Minnesota' K-12 Education System Needs Robust Accountability

Post 6 of 8 • Minnesota Education Finance Reform

This is the sixth post in an eight-part series on reforming Minnesota's K–12 education finance system, based on the Research Appendix I drafted for the 2025 MDE Task Force on Education Finance. Previous posts covered the history of inaction, the case for an adequacy study, weighted funding for high-need students, and the importance of evidence-based practices. This post addresses the accountability infrastructure that makes reform sustainable.

The Accountability Gap

Minnesota's school accountability system is built around the idea that competition and local control will drive improvement. Twenty years of data say otherwise. Recently, Minnesota legislators, politicians and pundits have attributed massive fraud to a lack of accountability. Minnesota's traditional public school districts are subject to a robust financial accountability system, and fraud is rare. However, when it comes to delivering an adequate education to students with higher educational needs, true accountability is largely missing. It might easily be argued, that the damage to Minnesota arising from lack of educational accountability is more serious than the financial fraud recently discovered.

By Gerald Von Korff • jvonkorff.com

Of all the elements of school finance reform, accountability is perhaps the most politically fraught. In Minnesota, accountability has long been equated with interference — an imposition of state mandates on the professional judgment of local educators and the democratic authority of locally elected school boards.

This attachment to local control is genuine, and the values behind it — community responsiveness, democratic governance, respect for teacher professionalism — are real. The problem is that those values, pursued without a parallel commitment to outcomes, have produced a system in which persistent failure continues without meaningful consequence. The students who suffer most are the ones with the least power to demand change.

This post examines Minnesota's current accountability system, explains why it has not worked, and describes what a genuine accountability infrastructure — one that supports and challenges local educators rather than simply watching from a distance — would look like.

What Minnesota's Current System Looks Like

Minnesota's accountability system rests primarily on two mechanisms: school choice and public reporting. The theory is that if parents can choose among schools, districts will compete for students and that competition will drive improvement. And if test scores and graduation rates are published publicly, embarrassment and community pressure will motivate underperforming districts to do better.

Neither mechanism has worked as intended.

Open enrollment and charter schools now serve about 10% of Minnesota's public school students. But the Research Appendix documentation is clear: school choice and charters have not produced the systemic changes necessary to make progress in closing the achievement gap. In 2024, the Minneapolis Star Tribune released a report criticizing the lack of accountability of Minnesota charter schools specifically. Competition has not driven system-wide improvement in outcomes for the students who need it most.

The public reporting mechanism — embodied most recently in the World's Best Workforce Act (now renamed Comprehensive Achievement and Civic Readiness) — has fared no better. A devastating 2022 report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor documented the system's fundamental inadequacy:

"Many schools see the WBWF report as a 'check-the-box activity,' not as a strategic planning imperative."
— Office of the Legislative Auditor, 2022

The auditor found that at the time of its review, MDE had allocated exactly one Full Time Equivalent staff position to World's Best Workforce administration. One person to oversee a statewide accountability system for over 2,100 schools. The auditor also found that MDE lacked any clear authority to intervene when districts set unambitious goals or failed to meet the goals they set. Districts were required to write plans. They were not required to implement them effectively. There were no meaningful consequences for failure. Recent data suggests that the MDE report to the legislature itself cost approximately $4,268 to prepare, including staff time, printing and mailing expenses. That's a very small figure for a statewide accountability report covering nearly 500 districts, suggesting the staff investment in review is minimal.

A January 2025 report summarizes how districts use these reports. It suggests that in many districts the CACR is indeed a check the box procedure.

Minnesota's Regional Centers of Excellence (RCE) represent the strongest element of the state's school support infrastructure. Staffed by specialists in literacy, math, special education, English language development, and school leadership, the Centers provide on-the-ground coaching and capacity building that goes well beyond what most districts could assemble on their own. By most accounts, their work is substantive and valued.

The problem is who they reach — and who they don't.

Under Minnesota's North Star accountability system, RCE support is triggered primarily for schools in the bottom 5 percent of Title I performance statewide, plus high schools with graduation rates below 67 percent. This is a deliberately narrow threshold, and the statewide proficiency data suggest it leaves a great deal of preventable failure unaddressed. As of 2025, fewer than half of Minnesota students are meeting grade-level expectations in math and reading — 43 percent in math and 48 percent in reading — essentially unchanged from 2023 and 2024, and proficiency rates remain roughly 10 percentage points below where they were before the pandemic. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has described Minnesota's educational disparities as deep, wide, and persistent, noting that they span all parts of the state and all types of schools, whether district or charter.

Against that backdrop, a support system calibrated only to the worst 5 percent is not a system designed for broad improvement — it is a floor, not a framework. The hundreds of districts and charter schools operating in the middle tier, where proficiency rates are chronically low but not catastrophically so, receive no independent review, no external coaching, and no structured accountability beyond the self-reported CACR process described earlier in this post. The result is a large population of students attending schools that are failing them in measurable ways, with no systematic mechanism to trigger outside help.

The Minneapolis situation illustrates a second structural flaw, one that compounds the first. Twenty of Minneapolis Public Schools' roughly 96 schools were identified for comprehensive support — the highest level of state intervention — including 11 elementary schools. That concentration is striking: no other district in the state comes close to that number of comprehensively identified schools. Yet schools identified for support in Minneapolis work with their own district leadership on school improvement, while all other schools work with state-funded staff in the Regional Centers of Excellence.

This carve-out for large urban districts undermines the very logic of the support system. The RCE model exists precisely because outside expertise and independent perspective are essential when a school cannot diagnose and fix its own problems. Redirecting that support through the same district leadership that presided over years of underperformance removes the independent intervention that struggling schools most need. MPS is simultaneously managing a major school transformation initiative and a budget gap that required a one-time draw of $55 million from assigned fund balances — hardly conditions under which district leadership can be expected to mount rigorous self-directed improvement across 20 chronically underperforming schools.

Taken together, these two design choices — a 5 percent threshold that ignores widespread middle-tier failure, and a Minneapolis exception that routes improvement work back through the district itself — leave Minnesota's most vulnerable students with the least access to independent, expert support. A more effective system would lower the threshold for RCE engagement, establish periodic independent reviews for districts with persistently low proficiency regardless of their ESSA designation, and end the practice of allowing large urban districts to substitute internal management for genuine outside intervention.

The contrast with special education is stark: MDE maintains a comprehensive compliance monitoring system for students with disabilities — a five-year review cycle, active complaint adjudication (206 complaints since 2019), dedicated fiscal monitoring staff, and legal authority to require corrective action. For students of color, English Learners, and low-income students, no comparable system exists. The implication is that some students' rights to an adequate education are enforceable and some are not.

