that each student receives an adequate education," and that a funding system is constitutionally sufficient once it provides "an adequate level of education which meets all state standards." Because the plaintiff districts conceded they already met those standards, their claim failed — not because funding disparities didn't exist, but because the constitution doesn't guarantee equal funding, only adequate funding measured against the standards the state itself has adopted.
To recap: what "all state standards" actually meant in 1993. At the time Skeen was decided, Minnesota's state standards were remarkably weak by today's measure. There was no state proficiency requirement — no requirement that a third-grader be able to read, no statewide math or science benchmark. State standards amounted mostly to inputs: minimum school-day length, minimum instructional hours by subject, staffing and licensing ratios. Nobody was measuring what students actually learned; the state measured what districts offered.
That matters, because it means the "all state standards" the Skeen plaintiffs stipulated to meeting were, by modern standards, a low bar. But the Court did not treat that bar as a static, permanent definition of adequacy. In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Attorney General's office told the Court that Minnesota was in the process of abandoning those input-based standards in favor of rigorous, outcome-based learning standards — measuring what students actually learned, not just what they were taught or how many hours they sat in a classroom. As the State's reply brief put it:
"The trial court erroneously decided to base its decision on inputs rather than upon analysis of whether students are learning what they should be learning because it believed that outcomes are not as easily measured as inputs are. What is easiest almost always is not what is right. In fact, some important outcome-type measures are already easily quantifiable… Moreover, there is uncontroverted testimony in the record that the state is moving rapidly toward being better able to use outcome based standards to compare districts and students."
The State went further, arguing that constitutional adequacy should be judged against these emerging outcome standards — "that educational opportunity needed in a contemporary setting to equip a child for his role as a citizen and as a competitor in the labor market."
That representation to the Court is not a footnote to the Skeen holding — it's part of the foundation the Court built on. The Court adopted "all state standards" as the constitutional measuring stick with the Attorney General's own assurance, on the record, that those standards were about to become proficiency-based and outcome-based. In other words, Skeen's "all state standards" requirement anticipated — and was premised on — a state standards regime built around what students actually learn, not merely what districts provide. Minnesota did go on to adopt exactly that kind of proficiency framework in the years that followed. What the Legislature has never done is tie school funding to the cost of actually delivering it.
Two things about this holding are easy to miss, and both matter for everything that follows in this series.
First, courts don't write the standards — the Legislature and its agencies do, through statute, rule, and policy. But once those standards exist, the Legislature has an enforceable constitutional obligation to fund districts sufficiently to meet them. The adequacy line isn't a judicial invention; it's borrowed directly from the state's own definition of what schools are supposed to accomplish, and it's enforceable in court against the state.
Second, the Court held that this right isn't just good public policy — it's a fundamental right, enforceable in the courts, subject to the same demanding strict scrutiny the Court applies to only its most protected constitutional guarantees. As the Court put it, education is "a fundamental right under the state constitution, not only because of its overall importance to the state but also because of the explicit language used to describe this constitutional mandate," and any challenge to that right must be evaluated under "the strict scrutiny test," which a law survives "only if it is necessary to serve a compelling governmental interest." That's a serious constitutional hook — one the Legislature cannot satisfy simply by pointing to good intentions or budget constraints.
Cruz-Guzman: Does Integration Matter Too?
Cruz-Guzman asks a different question, building on Skeen's foundation. The plaintiffs are trying to convince the courts that the Education Clause requires something more than adequate funding against state standards in the abstract — that it also requires Minneapolis and Saint Paul school districts and charter schools to provide a racially and economically balanced education. In other words, that segregation itself, regardless of funding levels, is a constitutional problem.
