Plaintiffs in Minneapolis and Saint Paul have filed a lawsuit against the state, alleging that the racial and poverty segregation in the metropolitan area violates the state constitution's education clause, equal protection clause, and due process clause, as well as the Minnesota Human Rights Act. The state supreme court has previously recognized education as a fundamental rights. On that basis, plaintiffs challenged segregation in Minneapolis in 1995. The Supreme Court never reached the merits of whether the segregation violated the state constitution, but held that plaintiffs case could move forward to trial. Plaintiffs presented a sufficiently compelling case that the state settled the case and agreed to an integration remedy.
In recent years, however, segregation in the metropolitan area has dramatically increased, with little or no effort by the state to abate it. To the contrary, charter school and other attendance policies are making matters worse. While children of color and low income students are respectively only 29 and 38 percent of the state's overall school population, "the public schools of the City of Minneapolis are approximately 66 percent children of color and 64 percent free or reduced lunch; and the public schools of the City of Saint Paul are 78 percent children of color and 72 percent free or reduced lunch." The adjoining surrounding school districts, however, are "overwhelmingly white" and predominantly middle income. Moreover, within the city school districts themselves, the state has created predominantly white and middle income schools alongside hyper-segregated poor and minority schools. Plaintiffs allege that "[t]he segregation and hyper-segregation [in these schools] have been the result of boundary decisions by the Minneapolis and Saint Paul School Districts, made with the knowledge and consent of defendants, which have had both the purpose and effect of creating and increasing segregation of the Minneapolis and Saint Paul public schools by race and socioeconomic status."
Charter schools, in particular, seem to have been the means to exacerbate segregation:
The Twin Cities metropolitan area now contains 131 charter schools, over 80 percent of which are segregated by race, socioeconomic status, or both. [Nearly seventy charter schools] are either more than 95 percent students of color or more than 80 percent white students. Nearly a third (42 of 131) of charters in the Twin Cities are more than 95
percent students of color. In addition, there is a growing pattern in the suburbs of predominantly white charter schools locating near more racially diverse traditional schools. In 2013, 67 percent of suburban charters (32 out of 48 schools) were predominantly white (defined as more than 80 percent white students) compared to just 44 percent of traditional schools in the suburbs. More than half of predominantly white suburban charters were located in the attendance areas of traditional schools that were significantly more racially diverse. This figure has nearly tripled in the previous five years.
This case is, of course, Minnesota's version of the Sheff v. O'Neill litigation in Connecticut, which produced the first and only state supreme court decision holding that racial segregation–even if de facto–denied students equal educational opportunity under the state constitution. The remedies in Sheff have garnered significant attention over the past year or so, with the New York Times criticizing the state of New York for its failure to replicate Connecticut's common sense remedies to address New York's hyper-segregation. Were Minnesota's supreme to eventually become the second state supreme court to formally validate the theory in Sheff it would go a long way to speeding along a movement two decades in the making. It is also worth noting that charter schools were not around in any real sense when Sheff was decided, but magnet schools were. Those consciously pro-integration magnet schools of choice have been the central means of integrating schools in Connecticut, whereas Minnesota's integration-agnostic charters of choice have become a major tool of segregation.
Get the full complaint here: Download Minnesota Complaint