Local Control: The Argument and Its Limits

Advocates for Minnesota's local control approach argue that community-responsive governance produces better outcomes, that locally elected school boards provide genuine democratic accountability, and that state mandates stifle innovation. Some of these arguments have merit in specific contexts.

But there is a significant problem: Minnesota's strong local control tradition has produced deeply unequal outcomes, and average performance metrics — which tend to be high in Minnesota — mask that inequality. When the Minnesota School Boards Association points to Minnesota's above-average ACT scores as evidence that local control is working, it is describing the performance of the state's advantaged students. It is not describing the performance of students of color, English Learners, or students from low-income families, whose outcomes have stagnated for two decades.

Peter Cunningham, former Assistant Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration, has put the counter-argument plainly:

"In every important metric of success from student achievement to access to rigorous classes to high school and college completion, stubborn racial and economic gaps remain. The plain fact is that local control and quality control rarely go hand-in-hand... The absence of accountability breeds complacency."

Local control, without accountability for outcomes, protects the status quo. And the status quo has consistently failed Minnesota's most vulnerable students.

Two Models That Work

To understand what genuine accountability looks like, it helps to look at two systems that are producing results.

Department of Defense Schools (DoDEA)

DoDEA runs a worldwide school system serving 64,000 students. In 2022, by some measures, DoDEA students outperformed all 50 states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — and were the only jurisdiction to see score increases during the COVID-19 pandemic. DoDEA students' demographics are challenging: high mobility, 50% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, 80% have parents without college degrees. Their success cannot be attributed to advantaged student populations.

Minnesota Special Education

Minnesota's special education system demonstrates that robust state accountability produces results. Federal law requires a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities, and Minnesota has built the systems to enforce it: five-year monitoring cycles, fiscal oversight, complaint adjudication, and dedicated staff with genuine authority to require corrective action. It is far from perfect, but it represents Minnesota's best existing model of what accountability for educational outcomes looks like.

What makes DoDEA work? Researchers have identified a clear set of success factors: centralized direction-setting paired with local decision-making; policy coherence and regular data flow on instructional goals and professional development; sufficient financial resources linked to instructionally relevant strategic goals; staff development that is job-embedded, intensive, and sustained; high expectations for every student; and a genuine organizational commitment to continuous improvement.

Notably, DoDEA's accountability system is not limited to test scores. All 50+ curriculum and student services programs are on a five-year review cycle. A dedicated Research, Accountability, and Evaluation office designs and analyzes surveys to assess the effectiveness of professional development. Schools undergo accreditation reviews that include in-person site visits. In 2021–2022, 40% of DoDEA districts earned Cognia's "distinction" designation — compared to 8% of other Cognia-accredited districts nationally.

As one education professor at Harvard told the New York Times: "If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what's going on."

What a Real Accountability System Would Look Like in Minnesota

Minnesota does not need to replicate DoDEA's military-adjacent structure. But it does need to build accountability mechanisms with genuine authority, adequate staffing, and a culture of continuous improvement rather than compliance theater.

Several elements are essential:

An independent oversight board with real authority. Modeled on Maryland's Blueprint Commission, this body would monitor implementation of funding reforms and evidence-based practices, require corrective action plans from districts that persistently fail to close achievement gaps, review how categorical funds designated for high-need students are actually spent, and report publicly to the Legislature. Advisory bodies without enforcement authority have been tried repeatedly and have not worked.

Substantially expanded Regional Centers of Excellence. These centers — which provide intensive, expert support to struggling schools — have demonstrated positive impacts on the schools they serve. But they currently reach only about 360 of Minnesota's more than 2,100 schools, with funding frozen at $1 million per year. The Legislative Auditor specifically recommended expanding funding and availability. A real accountability system provides not just consequences for failure but support for improvement.

Adequate MDE staffing for accountability functions. One FTE is not a serious accountability infrastructure. States that have made genuine progress on the achievement gap have invested in the state-level capacity to monitor, analyze, support, and — when necessary — require change.

Data systems that go beyond test scores. Accountability based solely on test scores misses critical dimensions of educational quality — including implementation fidelity for funded programs, graduation rates, attendance patterns, and post-secondary outcomes. Minnesota should develop the kind of comprehensive data infrastructure that DoDEA has built, making progress visible and actionable at the school and district level.

Accountability as Support, Not Just Surveillance

It is important to be clear about what strong accountability is not. It is not a punitive system designed to catch teachers and administrators doing something wrong. It is a support system designed to ensure that schools have the resources, knowledge, and expectations they need to succeed — and that when they are falling short, there is a pathway to improvement, not just a public shaming.

Odden and Picus, whose school finance research has informed dozens of state adequacy studies, put it well: the best results occur when district or school leadership embraces a culture of accountability — not as an external imposition, but as a fundamental commitment to the students they serve. Highly successful schools "believe it is their work on curriculum and instruction that produces improved student performance, and 'go back to the drawing board' when student performance does not rise."

That culture does not emerge spontaneously across all schools in all districts. It is cultivated by a state system that sets clear expectations, provides meaningful support, and holds schools accountable for results in a way that is consistent, professional, and focused on the students who are being failed.

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Next in the series → Post 7 of 8

Building for the Long Term: Continuous Improvement and Recalibration — Education reform is not a one-time event. The most successful state systems — Wyoming, Maryland, Kentucky — build in formal mechanisms to revisit, recalibrate, and improve their finance systems every few years as research evolves and conditions change. The next post explains why Minnesota needs a statutory commitment to continuous improvement, and what that looks like in practice.

Money is Necessary, But Not Sufficient: Evidence Based Practices

Post 5 of 8 • Minnesota Education Finance Reform

This is the fifth post in an eight-part series on reforming Minnesota's K–12 education finance system, based on the Research Appendix drafted for the 2025 MDE Task Force on Education Finance. Earlier posts covered the history of inaction, the case for an adequacy study, and why funding must be weighted to student characteristics. This post addresses what it means to spend money well.

Money Is Necessary — But Not Sufficient

The research is clear that adequate funding improves outcomes. It is equally clear that money spent on the wrong things does not. Here's what Minnesota must do differently.

By Gerald Von Korff • jvonkorff.com

A recurring argument against increasing education funding goes like this: we've tried spending more money, and it hasn't worked. The achievement gap persists. What schools need is better leadership, better teaching, higher expectations — not more money.

There is a kernel of truth in this argument. The research does show that, without accountability and guidance on effective practices, new funding can be absorbed into programs and practices that don't meaningfully improve student outcomes. Simply adding money to a dysfunctional system doesn't automatically fix the dysfunction.

But the conclusion drawn from this observation — that money doesn't matter — is wrong. What the research actually shows is more nuanced: money matters, and it matters most when it is paired with evidence-based practices and accountability. The three elements — adequate funding, effective practices, and accountability — are interdependent. Remove any one of them, and the others become much less effective.

