Earlier this month, Susan Robinar, a Minnesota district court judge, refused to exempt the state’s charter schools from a desegregation lawsuit.
The case, Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota, was initially filed in 2015 on behalf of a handful of public school parents in the Twin Cities. These plaintiffs allege that Minnesota’s increasingly segregated public schools are operating in violation of the state Constitution, which affirms that “it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools.” Students of color, the lawsuit insists, are receiving what amounts to a separate and unequal education in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the state’s two largest cities.
This problem has been exacerbated by the number of racially segregated charter schools in Minnesota, according to the plaintiffs. Minnesota lawmakers authorized the nation’s first privately managed, publicly funded K-12 charter school law in 1991. At the time, lawmakers also stipulated that charter schools should be “exempt from most state and local laws and regulations.”
Thanks to a 1999 ruling, this exemption status has meant that charter schools have not had to follow the same desegregation rules as the state’s traditional public schools. The state’s first charter school, City Academy, opened in 1992. By 2018, Minnesota hosted 164 charters, enrolling over 56,000 students. Nationally, more than three million K-12 students are enrolled in charter schools.
As a result of the growth of charters, the Twin Cities metro area now hosts a variety of highly segregated charter schools.
The growing resegregation of public schools—charter and otherwise—in the United States has been well documented, shining a spotlight on how charter schools often exacerbate the shift. As a result of the growth of charters, the Twin Cities metro area now hosts a variety of highly segregated charter schools, including those with majority white populations (such as a German immersion charter in St. Paul) and those that serve ethnically and racially isolated groups of Hmong, Somali, and African-American students, among others.
Researchers from outfits such as the Civil Rights Project, housed at the University of California-Los Angeles, have also documented the resurgence in school segregation that has taken place in the decades since 1954’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. This resegregation is occurring despite the plethora of benefits racially and economically integrated schools can provide for white students and students of color, including better resourced schools, more equal academic outcomes and a breakdown of racial stereotypes.
Charter schools have emerged as a prominent campaign issue for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. It has become necessary for leading candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris to declare their support for traditional public schools—a marked turn from the days when the Obama Administration promoted the expansion of charter schools through the federal Race to the Top program.
Some charter school advocates in Minnesota have long argued that these segregated schools are “racially affirming,” as noted in a recent article about the lawsuit, and that parent choice is what drives their homogenizing populations. As the Cruz-Guzman case makes it way through the Minnesota courts, two “ethnic” charter schools, Friendship Academy and Higher Ground Academy, asked the court to protect their exempt status when it comes to desegregation.
A full 100 percent of the students at Higher Ground Academy, based in St. Paul, are black or African-American, according to publicly available data, and ninety-five percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. Minneapolis’s Friendship Academy serves a similar racially and economically isolated student population. These numbers are in stark contrast to both cities’ overall population of black or African-American residents, which hovers below twenty percent.
On June 11, Judge Robinar refused this request. Instead, she validated evidence presented by plaintiffs attorney Dan Shulman, who argued that the 1999 exemption for Minnesota charter schools had been done with the intention of allowing for the proliferation of racially isolated schools.
Shulman has been clear about his own hopes for the lawsuit, telling Politico’s Morning Education report in 2018 that he thinks the case could have “national implications.” The framework presented by the case is that the state—and not individual schools or school districts—has an obligation to abide by its own constitution, and ensure that all Minnesota children have access to a “general and uniform system of public schools.”
Publicly-funded charter schools’ long-standing exemption from this requirement may soon be coming to an end. Both parties in the lawsuit are engaged in mediation, with a possible trial date slated for 2020.