In the case's 2018 trip to the Supreme Court — Cruz-Guzman I, 916 N.W.2d 1 (Minn. 2018), written by Justice Hudson for the Court — the justices held the parents' claims justiciable and, along the way, reaffirmed exactly what Skeen had established: that the fundamental right to an education "was not merely a right to anything that might be labeled as 'education,' but rather, a right to a general and uniform system of education that is thorough and efficient, that is supported by sufficient and uniform funding, and that provides an adequate education to all students in Minnesota." The Court added a further point worth keeping in view for this series — that "some level of qualitative assessment is necessary to determine whether the State is meeting its obligation to provide an adequate education," and that the judiciary "cannot fulfill our duty to adjudicate claims of constitutional violations by unquestioningly accepting that whatever the Legislature has chosen to do fulfills the Legislature's duty."
When the case returned to the Supreme Court a second time, in 2023, the Court didn't fully embrace the plaintiffs' integration theory, but it didn't reject it outright either. Writing for the Court, Justice Chutich held that racial imbalance in Minneapolis and Saint Paul schools does not violate the constitution per se — imbalance alone isn't enough. Instead, to prevail in their effort to reorganize schools and districts toward racial and economic balance, the plaintiffs must show that imbalanced demographics are a substantial factor in preventing students from receiving the adequate education that Skeen guarantees. Segregation has to be shown to cause the constitutional harm, not just correlate with it.
The Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs recognized that inadequate state funding might be part of the problem, but their overarching focus is on the claim that racial and economic imbalance in school populations is a substantial contributing cause of Minnesota's failure to provide an adequate education. Under the Court's 2023 decision, they can only obtain relief if they prove that imbalance is a substantial factor in causing an inadequate education. That causal question — does racial and economic imbalance actually prevent students from getting an adequate education — is exactly where the charter intervenors' new expert evidence comes in.
Enter the Malatinszky Report
It's in this context that Higher Ground Academy and the other charter intervenors have presented the opinion of their expert, Aron Malatinszky. His amended report was built to speak directly to the causal question Cruz-Guzman left open. Here's what it says.
Malatinszky was asked to answer three questions: how racially imbalanced are Minneapolis and Saint Paul's district and charter schools; are those schools performing adequately; and — the central question — is school racial composition a substantial factor in causing students to receive an inadequate education.
On imbalance, using 2024-25 enrollment data and a 15-percentage-point deviation standard borrowed from federal desegregation case law, he finds that many — though not all — MPS and SPPS district and charter schools are in fact racially imbalanced relative to their district's average.
On performance, using 2024-25 state assessment data, he finds that many schools are also identified by the state's own North Star accountability system as low-performing. District-wide, only 35.79% of tested Minneapolis students were proficient in math (40.79% in reading); in Saint Paul, the figures were 26.55% math and 34.82% reading. At the individual school level, the numbers are often starker still — a number of schools post proficiency rates in the single digits.
On causation, which is the heart of the report, Malatinszky turns to two decades of statewide longitudinal student data and a student fixed-effects regression design — a method that tracks the same students over time as they experience different school compositions, rather than simply comparing different students at different schools. His conclusion: he finds no meaningful causal effect, positive or negative, of school racial composition on student achievement. That finding, he reports, holds up across Black and Hispanic subsamples, across the Twin Cities metro area and the state as a whole, and across several different control specifications.
In plain terms: Malatinszky's opinion is that racial imbalance, by itself, is not what's driving the achievement gaps in Minneapolis and Saint Paul schools — and if that's right, it directly undercuts the causal showing that Cruz-Guzman requires the plaintiffs to make.
What's Missing — And Why It Matters
That's the report on its own terms. But a few things are worth flagging before anyone treats this as the last word on adequacy in Minneapolis and Saint Paul — and they'll be the subject of the next posts in this series.
The report never engages with Skeen's actual definition of an adequate education — one that "meets all state standards" — or with the fact that Justice Hudson's 2018 opinion for the Court reaffirmed that same standard, and insisted that some qualitative assessment of outcomes is unavoidable. Funding appears almost nowhere in the analysis; the only school-level inputs modeled are teacher characteristics, not dollars. And by the report's own numbers, a substantial majority of students in both districts are not meeting state proficiency standards at all — a fact that speaks directly to the Skeen adequacy question, independent of whatever the report concludes about race.