This post focuses on the middle element: what it means to ground school funding in evidence-based instructional practices, and how other states have done it.

What the Research Says About Money and Outcomes

The debate about whether money matters in education has been conducted for decades, and the evidence has become increasingly clear. Dr. Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, whose work is among the most cited in school finance research, summarizes it directly:

"On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes... In direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters."

A landmark 2015 study by researchers at Northwestern and Berkeley examined states where court-ordered funding reforms increased spending in underfunded schools and found that increasing per-pupil spending by 10% across all twelve school-age years increased the probability of high school graduation by 7 percentage points for all students, and by roughly 10 percentage points for low-income students. For low-income children, that additional spending also boosted adult wages by about 13%. These are large, sustained, real-world effects.

More recent research reinforces this finding. A 2018 study using national NAEP data found that school finance reforms that increased funding in low-income districts caused sharp, immediate, and sustained increases in student achievement. The effects phased in over several years following the reform — consistent with the reality that educational improvement is gradual — but they were real and substantial.

However, the same body of research also documents that money spent ineffectively can have little or no impact. The question is not whether to spend more — it is how to ensure that additional spending is directed toward practices that actually work.

Evidence-Based Funding: What It Means

The leading approach to connecting funding with effective practices is called Evidence-Based Funding (EBF). Developed and championed by school finance scholars Allan Odden and Lawrence Picus, EBF works as follows: rather than setting a funding level based on historical spending patterns or political negotiation, the state identifies the specific programs, staffing configurations, and services that research shows are effective, prices them out, and funds schools at the level required to implement them.

This approach does more than calculate a cost. It provides direct guidance on how money should be used — what teacher-student ratios are supported by research, what intervention programs have proven track records, what professional development structures lead to sustained improvement. It connects the dollar amount to the educational strategy.

EBF has been adopted, in various forms, in Illinois, Wyoming, Arkansas, New Jersey, and many other states. Each implementation is tailored to state-specific standards and conditions, but all share the core principle: funding levels are derived from an evidence-grounded analysis of what it costs to deliver effective education, not from what the Legislature happened to appropriate last year. None of these states have implemented evidence based systems fully, or perfectly. Minnesota could do it better, if we implemented it more faithfully. In some iterations, the evidence based funding system has failed to pair evidence based practices with promised increased funding. If Minnesota implemented EBF, we would have a head start over other states, because our finance system is closer to fair than most others.

I would like to be crystal clear: I'm not asserting that Wyoming, Illinois, or Arkansas have vaulted their educational systems to acceptable levels. Each has experienced major challenges and obstacles. Often they have failed to properly fund the evidence based practices that EBF has identified. The fundamental difference in these states worth studying, however, is that they start with identifying evidence based practices necessary to achieve educational goals and then proceeded to estimate the amount of funding required to fund those practices. This is completely foreign to Minnesota's approach. Indeed Minnesota has intentionally, wilfully, avoided any attempt to base funding on the educatonal practices and programs necessary to provide students with an adequate education that meets all state standards.

What Other States Have Done

Illinois

Illinois enacted a historic Evidence-Based Funding reform in 2017. The Legislature created a Professional Review Panel — composed of practitioners, experts, legislative leaders, and advocates — to regularly review and recalibrate the funding model. The state also created a Balanced Accountability Measure Committee to develop recognition standards for student performance and school improvement across all districts. The reform has directed hundreds of millions of new dollars to the state's most underfunded districts, with the explicit requirement that those funds support evidence-based programs. Illinois publishes the research summaries underlying its EBF recommendations, so districts can understand not just what they are expected to do, but why.

Critics of Illinois implementation have argued that Illinois' Evidence-Based Funding (EBF) formula is significantly underfunded, with a gap of approximately $5.7 billion as of late 2025. Despite the 2017 law intending to provide adequate resources to schools, particularly high-poverty districts, consistent underfunding means roughly 3.3 million students attend schools that do not meet the mandated funding adequacy level.

Maryland

Maryland's Blueprint for Maryland's Future, enacted in 2021, committed $3.9 billion in additional K–12 funding over ten years — paired with explicit accountability provisions requiring that funds be used for evidence-based practices. The Blueprint includes guardrails to ensure that money designated for high-need students actually reaches high-need programs, not administrative overhead or programs without evidence of effectiveness. Maryland's approach also includes an independent oversight board (discussed more in the next post) with authority to require course corrections when implementation falls short.

Maryland's Blueprint for the Future has faced mounting fiscal and political headwinds as it works toward full implementation by 2032. When state financial officials determined in December 2024 that Maryland would face a roughly $3 billion deficit in fiscal year 2026, Governor Wes Moore proposed scaling back parts of the Blueprint, including temporary pauses on plans to give teachers more collaborative planning time, reduced funding for English learner programs, and a two-year freeze on community school funding. The resulting debate in the 2025 General Assembly session was among the sharpest of the year, with the governor and lawmakers — particularly the House — deeply divided over how much to cut. A compromise bill ultimately passed, but the relief is only temporary: while Blueprint spending is covered in the next two years, funding in subsequent years is set to shift to the state's general fund, where projected deficits could reach $3 billion by fiscal 2030. Critics and advocates alike have noted a pattern of legislative procrastination: each session, revenue solutions are proposed to close structural gaps, but lawmakers have done just enough to keep the program afloat for another year rather than securing long-term financing — leaving the Blueprint's ambitious goals chronically underfunded even as its 2032 deadline approaches.

Wyoming

Wyoming has contracted with a consulting team to recalibrate its Evidence-Based Funding model every five years since 2005 — making it one of the longest-running continuous adequacy and effectiveness review processes in the country. Each recalibration incorporates updated research on effective practices, revised cost estimates, and analysis of what has and hasn't worked in Wyoming's specific context. The process ensures that the state's funding system evolves with the evidence rather than calcifying around outdated assumptions.

The state has consistently ranked among the top ten to fifteen states nationally in per-pupil spending, though that figure is substantially inflated by Wyoming's small enrollment, vast geography, and historically strong mineral tax revenues rather than reflecting an unusually generous education policy. In recent years the gap between what the model recommends and what the legislature actually appropriates has become a flashpoint. During the 2025-26 recalibration cycle, the Select Committee on School Finance cut the consultants' recommended funding increase from roughly $100 million down to about $12 million, drawing sharp criticism from the governor, school districts, and educators who argued the legislature was using the recalibration process to cut education spending rather than honestly assess what a constitutionally adequate education actually costs.

