Wake Up Minnesota Education and Fight to Implement the Constitution

For fifteen years, Minnesota's legislature has abdicated its responsibility to implement the the plain language of the Supreme Court's Skeen decision, which requires the state to provide enough funding to provide an education to each student that meets all state standards. And, for fifteen years the entire  education community has abdicated its responsibility to do something about it. Too many of us don't even know about the "all state standards" language in that decision.  We've been brainwashed somehow into believing that the case merely holds that the state must fund an amorphous so-called basic education.  For this reason, Jvonkorff on Education has been running this "wake up" call, first to understand the two great constitutional decisions, Skeen and Cruz-Guzman, and then do something about it for the sake of Minnesota students.

In the two previous posts, we've explored the Supreme Court's statement that the state has an obligation to provide enough funding for an adequate education to student that meets all state standards. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten how it happened that the Supreme Court purposely adopted the concept that adequacy means an education that meets all state standards.  In fact, the all state standards concept came directly from the state itself.  This "all state standards" definition of adequacy was presented to the Court by the Attorney General on behalf of the legislature in the Skeen v State case.  In this post, we explain in detail, how the Attorney General and state defendants convinced the court that an adequate education means, an education that fulfills all legislative requirements for school districts set by law and regulations, in other words, an education that meets all state standards. 

We keep hammering on this point, because for years, the legislature has tried to suppress the facts of what Skeen actually says. In fact, the State’s current position is that the constitution does not require the state to provide funding for the "extra cost" required to educate students with disabilities, “students of poverty,” and English language learners.  The state asserts that it is voluntarily providing some additional contribution towards “students of poverty,” but it contends that this extra revenue is optional: that it can fund as much, or as little, as it chooses. Let's look at what "all state standards" really means, and where it came from.

Skeen was decided in 1993.  At that time, Minnesota's minimum standards for school districts required them to supply a minimum number of days and hours of education.  The state had no proficiency standards, and so complying with all state standards could be accomplished for pretty much a standard cost per student with modest adjustments. However, as Skeen was being briefed, the legislature had already decided that these state standards were insufficient, and that the state needed to adopt more robust proficiency standards, called at the time outcome based education standards.

The Skeen plaintiffs were arguing that educational adequacy required all districts to have equal access to the same funding.   They wanted the state to equalize finding from district to district, partly by giving all districts the same property tax funding power.  Since state standards were so low, they believed that the extra revenue that referendum revenue provided was essential to providing students with a really good education.  In essence, they wanted the courts to force the state to give them better access to supplemental funding that could be used to exceed standards. 

The Attorney General's position on behalf of the legislature was that the state's obligation was limited to providing enough funds to allow all districts to provide an education that meets all state standards. For this reason, at the beginning of the Skeen litigation, the Attorney General asked the Skeen plaintiffs to stipulate that all students in their districts were meeting state standards. And indeed, the parties stipulated that as of 1990, all school districts were meeting all state standards for all students.  This binding stipulation stated the following:

All parties agree that….all of the plaintiff districts meet or exceed all educational requirements for themselves and their students established by the Minnesota Legislature, the State Board of Education, and the Commissioner and the Department of Education…..The parties agree that for purposes of this litigation all school districts in Minnesota meet state requirements set forth in statutes, rules and policies.  (emphasis added). 

The test for adequacy should be, the legislature argued, the ability to meet or exceed all educational requirements--- that is, the requirements set forth in statutes, rules, and policies.

Recall that in 1990, Minnesota did not have proficiency standards.  State law focused on how many hours and days  of education each student must receive, on the licensing requirements for teachers, and certain other educational inputs.  The parties were stipulating that all Minnesota students were receiving at least the education that state law required, but they were not stipulating that all students were doing well, because of course they were not.  However, and this is important, the legislature had already determined that Minnesota needed a new and more robust set of proficiency based standards.   As it happens, Minnesota school districts were currently meeting state standards, but a new set of more rigorous standards were on the way, by legislative decree, and the Attorney General made a specific point in the State's briefs that there would be new standards adopted that would be more rigorous and challenging to meet.

The above quoted stipulation formed the basis of the state’s argument to the Supreme Court that Minnesota’s school financing system passed constitutional muster as of 1993, because the challenged referendum funding system was not preventing the plaintiff districts from meeting “state requirements set forth in statutes, rules and policies,” -- what the Skeen court referred to as “all state standards.”  As stated above, the Skeen plaintiffs argued that adequacy in education meant that all school districts should have equal access to the same funding, that if one school district could supply extra education beyond that required by state law, then all districts should have that same right.   The state responded, no: to the extent that the constitution imposes an adequacy requirement, the requirement is that all districts should be able to provide an education that meets all state standards. The States' brief wrote: . 

Minnesota has a flourishing, high quality system that is envied around the nation. …It is uncontroverted that our public-school system fulfills the purposes for which it was established.  All parties stipulated, and the court found, that the public-school system meets contemporary standards for the accomplishment of all objectives associated with formal education and that all districts meet or exceed all state educational requirements, which apply uniformly to all districts. …. a low-income family would do well to choose to be educated in Minnesota, which has done unusually well in compensating for the negative effects of disadvantaged home life on educational achievement. 

When the Supreme Court issued its Skeen decision, this all educational requirements argument of the Attorney General appeared right there in the Court's decision.   The Court first found that the constitution guaranteed that all districts would receive “enough funds to ensure that each student received an adequate education.”   The Court explained:

“The fundamental right recognized in Skeen was not merely a right to do 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.

Adequate education, the Court continued, adopting the recommendation of the state itself, meant an education that "meets all state standards."The language of Skeen speaks to “enough funds to ensure that each student received an adequate education and it says that education is defined as enough funding to provi”  Not some students, not the just kids who come to us fully ready; not just the kids who are easy to educate, cheap to education.  Both Skeen and Cruz-Guzman use this same language; both state that the constitution requires that the state must fund is an adequate education in “an amount sufficient to generate an adequate level of education which meets all state standards.”

In the next post we'll show that the State told the Skeen court that Minnesota was about to adopt newer more rigorous proficiency standards. The state advocated that that this was another reason why the Court should accept state standards as the adequacy requirement.  In other words, when the Court adopted "all state standards" as the adequacy and funding requirement, it knew exactly what it was doing:  requiring the state to provide enough funding for districts to meet the new proficiency standards for all students.  And, we will then show that the state actually began the process of keeping that implied promise -- to fund achievement of the new rigorous proficiency standards by issuing recommendations in the Governor's funding task force. Then, we'll look at how the education community came to abandon the constitutional promise turning the constitution into a slogan rather than a fundamental right for the sake of fiscal expediency.

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