MN school segregation lawsuit returns to Supreme Court

Josh Verges, Pioneer Press
·4 min read

The Minnesota Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a 2015 lawsuit that, if successful, could lead to an overhaul of policies that have allowed Twin Cities public schools to become segregated by race and family income.

The plaintiffs in Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota argue that school segregation in the Twin Cities metro violates the education clause of the state’s constitution, even if lawmakers did not intentionally cause the segregation. However, judges with the Hennepin County District Court and state Court of Appeals say otherwise.

Now, the plaintiffs are asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on that question of intent, five years after the same justices revived the case following the district court’s dismissal.

If the plaintiffs prevail at the Supreme Court, they envision three paths toward winning the case once it’s back in district court. Freed of the need to prove lawmaker intent, they could persuade a judge that the state has violated the constitution if:

• There is evidence that a school system is segregated by race and/or family income, even without showing that students are performing poorly; or
• There is evidence of segregation and that students aren’t getting an adequate education, even without proving causation; or
• Students aren’t getting an adequate education, and school segregation is a contributing factor.

Plaintiffs attorney Dan Shulman is eager to proceed on any of those three lines.

“We want to get back to the district court and prove our case,” he told the justices Tuesday.

Associate Justice Margaret Chutich indicated that third line could be an acceptable path forward, suggesting the plaintiffs should have to show that “segregation is a substantial factor in bringing about an inadequate education.”

Even if the Supreme Court affirms the lower rulings, Shulman still could try to make the case that state actors intentionally set up the system to produce segregated schools, through policies like open enrollment and charter schools that don’t have to follow state rules on school integration.

Charter schools

The ongoing lawsuit worries the leaders of charter schools that cater to families of a particular race or ethnicity. They argue their schools serve those students better than traditional public schools. And they say there’s a significant difference between racially-identifiable schools that are established by the government and those that are segregated by parent choice.

More broadly, the charter schools that have intervened in the case take offense to the plaintiffs’ argument that minority students can’t get an adequate education unless they go to school with a certain percentage of white students and students from higher-earning families.

Chutich on Tuesday asked whether the plaintiffs believe a school that serves almost exclusively students of color is “inherently inadequate, without regard to school performance.”

Plaintiffs attorney Richard Landon said they do believe that.

He pointed to a favorable ruling in a similar 1965 case from New Jersey that did not require a showing of policymaker intent in finding school segregation unconstitutional. To reach that conclusion, the state Supreme Court in that case spoke to the societal benefits of embracing diversity.

“The children must learn to respect and live with one another in multiracial and multicultural communities and the earlier they do so, the better,” the New Jersey justices said.

Value of diversity

Landon said the Minnesota Supreme Court has similarly concluded that a school system that tolerates “racial isolation” fails to prepare students for the duties of citizenship.

Associate Justice Natalie Hudson, who wrote the 4-2 decision that brought the case back to life in 2018, sounded most sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ arguments Tuesday. Echoing the plaintiffs’ arguments, she pushed back on the suggestion of Liz Kramer, state solicitor general, that the plaintiffs should have to demonstrate a link between school segregation and a poor-quality education.

“Why should they have to prove that? It’s almost as if we don’t want to see what we see or know what we know,” Hudson said, recalling the pluralistic ideals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. “Brown is very clear that … segregation itself is a problem. It’s because we don’t have proximity to one another, we don’t get to know each other, we don’t get to become citizens of the world when we’re in our own silos, and that in and of itself is a problem in our society and continues to a problem in our society. So, why isn’t that enough?”

Kramer responded that there’s nothing in the Minnesota Constitution’s education clause that requires schools to be integrated.

“There’s just no constitutional hook for it,” she said.

Failed settlement

Attorneys for the plaintiffs and the state defendants reached a settlement agreement in the lawsuit in 2021, but the Legislature never acted on it.

At a cost of $63 million per year, it would have created a metro-wide system of student busing, established four new integration-focused magnet schools, ordered racially isolated public schools — including charter schools — to integrate, and poured more money into state-mandated efforts by school districts to integrate and better serve students of color.

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