State Mandated Effective Practices

Evidence based funding is an approach that ties funding to effective practices. There has been considerable resistence to state effective practices directive in Minnesota. However, our failure to address the literacy gap, and a corresponding concern with the lack of the adoption of science of reading principles ultimately led the legislature to adopt the Minnesota Read Act. A first nod towards mandating effective practices, but with no connection to funding based on cost. Whether Minnesota has the will systematically and robustly implement any effective practice mandate,and whether Minnesota will provide funding based on cost remains to be tested.

Early anecdotal results are encouraging, but the chances for cost based funding are not. Teachers across the state are being trained in a unified, evidence-based approach. Districts that had been using curricula misaligned with the science of reading are being required to change. The statewide focus has created momentum and shared purpose that fragmented, locally-determined approaches could not generate.

"Tens of thousands of public school teachers in Minnesota are on the same journey... Concerned about test scores showing a decline in the reading performance of Minnesota children since just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the state in 2023 passed the Read Act, requiring all Minnesota schools to train their teachers in the structured literacy approach... the initial results are encouraging."

The Read Act is not perfect. A 2024 report by Minnesota's Literacy Team found that 68% of districts reporting on their reading curriculum were still not using materials fully aligned to the Science of Reading. Full implementation will require sustained effort, monitoring, and support. But the model — state establishes evidence-based practice requirements, funds training, monitors implementation — is exactly right.

The 2026 legislative session shows a consistent pattern — complaints about the READ Act being an underfunded burden are coming primarily from Republicans and district administrators, while DFL legislators have tried to respond with supplemental appropriations. The tension between the mandate's ambitions and available funding has been a recurring theme throughout the session. Once again, Minnesota has utterly failed to determine the cost of implementation and fully fund it. Our failure to connect adequate funding, once again, threatens even this critical reform

The key insight: The Read Act will work fd it doesn't just tell districts what outcomes to achieve — but tells them what practices are required to get there, and then funds the infrastructure to support those practices. This model should be extended to mathematics education and Multilingual Learner programming, where similar evidence bases exist and similar gaps in practice persist.

The Accountability Connection

Evidence-based practices without accountability become suggestions. States like Maryland and Illinois have recognized this: they built guardrails into their funding reforms specifically to ensure that money designated for high-need students and effective programs actually gets used for those purposes.

Odden and Picus, whose school finance work is among the most widely cited in the field, put it plainly: it is critical that adequate funding be paired with an obligation by schools to implement effective practices. Funding without that obligation allows well-intentioned dollars to flow into activities that are comfortable and familiar but not necessarily effective.

This is not a criticism of educators. Most teachers and administrators are working hard and want their students to succeed. The problem is that without a structured framework connecting funding to specific evidence-based practices, schools default to what they already know — even when research points clearly toward something better.

The next post addresses accountability more directly. But the evidence-practice connection is worth stating here: the reason accountability matters is precisely because it enforces the link between the funding we provide and the practices we've determined are most likely to help students achieve.

A Note on What "Evidence-Based" Means

It is worth being clear about what evidence-based practices are and are not. They are not a single rigid curriculum or a top-down mandate that eliminates teacher professional judgment. They are an evidence-grounded framework — a set of instructional approaches, program designs, and organizational structures that research has shown to be effective across a range of settings.

Within that framework, there is substantial room for local adaptation, teacher creativity, and responsiveness to the specific needs of each school community. The science of reading, for example, establishes what the building blocks of effective literacy instruction are — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension. It does not dictate how a teacher engages with a particular student on a particular day.

The goal is not uniformity. It is effectiveness — and effectiveness grounded in evidence rather than habit, tradition, or ideology.

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Next in the series → Post 6 of 8

The Accountability Gap — Even with adequate funding and evidence-based practices, Minnesota's achievement gap will not close without a genuinely robust state accountability system. The next post confronts the state's deep attachment to local control, examines why that attachment has not produced systemic improvement, and describes what a real accountability infrastructure — one modeled on special education compliance and the Department of Defense school system — would look like.

Minnesota is not Funding the Actual Needs of Students

Post 4 of 8 • Minnesota Education Finance Reform

This is the fourth post in an eight-part series on reforming Minnesota's K–12 education finance system, based on the Research Appendix drafted for the 2025 MDE Task Force on Education Finance. Post 1 introduced the series; Posts 2 and 3 covered Minnesota's history of inaction and the case for an adequacy study. We have pointed out that the 2004 finance study urged that the legislature should fund the "full dollar cost" of educating each student, and that the Skeen decision ruled that the constitution demanded the legislature to provide districts with enough funding to provide an adequate education that meets all state standards. This post addresses how funding must be tailored to the real cost of educating each student and how the state fails even to try to meet that standard.

In the prior post, we identified two methods of estimating the full dollar cost of delivering an adequate education. But there is another method largely ignored in Minnesota and elsewhere. Every district in Minnesota serving students of color, lower income students, English language learners, and/or students with disabilities is spending way more money, per student, than the state supplies for those students education. Most of them are stretched and would like to be able to spend more. Since each of those district is spending more than the state is supplying, surely it is reasosonable to conclude that what they are spending is compelling evidence of the minimum amount of money necessary to provide those student with an adequate education. The real question is how much more than they are spending, constrained as they are, would be required to provide that adequate education.

Funding Students, Not Just Schools

It costs more to educate some students than others. Minnesota's funding system doesn't reflect that — and the students paying the price are the ones who can least afford it.

By Gerald Von Korff • jvonkorff.com

There is a principle in education finance that sounds almost obvious once you state it: it costs more to educate a child who arrives at school three grade levels behind than a child who arrives ready to learn. It costs more to serve a student who doesn't yet speak English than one who does. It costs more to educate a child living in deep poverty — with all the health, nutrition, housing, and family instability challenges that poverty brings — than a child whose basic needs are reliably met.

This is not a liberal or conservative position. It is arithmetic. And it has significant implications for how Minnesota funds its public schools.

Minnesota's current system acknowledges this principle in theory — it provides categorical supplements for certain high-need student populations. But those supplements are set at levels determined by political compromise, not by rigorous analysis of what education actually costs for these students. The result is a systematic underfunding of exactly the students who need the most support.

The Historical Shift That Changed Everything

To understand why weighted student funding matters so much, it helps to understand how the cost of education changed when Minnesota — and the country — shifted from seat-time to proficiency-based standards.

Before the 1980s, Minnesota public schools were legally required to deliver required course content in a minimum number of hours of instruction. That was the standard: show up, teach the curriculum, maintain the required student-teacher ratios. Under that model, it was expected and accepted that students would perform very differently. Some would thrive; some would struggle; some would fall through the cracks. No one was held responsible for closing the gap.

In 1983, Minnesota began transitioning to a proficiency-based system — one that holds schools accountable not for the instruction they provide but for the learning that results. All students are expected to reach minimum standards of proficiency in core subjects. The state now mandates reading at grade level, math proficiency, and graduation. Schools are judged on whether their students achieve those outcomes.

