SCERAC Seeks to Establish the Full Cost of an Adequate Education for Students of Color, ELL's, & Lower income Students

    This is the second in a series about the efforts of the St. Cloud Educational Rights Advocacy Council (SCERAC) to address Minnesota's failure to provide a constitutionally adequate education to students of color, lower income students, ELL's and struggling readers.  SCERAC's ultimate goal is to transform Minnesota's educational system so that it will:

• (1) fund the full dollar cost of providing an adequate education to students of color, lower income students, English language learners and children with reading challenges
• (2) require that the funds provided for that purpose are actually used to expand and add new programs and services of proven value to meet those students educational needs.   

SCERAC's end goal, of course, is to reform Minnesota's public education system, both for charters and traditional publics, so that public schools provide an adequate education to students of color, lower income students, English language learners, and and to students with dyslexia and other struggling readers--students that our state system has traditionally failed. The premise of the litigation is that Minnesota cannot achieve that objective if it fails to provide enough state funding to provide districts with what the 2004 education finance report issued under Governor Pawlenty called the "full dollar cost" of providing that adequate education, but correspondingly, the State has a duty to demand that when funds are provided, the full dollar cost is actually allocated to serve students of color, lower income students, English language learners and struggling readers by expanding the amount of services, the amount of instructional time and the quality of those services.   

    Unfortunately, neither MDE, nor the Governor, nor the legislature makes any concerted effort to determine what that full dollar cost actually is -- the actual cost of providing an adequate education to students of color, English language learners, or to any students for that matter.  The Governor's budget, and the legislature's deliberations, center on what increment should be added to the last education budget to cover cost increases in what we are doing now.  The budget doesn't identify, nor do hearings inquire into how much revenue is required to deliver the adequate education that the constitution requires.  

Imagine the chaos that would result if the Department of Transportation built highways this way, by ignoring project cost.  Suppose MnDot were asked to expand highway 94 from Minneapolis to St. Cloud by two lanes without credibly estimating the cost.   Imagine if the Republicans and the Democrats held a hearing and debated how much money to appropriate for the project, without any information on how much it will cost to build that highway so that it met all state standards!  If they guestimated the cost and the highway constructed was then an engineering failure, or if the appropriation couldn't pay for the full 70 miles, would anyone really be surprised?!

    What if delivering an adequate education requires more instructional days, and additional learning time in each instructional day?   What if it requires additional support staff, or co-teachers in the early grades  In St. Cloud one additional instructional day costs $300,000 approximately, and the district would need the concurrence of labor representatives to add that extra day.  And if asked to do so, one can hear the representatives at the table saying, "If you have $300,000 to spare, then you can afford to add that money to your compensation offer."  

    SCERAC's First Litigation Objective:  And so, one of SCERAC's first litigation objectives has been to convince the state to determine authentically -- in consultation with the district -- what the programming the St. Cloud District would require to deliver a  constitutionally adequate education (or a world-class education if you prefer) to students of color, English language learners and lower income students and students with reading challenges--and then what it would cost to deliver that expanded programming.  If the legislature has no idea what it will cost to provide an adequate education to the students Minnesota is failing, how can it possibly act to fix that problem.  For decades, the state has decried its own failure, and despite multiple reports, never has the state actually identified an actual program capable of delivering an adequate education, nor has the state identified its cost. 

The Preliminary Injunction Motion:   In SCERAC's case in District Court, it moved the court for an order to require the Governor to provide the legislature with costing information -- the "Full Dollar Cost" of an authentic program to deliver an adequate education to its students of color, English language learners, and lower income students.  This would be only a first, but necessary step towards fixing Minnesota's broken system.   The District court denied our motion and dismissed our entire case.  But the Court of Appeals reversed the District Court and ordered the District Court to consider our motion based on the existing constitutional standards established by the Supreme Court.  That decision led to formal negotiations between SCERCAC and MDE, and the informal participation of the School District. 

The Agreement.   When the Court of Appeals ordered consideration of our motion for injunctive relief, SCERAC and the Department of Education entered into an agreement that will provide the Governor and legislature with a joint report that for the first time describes a vision of what a public school district -- in this case the St. Cloud District -- would need to do to provide its students of color, English language learners, lower income students and students with reading challenges a world class education (or if you prefer, a constitutionally adequate education).   If SCERAC, MDE and the school district does this job well, Minnesotans will have for the first time a clear picture of what it will take to close Minnesota's achievement (or opportunity) gap and how much it would cost.

    This is important because none of the three major Minnesota school finance Reports issued in the last two decades provided any estimate on what it would cost to provide an adequate education to the students Minnesota is currently failing.   Minnesota has issued three major state school finance reports - 2004, 2011/2012 and 2020.  None of those reports attempted to calculate the cost of providing an adequate education to the students that Minnesota is currently failing, nor did they provide a clear vision of what the educational programs would look like.  In fact, the 2020 "80-20-10 Report" urged that the basic formula for all students be increased  as the "largest single recommendation" in the report.  

    To its credit, the 2020 Report correctly acknowledges that new funding is critically important: "There’s an old saying," it points out

“You get what you pay for.” Minnesota is paying less today for education than in the 20th century as a percentage of our personal income and getting–at best–uneven results 20 years into the 21st century...Over the same 20 years, educational outcomes measured by state accountability tests have stagnated with a large, persistent achievement gap while the percentage of children of color has more than doubled from 16% to 34%.

     Of course, all school districts deserve appropriate funding.   All children are important.  There is no legitimate objection to raising the funding for all students and all districts, but the constitutional problem in Minnesota is its failure to provide an adequate education to students of color, lower income students, English language learners and to struggling readers.   It follows that the number-one constitutional responsibility of the Governor and his constitutional officers, is to provide the legislature with a clear description of what it will take to serve these students, not merely to help all students receive an incrementally better education, but rather to assure that all students receive an education that is constitutionally adequate, one that meets all state learning standards.  And then of course, it is the legislature's duty under the Skeen decision to provide districts with those funds. 

    Importance of the new Report. The MDE-SCERAC-742 report that is underway, involving representatives of the school district, SCERAC, and the Minnesota Department of Education could potentially change the dialog at the legislature, and hopefully change the education dialog in public forums.  "Begin with the End in Mind," Steven Covey preaches.  If the end is providing all students with an adequate education, then beginning with the end in mind requires understanding the elements necessary to provide that adequate education, and calculating the funding and other resources required to deliver those elements.   

SCERAC Interested in Dialog:  For this reason, the SCERAC folks are interested in learning from others in Minnesota and elsewhere as to what should go into that report.   What would it look like for a district that was properly funded to deliver an adequate education to students of color, lower income students,  and English language learners?   It is surely not one thing:  more teachers of color, culturally responsive teaching, professional development, disciplinary reforms, none of these alone will be enough.  The exceptionally successful schools typically report that they deliver many more instructional days than most Minnesota public schools; they typically deliver more instructional hours per day; they invest more time and thought into authentic professional development; and they tend to be way more agile in changing what they do when what they are doing is not working. Many have smaller class sizes, and many have just-in-time strategies to assure that when students don't understand their lessons, something is done right away.  If we want finally to stop merely celebrating our status as a huge achievement gap state, and instead implement strategies that work, we will need to adopt strategies that work and fund those that cost more.  

SCERAC hopes that the work it is doing with MDE this year will make a contribution to an effort to advocate for a bold plan that can begin to make a real difference for Minnesota students of color, lower income students, English language learners and struggling readers.