For several decades, Minnesota commissions, task forces, and advocacy groups have warned that our education system has been failing to meet twenty-first century challenges for students who come to school with educational disadvantages. Three constitutional challenges have been made to Minnesota’s education system, though each was founded on an inadequate theory. Although three constitutional challenges have been launched in the last three decades, all three have been founded on inadequate legal theories. The central thesis of this article is that Minnesota’s education system needs to be reinvigorated with ambitious litigation that remedies the state’s failure to provide an education that meets state standards. As discussed throughout this article, “state educational standards” or “state standards” refer to the robust statutory framework included in Minnesota Statutes Chapers 120B, 124D, and 125A.
In Skeen v. State, the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed that the Education Clause of the Minnesota Constitution provides a fundamental right to an education, including the right to “what is necessary to provide an adequate level of education which meets all state standards.” However, because the Skeen plaintiffs conceded that their school districts were already meeting all existing state standards, the court had no occasion to enforce the fundamental right to education and thus denied the relief sought.
Despite this holding, two recent cases—Forslund and Cruz-Guzman—challenged only discrete components of Minnesota’s complex education system. The plaintiffs in both cases failed to tie their challenges to state standards, and did not seek relief under Skeen that would “provide an adequate level of education which meets all state standards.” Rather, the plaintiffs based their claims on the amorphous concept of an “adequate” education. Both cases were dismissed as nonjusticiable by two separate Minnesota Court of Appeals panels.
Skeen, Forslund, and Cruz-Guzman all failed to seek the systemic changes necessary to address the needs of students who have traditionally failed to thrive in Minnesota’s educational system. Even if the courts granted all the relief sought in these constitutional challenges, Minnesota’s system still would still fail to produce an education that the legislature decrees meets twenty-first century standards. This is because no plaintiff urged the court to require the state to provide adequate financial resources or reform Minnesota’s delivery system to meet state educational standards. As a result, the three branches of Minnesota government are presiding over a dysfunctional education system, and they are doing so in a dysfunctional way.
Article XIII, section 1, of Minnesota’s Constitution (“Education Clause”) mandates that the legislature “establish a general and uniform system of public schools and to make such provisions . . . as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state.” In fulfillment of the constitution, the legislature established a rigorous statutory framework of academic standards and programmatic requirements that, if implemented thoroughly and efficiently, would meet the educational requirements of the twenty-first century. To deliver new state and federally mandated education in Minnesota, the state must spend at least two billion dollars per biennium or more. However, two governors and the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) have scrupulously avoided providing official notification to the legislature of that fact. In doing so, the state has failed to provide resources sufficient to achieve those standards and programmatic requirements and has failed to create a systemic organizational framework that would allow local districts to meet state standards and requirements even if they had every last dollar they needed.
Adequate funding is not enough. Two leading authorities on configuring schools to deliver high performance for disadvantaged students emphasize the importance of structural changes to accompany the appropriation of adequate resources.
The education system will need to implement enormous changes for the country to attain these lofty goals. Change will be required in school and classroom organization, curriculum programs, instructional practices, professional development, use of computer and information technologies, and the way the system recruits, develops, and manages its most important talent—teachers and principals.
Karin Chenoweth, who has been studying schools that produce extraordinary educational results, despite student demographics traditionally associated with failing schools, writes:
As long as schools are organized in traditional ways, schools will be entirely dependent on the social capital students bring to their schooling. Schools serving low income students will for the most part be low performing; schools serving middle class and upper middle-class families will appear to be reasonably successful.
For decades, Minnesota has sought to close the achievement gap solely by mandating outcomes and launching new, inadequately funded initiatives. The results demonstrate the futility of trying to make significant changes in educational outcomes for economically disadvantaged students by only changing the legislatively mandated outcomes. Minnesota students are still waiting for their school districts and legal advocates to bring a case—predicated on state education standards—that will transform Minnesota’s public education system and bring it into compliance with its constitution.
This article begins by describing the urgency of a more rational system of public education calculated to achieve state standards. Then, it discusses the legal and educational significance of Minnesota’s transformation from a “seat-based” educational system, existing when Skeen was decided, to a proficiency-based system in the 1990s. This article next examines the funding adequacy decision in McCleary v. State, which addresses one essential component of a thorough, efficient twenty-first century education system: the correlation of revenues to the cost of meeting state requirements. This article further argues that Minnesota needs its own McCleary decision that seeks financial adequacy as well as organizational and operational authority.
This article then argues that the two most recent attempts to challenge the educational system, Cruz-Guzman and Forslund, have failed to state claims enforcing the constitutional mandate; they merely asked the courts to tinker with individual components of it. The plaintiffs’ failure to ground constitutional claims on legislatively-established educational standards prevents those cases from creating precedent applicable to a suit that forces the state to provide economically disadvantaged students with the education the legislature requires. Finally, the article proposes reform to the way the three branches of government deliver the thorough, efficient system that the Minnesota Constitution requires.