This transition was the right thing to do morally and economically. But it fundamentally changed the cost structure of public education. Under seat-time standards, a trained teacher with an appropriate curriculum was essentially sufficient. Under proficiency-based standards, a school serving students who are significantly behind — whether due to poverty, language barriers, disability, or other factors — must do dramatically more to achieve the same outcome: more instructional time, more intervention services, more support staff, more family engagement, more individualized attention.

"If students are behind, or must overcome barriers to successful learning, they need more services, more time learning, and more support, and therefore significantly more funding."
— Thomas Fordham Institute, "Fund the Child" (2006)

This conclusion comes not from progressive advocates but from the Thomas Fordham Institute — one of the country's most prominent conservative education think tanks. When even ideological conservatives acknowledge that high expectations for disadvantaged students require more resources, the debate about whether weighted funding is necessary should be settled.

The Students Minnesota Is Underfunding

Students from Low-Income Families

On average, students living in poverty arrive at school with accumulated educational deficits — less early childhood preparation, more health and nutrition challenges, more frequent mobility, less access to out-of-school enrichment. Closing those gaps requires significantly more instructional support, earlier intervention, and extended learning time. Research consistently shows that the additional cost of providing an adequate education to low-income students double the base cost for more advantaged students or more.

English Learners / Multilingual Learners

Students who are still acquiring English require specialized instruction, bilingual support staff, and additional time. Minnesota's current ELL funding creates what researchers describe as a "cross-subsidy" — districts are required to spend far more on ELL services than the state provides, meaning other programs are effectively subsidizing ELL education. The 2020 Walz administration report recommended reducing this cross-subsidy to no more than 50% by adjusting per-student funding and lifting the cap for inflation. That reform has not been fully implemented. The 2023 legislation represented a major step forward — nearly doubling the per-pupil EL allowance and creating a new cross subsidy aid component starting FY 2027 — but that new component only reimburses 25 cents on the dollar of the remaining gap, so a significant cross subsidy burden remains. A district's cross subsidy, as measured by the state, is not the difference betweeen providing an adequate education to ELL's, its merely the difference between what the district is spending and the amount of reimbursement. Other than a potential constitutional claim, there is no practical mechanism to assure that districts are allocating adequate funding to English language learners.

Students with Disabilities

Special education is treated differently. State and federal law demands that districts provide the adequate education the law demands, but purposely underfunds the cost. Students and their parents are afforded a right afforded to no other student: to seek administrative or judicial relief to force the district to provide a free and appropriate education. As a result, Special education is the one area where Minnesota has built a relatively robust state accountability and funding system. Federal law requires a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities, and the state has developed compliance monitoring, fiscal oversight, and complaint adjudication systems to back it up. As one example, the Minneapolis public school district is required to spend as of the latest report $43 million more on special education than the state reimburses. To cover this deficit, Minneapolise must divert funds from programs and services for other students. Under the Minnesota Supreme Court's Skeen decision the state is required to provide districts with enough funding to provide an adequate education meeeting state standards For students with disabilities districts are required to deliver the adequate education, but even for special education students the funding requirement is ignored.

Students in Early Childhood

Research is overwhelming that early childhood education — particularly for children facing educational barriers — produces substantial returns. The Great Start for All Minnesota Children Task Force, authorized by Governor Walz in 2021 with bipartisan support, recommended that Minnesota move toward a system where no family pays more than 7% of annual income on early care and education, and that early learning scholarships be expanded to include three-year-olds. Early investment reduces the remediation costs that accumulate when children arrive at kindergarten significantly behind. In 2024, first Children’s Finance estimated early childhood shortages affected 89,528 Minnesotan children with working parents. Without better options, many parents stay home or reduce their work to part-time in order to care for their children. Some parents alternate working hours with their partners or other family members, missing out on important family bonding time.

What the Research Says About Funding Weights

The 2004 Taxpayers Association study found that the cost of an adequate education in Minnesota varied from roughly $6,200 to over $14,000 per student — a ratio of more than two to one, depending on student characteristics. That study was conservative and is now more than two decades old. More recent research suggests the differentials may be even larger.

Dr. Bruce Baker's national research finds, as a general principle, that input-based analyses — which is what Minnesota's current categorical supplements essentially are — "fail to capture the full additional costs to provide equal opportunity in high need settings." In other words, the supplements Minnesota currently provides are structurally likely to underestimate what high-need students actually require.

What this means in practice: A school district in which 80% of students qualify for free and reduced-price meals, 30% are English Learners, and 15% have disabilities genuinely needs two to three times as much per-pupil revenue as a district serving a predominantly affluent, native English-speaking population. Minnesota's current formula does not come close to reflecting that differential. The districts serving the most vulnerable students are receiving the least adequate funding.

The St. Cloud Example

In 2023, the St. Cloud Area School District — in partnership with a citizen group called SCERAC — prepared a detailed description of what adequate funding would make possible for its students. The district's submission to MDE described specific programs that additional revenue would support, including: expansion of early childhood education; significantly enhanced Multilingual Learning services; expansion of its dyslexia programming; increased counseling and support staff; diversification of accelerated learning opportunities; and continued recruitment of teachers and staff of color.

The district noted with pride its commitment to evidence-based Multilingual programming — and documented the "multi-million dollar funding shortfall" that prevents it from fully implementing what it knows works. This is the practical consequence of inadequate weighted funding: schools that know what to do, and want to do it, but lack the resources.

The Principle: Fund the Actual Cost

The 2004 Governor's Task Force stated the principle clearly and it has not changed: "Education funding must be tailored to relevant characteristics of each individual student, such as student disabilities, household or neighborhood poverty, pre-K or Kindergarten readiness, and the needs of English language learners."

Twenty years later, Minnesota has still not implemented this principle in any rigorous way. Categorical supplements exist, but they are set by political negotiation rather than cost analysis. The adequacy study described in the previous post would provide the factual foundation for setting those weights correctly — based on what education actually costs for each student population, not on what the Legislature finds politically comfortable.

Funding the actual cost of education is not a luxury. Under Minnesota's proficiency-based standards, it is a legal and moral obligation.

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Next in the series → Post 5 of 8

Evidence-Based Practices: Money Is Necessary But Not Sufficient — Adequate funding is essential, but money spent on the wrong things doesn't help students. The next post explores how states like Illinois, Wyoming, and Maryland have paired funding reform with requirements to use evidence-based instructional practices — and why Minnesota's own Read Act offers a promising model for what this can look like statewide.

