How Do You Get Better Schools? Take the State to Court, More Advocates Say

By his own account, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman’s five children have received a good education at public schools in St. Paul, Minnesota. His two oldest daughters are starting careers in finance and teaching. Another daughter, a high school student, plans to become a doctor.

But their success, Cruz-Guzman said, flows partly from the fact that he and his wife fought for their children to attend racially integrated schools outside their neighborhood. Their two youngest children take a bus 30 minutes each way to Murray Middle School, where the student population is about one-third white, one-third black, 16 percent Asian and 9 percent Latino.

“I wanted to have my kids exposed to different cultures and learn from different people,” said Cruz-Guzman, who owns a small flooring company and is an immigrant from Mexico. When his two oldest children briefly attended a charter school that was close to 100 percent Latino, he said, he realized, “We are limiting our kids to one community.”

Now Cruz-Guzman is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit saying that Minnesota knowingly allowed towns and cities to set policies and zoning boundaries that led to segregated schools, lowering test scores and graduation rates for low-income and nonwhite children. Last month, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the suit could move forward, a decision advocates across the country hailed as important.

The case is part of a wave of lawsuits over the quality of schools in more than a half-dozen states. The suits could serve as road maps for advocates in other states amid a nationwide teachers’ movement and a push in some state legislatures for more school funding.

The legal complaints have different areas of focus — including school funding, segregation and literacy — but all of them argue that the states are violating their constitutions by denying children a quality education.

Such lawsuits were filed in past decades, but the recent cases show a renewed energy for using the courts to fight for better education, and they may signal an end to a period when many courts, after the last recession, seemed unwilling to require states to spend more money on schools.

“The courthouse doors are in effect open again,” said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, which has argued school funding cases in New Jersey and has filed amicus briefs in several of the current cases. “What we’re seeing are the beginnings of a broader conversation about what the right to an education should look like.” Advocates are focused on state courts because of roadblocks at the federal level: A 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision found that unequal school funding was not a violation of the U.S. Constitution, which does not mention education. Last month, a federal judge in Michigan ruled that “access to literacy” was not a fundamental federal right for students in the troubled Detroit school system.

But almost every state constitution guarantees the right to an adequate education. Now, the questions making their way from campuses to the courts concern what an adequate education should consist of, and to what extent factors like money and demographics make a difference.

The lawyers who brought the federal literacy case in Michigan plan to file an appeal, and they are pursuing a similar, state-level claim in California. They argue that poor students are not getting the basic reading and writing skills necessary to function as citizens in a democratic society.

In New Mexico last month, a state district court judge ruled that the state is underfunding schools, particularly those that serve large numbers of Native American, Hispanic and low-income students. The judge set a deadline of April 15 for the state to establish a new funding system for schools and even suggested which taxes could be raised to do so. She listed preschool, summer school, after-school programs and literacy programs as those that should be expanded. The state is expected to appeal the decision.

In Kansas, the state’s Supreme Court ruled last year that the school finance system was shortchanging students and was unconstitutional. Courts in Pennsylvania and Florida have agreed to hear similar cases — a break from years past, when judges in both states said such matters should be left to legislators and voters to decide.

Part of what has changed is the evidence used in such cases. During the past 10 years, as most states set new academic standards, test score data has revealed how many children are attending schools that fail to meet more challenging academic goals. In New Mexico, which has one of the highest child poverty rates in the nation, three-quarters of fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. A growing body of research suggests that both more funding and greater racial and socioeconomic integration of schools can help improve those numbers.

For example, one 2016 study found that spending 10 percent more per pupil was associated with students staying in school longer and earning about 7 percent more in adulthood. The gains were larger for students from low-income families.

Not all experts are persuaded by such research. Eric Hanushek, an economist who testified on behalf of the state in the New Mexico case, said that, nationally, education spending has increased over the past two decades without significant improvements in student achievement. He argued that instead of lowering class sizes or raising teacher pay across the board, only the most effective teachers should be paid more.

“I don’t think that these are constitutional issues,” said Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. “How do you make sure you spend money well?”

He said he was more sympathetic to the argument that desegregation could raise student achievement, but he was skeptical that a large-scale solution could be found.

Daniel Shulman, the lead lawyer in the Minnesota desegregation suit, said he was looking at remedies such as a regional busing program, similar to the ones used, successfully, by some North Carolina counties in the decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

“If the entire seven-county area is part of a remedy, there won’t be white flight,” Shulman said. “Where are they going to go?”

Not all Twin Cities education reformers are enthusiastic about the case. Charter school leaders are especially nervous, since many of their schools serve student bodies that are close to 100 percent nonwhite and poor in urban areas, or, in the suburbs, overwhelmingly white. The lawsuit says that the state has erred in exempting charter schools from desegregation requirements.

Khulia Pringle is an education consultant and former charter school teacher whose daughter attended a St. Paul charter school that was overwhelmingly black and low income. She said such schools can be “culturally affirming” to nonwhite children like her daughter, who may face discrimination from white teachers and administrators in traditional schools.

“If schools in urban areas need more resources, then they should get more resources. It shouldn’t take busing kids to white schools to get those resources,” she said. “It sends a message to black children that the only way you’re going to succeed is to get bused to a white school, leave this ghetto and get out of your neighborhood.” Some long-standing desegregation programs, like one in Hartford, Connecticut, bus white children to magnet schools in nonwhite neighborhoods, in addition to busing nonwhite and poor children to suburban schools. Pringle said she had no problem with such a plan, but only if it were voluntary and driven by family choice — not an integration mandate from the courts.

“The focus shouldn’t be ‘Let’s get the white kids into this black school,'” she said. “If white kids are going to go, they are going to go because it’s a good school.”

Justice Natalie E. Hudson, the Minnesota Supreme Court judge who wrote the majority opinion last month allowing the case to move toward trial, suggested that a segregated school system could not be constitutional, even if the causes of segregation look very different today than they did in past decades.

“It is self-evident that a segregated system of public schools is not ‘general,’ ‘uniform,’ ‘thorough’ or ‘efficient,'” Hudson wrote, quoting the state constitution. “We will not shy away from our proper role to provide remedies for violations of fundamental rights merely because education is a complex area.”