The Case for Adequate Cost-Based Education Funding in Minnesota

Post 3 of 8 • Minnesota Education Finance Reform

This is the third post in an eight-part series on reforming Minnesota's K–12 education finance system, based on the Research Appendix drafted for the 2025 MDE Task Force on Education Finance. Post 1 introduced the series; Post 2 surveyed twenty years of unheeded warnings. This post makes the case for adequate, cost-based funding.

Minnesota's Unfinished Business: The Case for Adequate, Cost-Based Funding

We know education costs more for some students than others. Why won't Minnesota calculate how much more?

By Gerald Von Korff • jvonkorff.com

In 2004, Minnesota's Governor-appointed task force took an important step: it authorized a nationally recognized consulting firm to conduct a comprehensive study of how much money Minnesota districts actually need to provide every student with the opportunity to achieve state standards. The study was nearly complete when the Governor terminated the work. The adequacy study was never finished. The recommendations were never implemented.

In the two decades since, Minnesota has remained one of the only states in the country that launched — and then abandoned — such a study. Other states, including Kansas, Kentucky, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Illinois, Maryland, Wyoming, and many others, have not only completed adequacy studies but built their entire school finance systems around their findings. Minnesota has not. Ironically, Minnesota's funding is, in many respects fairer than many other states. It may well be that it would take less money in Minnesota to reach adequate funding for the students Minnesota now leaves behind. But that's not an argument for ignoring what it actually costs to meet the constitutional standard: enough funding to afford each student with an adequate education that meets all state standards. On the contrary, it means that if Minnesota would allocate enough funding, and pair that with effective practices and accountability, it should be easier to reform our broken school finance system.

This post explains what an adequacy study is, what it would likely reveal about Minnesota's funding levels, and why rebuilding the state's basic funding formula on a true cost basis is the essential first step in closing the achievement gap.

What Is a Funding Adequacy Study?

An adequacy study asks a simple but powerful question: how much does it actually cost to provide each student with a genuine opportunity to achieve state academic standards?

This is different from asking how much money Minnesota is currently spending, or what neighboring states spend, or what the Legislature is willing to appropriate. Those questions describe what is happening. An adequacy study asks what should be happening — and calculates the price.

There are two major methodologies used in adequacy studies. The first, called the Evidence-Based Funding approach, assembles educators and experts to identify the specific programs, staffing levels, and services that research shows are effective, then calculates the cost of providing them in each district. This approach has been used in Illinois, Wyoming, Arkansas, and many other states.

The second, developed by scholars over decades including Dr. Bruce Baker of the University of Miami, is an econometric cost model that uses statistical analysis of actual student outcomes — graduation rates, test scores, long-term earnings — to estimate what funding levels are associated with achieving defined outcome targets. This approach, used in a landmark 2021 national study, has the advantage of being grounded in real-world results rather than theoretical program designs.

Both approaches reach similar conclusions about Minnesota: the state is significantly underfunding the districts and students who need the most resources.

What the 2004 Taxpayers Association Study Found

Even the business-funded 2004 Taxpayers Association study — which used conservative assumptions and was explicitly skeptical of large funding increases — found that the cost of an adequate education in Minnesota varied from roughly $6,200 to over $14,000 per student depending on student characteristics. That is a more than two-to-one ratio.

The same study found that Minneapolis was underfunded by an estimated $138 million — more than $3,000 per student — even by its conservative standards. And that was in 2002 dollars. The authors acknowledged that their study was only intended to "illustrate the approach" and explicitly stated it could not be used as the basis for actual policy without further work. And that is exactly what this post advocates: that Minnesota must marshall all the evidence, develop evidence based cost estimates, and provide adequate funding with accountability guardrails to assure that districts are using adequate funding to deliver an adequate education to the students we are now leaving behind.

In other words, even the most fiscally conservative adequacy analysis available confirmed that Minnesota's highest-need districts were dramatically underfunded. And that study is now more than twenty years old.

What the 2021 Rutgers Study Found

The most rigorous recent national analysis, conducted by Dr. Baker's team at Rutgers and published by the Shanker Foundation in 2021, estimated the additional funding each Minnesota district would need to bring students to national average outcomes — a standard less demanding than full proficiency for all students.

The findings were striking. The least adequately funded districts in Minnesota included not only Minneapolis and St. Paul, but also Greater Minnesota districts like Worthington, St. Cloud, Chisholm, and Mabel-Canton, as well as suburban districts like Columbia Heights and Brooklyn Center. The pattern was unmistakable: districts serving higher concentrations of students of color, English Learners, students experiencing poverty, and students experiencing homelessness were systematically the most inadequately funded.

"Minnesota students who are English Learners, students of color — particularly Black students — and students experiencing poverty are significantly more likely to be enrolled in school districts where funding is below adequate."
— Summary of the 2021 Rutgers/Shanker National Study as applied to Minnesota

Why the Basic Formula Doesn't Work

Minnesota's basic education funding formula provides a uniform per-pupil amount to every district, with some categorical supplements for specific populations. The problem is that the basic formula was never set at a level derived from a rigorous analysis of what education actually costs. It was set — and has been incrementally adjusted — based on what the Legislature was willing to spend, not on what students need.

The 2004 Governor's Task Force put the principle clearly: education funding must "cover the full-dollar costs of ensuring Minnesota public school students have an opportunity to achieve state-specified academic standards." That standard has never been met.

Moreover, simply increasing the basic formula uniformly cannot remedy the specific deficits affecting special education, English Learner education, and education for students from low-income families. The 2004 Task Force recognized this explicitly: a uniform increase helps every district equally, but it does not address the disproportionate needs of districts serving the most disadvantaged students.

The core problem in plain terms: Minnesota currently sets its education funding based on what it is willing to spend, not on what it actually costs to deliver proficiency-level education to all students. Until those two numbers are aligned, the achievement gap cannot close — because the state is systematically under-resourced in the districts serving students who need the most support.

What a Genuine Adequacy Study Would Do

A properly designed adequacy study — the kind that was begun but never finished in 2004 — would accomplish several things.

First, it would establish an evidence-based cost estimate for providing every Minnesota student with a genuine opportunity to achieve state standards. This would give the Legislature an objective foundation for its funding decisions, replacing the current practice of incremental adjustments to a historically arbitrary baseline.

Second, it would quantify the cost differentials between students and districts, providing a principled basis for the categorical weights and supplements that are supposed to account for higher-need students. Right now, those weights are essentially political compromises. An adequacy study would replace them with research-grounded cost estimates.

Third, it would establish accountability: if the state commits to funding education at the level the adequacy study determines is necessary, it becomes much harder to justify underfunding without confronting the direct consequences for student outcomes.

What Other States Have Done

Minnesota is an outlier. Dozens of states have conducted comprehensive adequacy studies and rebuilt their finance systems around the findings. Some of the most instructive examples:

Wyoming has contracted with a consulting team to recalibrate its education funding model every five years since 2005. Its finance system is explicitly designed to fund the programs and staffing levels that research identifies as effective. The system is regularly updated as costs change and new evidence emerges.

Illinois enacted a landmark Evidence-Based Funding reform in 2017, creating a professional review panel to regularly recalibrate the state's funding model and a balanced accountability committee to monitor outcomes. The reform has driven hundreds of millions of new dollars to the state's most underfunded districts.

Maryland, after commissioning a comprehensive adequacy study, enacted the Blueprint for Maryland's Future in 2021 — committing to a $3.9 billion increase in education funding over ten years, paired with accountability provisions and a mandate to implement effective practices. The Blueprint's five pillars — early childhood education, high-quality teachers, college and career readiness, additional resources for high-need students, and accountability — represent exactly the kind of comprehensive approach Minnesota needs.

In each of these cases, the adequacy study was not the end of the process — it was the beginning. It provided the factual foundation for legislative action.

The Ask: Finish What Was Started in 2004

Minnesota's first immediate priority should be to commission the adequacy study that was terminated twenty years ago. The study should use both the Evidence-Based Funding methodology and the econometric approach pioneered by Dr. Baker's team, so that the Legislature has the benefit of both perspectives. It should be completed within eighteen months and used as the basis for rebuilding the basic funding formula.

This is not a radical ask. It is, in fact, the minimum that responsible governance requires: before deciding how much to spend on education, determine how much it actually costs.

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Next in the series → Post 4 of 8

Funding Students, Not Just Schools — Even if Minnesota sets its overall funding at the right level, the money won't reach the students who need it most without a dramatic overhaul of how funding is weighted for student characteristics. The next post explains why per-pupil funding must reflect the real, higher cost of educating children facing poverty, language barriers, disability, and other challenges — and what that means in practice.

Twenty Years of Unheeded Warnings: Leaving Children Behind

Post 2 of 8 • Minnesota Education Finance Reform

This is the second post in an eight-part series on reforming Minnesota's K–12 education finance system. The series is based on the Research Appendix drafted for the 2025 MDE Task Force on Education Finance. Start with Post 1 for an overview of the series and why it matters.

Twenty Years of Unheeded Warnings

Report after report has reached the same conclusion. Why hasn't Minnesota acted?

By Gerald Von Korff • jvonkorff.com

Imagine receiving the same diagnosis from twelve different doctors over twenty years — and choosing, each time, not to begin treatment. That is essentially the story of Minnesota's response to its education funding crisis.

Since the early 2000s, a remarkable parade of task forces, academic studies, federal reserve analyses, university researchers, and legislative auditors have all reached the same conclusion: Minnesota's school finance system is structurally inadequate for the students who need it most, and the achievement gap that results is not closing. In some respects, it is growing.

Understanding this history — the pattern of diagnosis without treatment — is essential context for understanding why the reforms this series advocates are so urgent. This is not a new problem awaiting a new solution. The solutions are known. What has been missing is the sustained political commitment to implement them.

The Reports: A Parade of Warnings

2004

Governor Pawlenty's Blue-Ribbon Task Force

Governor Pawlenty convened a task force chaired by Superintendent Rick Dressen, which acknowledged that "Minnesota has one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation." The task force recommended a cost-based funding formula sufficient to ensure all students could achieve state-specified academic standards — and was authorized to commission a national expert to calculate exactly how much that would cost. The study was nearly complete when the Governor terminated the task force's work. Minnesota is perhaps the only state that initiated, and then stopped, a funding adequacy study before it was finished.

2004

Minnesota Taxpayers Association Adequacy Study

Commissioned by the Minnesota Taxpayers Association and financed by business groups, this study used sophisticated statistical modeling to estimate what adequate funding would cost. It found that the cost of an adequate education varied from roughly $6,200 to over $14,000 per student depending on student characteristics — a more than two-to-one differential. Its conclusion, notably, was that closing the achievement gap through adequate funding would be "cost prohibitive" and "politically unfeasible." The study's own authors, however, cautioned that it could not be used as a basis for actual policy without further work to define adequacy and involve stakeholders.

2009

Minnesota Budget Trends Commission

This commission warned of a rising dependency ratio as baby boomers retired and the workforce shrank. Its solution: Minnesota must urgently address educational attainment gaps in the K–12 system, because those students would need to support the state's future economic growth. "We will need to utilize the talents of all of our younger citizens," the Commission wrote, "no matter their family income, race, or ethnicity."

2011–2013

Governor Dayton's Task Force

This task force repeated the warnings of its predecessors: "There are wide gaps in reading and math proficiency by race and by economic status. Little progress was made in closing these achievement gaps between 2006 and 2010." Its recommendations focused largely on reallocating existing resources rather than adding new ones, as the state faced significant fiscal constraints. Some of its proposals — including all-day kindergarten — were eventually enacted. The achievement gap, however, persisted.

2016

Minnesota Education Equity Partnership (MnEEP)

MnEEP connected the dots between Minnesota's achievement gap and its economic future. As the state's student population was becoming more diverse — more students of color, more English Learners, more students from low-income families — the proportion of students not achieving educational proficiency was growing. The economic stakes were enormous. Researchers quoted in the report estimated that closing racial and ethnic achievement gaps nationally could make the U.S. economy nearly $2.3 trillion larger by 2050.

2019

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

The Minneapolis Fed joined the chorus: "Minnesota's education achievement gaps have persisted for decades despite implementing policies designed to close them." This was not an ideologically motivated advocacy report — it was the Federal Reserve, assessing the economic consequences of educational inequity.

2020

Governor Walz's 80-20-10 Report

The most recent gubernatorial task force before the current one documented that test scores had stagnated over twenty years while the percentage of students of color doubled. The report found that the buying power of general fund revenue had declined by 10% over the preceding decade — meaning districts were effectively receiving less money in real terms even as the student population they were asked to serve became more challenging.

2021

Rutgers University / Shanker Foundation National Study

Using the National Education Cost Model, researchers estimated the additional funding each Minnesota district would need to bring students to national average outcomes. The least adequately funded districts included Minneapolis and St. Paul, but also many Greater Minnesota districts — Worthington, St. Cloud, Chisholm — and suburban districts like Columbia Heights and Brooklyn Center. The pattern was clear: districts serving higher proportions of students of color, English Learners, and students qualifying for free and reduced-price meals were the most severely underfunded.

2022

Office of the Legislative Auditor

Minnesota's own legislative auditor concluded: "Minnesota has had long-standing academic achievement gaps, despite efforts by MDE, school districts, and charter schools to implement policies designed to close them." The auditor also documented that the accountability mechanisms in place were toothless — MDE had insufficient staff, insufficient authority, and insufficient tools to actually require improvement from districts that were failing their students.

2022

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Updated)

"Data show that Minnesota's public schools consistently underserve students from low-income families, Indigenous students, and students of color." The Fed had to say it again, three years later, because nothing had changed.

The Pattern: Why Has Nothing Changed?

Reading through these reports, a pattern emerges. Each successive effort acknowledges the prior warnings, documents that little has changed, and makes recommendations. Some partial reforms are enacted. But the structural problem — a funding formula that does not cover the actual cost of educating high-need students to proficiency — is never fully addressed.

Why? Several forces are at work.

First, there is genuine fiscal pressure. Adequately funding education for all students is expensive, and Minnesota has faced recurring budget constraints that make large new commitments politically difficult.

Second, there is a strong tradition of local control. Many Minnesotans — including many educators and school board members — are deeply resistant to state-level accountability mechanisms, viewing them as interference with local decision-making. This attachment to local control, however well-intentioned, has allowed persistent failure to continue without consequence.

Third, the students most harmed by this system are also among the least politically powerful. Low-income families, families of color, and immigrant communities have less lobbying capacity than the interests that benefit from the status quo.

"Diffuse local control empowers the powerful, the advantaged, and interests that may be seeking to preserve the status quo."
— Research Appendix, 2025 MDE Task Force

Fourth — and perhaps most fundamentally — there has been a persistent belief that the problem is not really about money, but about practices, culture, or effort. This belief, while containing a grain of truth (money spent ineffectively does not help students), has been used repeatedly to avoid the harder question of whether Minnesota is actually spending enough in the right places. The research, as we will explore in later posts, is clear that it is not.

The Cost of Waiting

Twenty years of inaction has a cost. Each cohort of students who passed through inadequately funded schools represents a generation of unrealized potential — lower graduation rates, lower earnings, greater reliance on public services. The Federal Reserve's concern is not abstract: an undereducated workforce is an economic drag that compounds over decades.

Meanwhile, Minnesota's student population has continued to change. The share of students of color — the students most severely underfunded relative to their needs — has doubled. The problem is not getting smaller while we wait.

The 2025 Task Force represents another opportunity to break this pattern. The research is, if anything, more compelling than it was in 2004. The question is whether this time, Minnesota will act on what the evidence requires.

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Next in the series → Post 3 of 8

The Case for Adequate, Cost-Based Funding — Minnesota is perhaps the only state that started and then stopped a school funding adequacy study before completing it. The next post explains what an adequacy study is, what it would reveal about Minnesota's funding levels, and why rebuilding the basic funding formula on a true cost basis is the essential first step toward closing the achievement gap.

Minnesota's Education Funding Must be Reformed: A Series

Series Introduction • Post 1 of 8

Minnesota Is Failing Its Most Vulnerable Students — And Has Been for Twenty Years

An eight-part series on what the research says, what other states have done, and what Minnesota must do now.

By Gerald Von Korff • jvonkorff.com

Over the past two decades, Minnesota has been warned — repeatedly, by governors, legislators, federal economists, university researchers, and its own auditors — that its public school finance system is failing the students who need it most. Students of color, students from low-income families, English Learners, and students with disabilities are being systematically underfunded. The achievement gap is wide, persistent, and in many respects growing.

And yet, despite report after report, task force after task force, the structural problems remain unaddressed.

In 2025, the Minnesota Department of Education convened a new Task Force on K–12 Education Finance. This post is drawn from the Task Force's Research Appendix — a comprehensive review of twenty years of evidence on Minnesota's achievement gap, what other states have done to address funding adequacy, what the research says about money and outcomes, and what a genuine accountability system looks like.

This blog series draws on that research to make the case — in plain language — for the reforms Minnesota needs. It is written not just for policymakers and educators, but for any Minnesotan who cares about whether our public schools are delivering on their promise.

Why This Matters — and Why It Hasn't Been Fixed

Minnesota has a deserved reputation as one of the country's better-educated states. Average test scores are high. Graduation rates are solid. But those averages mask a deeply troubling reality: Minnesota also has one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation between white students and students of color, between affluent students and students living in poverty.

This is not a new problem. It has been documented since at least the early 2000s. What is remarkable — and troubling — is how little progress has been made despite so many well-intentioned efforts.

"Over the past 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%."
— Minnesota School Finance Working Group, 2020

The reasons for this failure are structural, not personal. Minnesota's school finance system was not designed to deliver proficiency-level education to all students regardless of background. It was built for a different era — one in which schools were expected to provide instruction, not guarantee learning. When Minnesota (and the country) shifted to outcome-based, proficiency-focused standards beginning in the 1980s, the cost of education for disadvantaged students rose dramatically. The funding system never caught up.

What This Series Will Cover

Over eight posts, this series walks through the five reforms the research points to as necessary and sufficient to finally close Minnesota's achievement gap. Each post corresponds to a section of the research memo prepared for the Task Force:

The Eight Posts in This Series

1. Post 1 (this post): Series introduction — the problem, why it persists, and what we'll cover.
2. Post 2: Twenty years of unheeded warnings — the reports, the data, and the pattern of inaction.
3. Post 3: The case for adequate, cost-based funding — why the current formula doesn't work and what a real adequacy study would reveal.
4. Post 4: Funding students, not just schools — why per-pupil funding must be weighted to reflect the real cost of educating each child.
5. Post 5: Evidence-based practices — what works, and why money alone isn't enough without guardrails on how it's spent.
6. Post 6: The accountability gap — why local control has not produced systemic improvement and what a real accountability system looks like.
7. Post 7: Continuous improvement — how states like Wyoming and Maryland build recalibration into their finance systems.
8. Post 8: What Minnesota must do now — the six immediate legislative priorities that would put the state on a new path.

A Word About the Research

This series is grounded in the Research Appendix drafted for the 2025 MDE Task Force, drawing on peer-reviewed academic research, state-commissioned adequacy studies from across the country, federal reserve analyses, legislative auditor reports, and the work of leading school finance scholars including Dr. Bruce Baker of Rutgers University and Dr. Allan Odden of the University of Wisconsin.

I have tried to make this accessible to general readers without sacrificing accuracy. Where I cite studies, they are real. Where I draw conclusions, I try to be clear that they are my own read of what the evidence requires.

Minnesota has the knowledge. It has the research. What it has lacked is the political will to act. My hope is that this series contributes, in some small way, to building the public understanding that makes action possible.

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Next in the series → Post 2 of 8

Twenty Years of Unheeded Warnings — The next post surveys the remarkable parade of task forces, academic studies, federal reserve reports, and legislative audits that have all reached the same conclusion: Minnesota is failing its most vulnerable students, and the situation is getting worse. Understanding this history is essential to understanding why reform is so urgent.