Two items of note of this week, which marks the 57^th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation decision, Brown vs. Board of Education:

It’s possible that when the Legislature ends its regular session next week, for the first time in nearly 40 years, Minnesota will have no law or policy requiring school districts to make efforts to desegregate. Funding that now underwrites integration efforts would instead be redirected away from schools in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth and toward rural districts and charters.

At the same time, a new study estimates the cost to Minnesota’s economy of continued educational inequities for Native American students and students of color. Cutting the dropout rate to Minnesota’s 2010 high-school class by half would have a significant impact, according to the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Alliance for Excellent Education.

In the early hours today the state Senate approved its final version of the Omnibus Education Bill, identical to H.F. 934, the one passed Wednesday by the House of Representatives. The conference report, as the last version is called, temporarily restores some of the funding its predecessors shifted away from the three aforementioned “Cities of First Rank.”

The measure would eliminate the state law that requires school districts to work toward racial and socioeconomic integration as well as the money that paid for magnet schools, interdistrict schools and other efforts to draw kids of different backgrounds together. Left intact was the smaller pot that pays to bus impoverished Minneapolis kids to suburban schools.

The bill’s final language does note that segregation is prohibited. “The state … does not condone separating school children of different socioeconomic, demographic, ethnic, or racial backgrounds into distinct public schools. Instead, the state's interest lies in offering children a diverse and nondiscriminatory educational experience,” it states.  

Because the aid would be replaced by a system of “innovation” grants and increased funding to small schools, the net effect would not save money for taxpayers, but would simply shift money [PDF] from the central cities to rural districts and charters.

Currently, every district in the state is eligible for the integration aid, but Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth receive more compensation per pupil than other districts. With segregation increasingly an issue in suburban districts, lawmakers have long admitted the program needed fixing, but DFLers have been reluctant to reform it for fear that it would be eliminated outright.

The initial version of the bill had the urban districts losing up to $450 per pupil; with new innovation money factored in, the net loss would have been around $380. Compounding this was a freeze on increases in special education reimbursement, which disproportionately affects large and urban districts.

Under the conference report, transitional aid would reduce the size of the losses by about half. The three districts most dependent would lose some $95 per pupil in 2012 [PDF] and $80-$174 per head in 2013 [PDF]. Special ed reimbursements may increase by 2 percent — hardly enough, but something.

The programming that will need to be cut to make up the funding shift is eye-popping  indeed. Adding insult to injury, with popular programs like magnets on the chopping block more kids may choose to spend the remnants of the integration transportation revenue to open-enroll in suburban schools.

Painful as the cuts would be, they may be a drop in the bucket compared to the overall effects of abandoning formal efforts to ensure equity. Headed by former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, the Alliance for Excellent Education calculated the number of Minnesota seniors who did not graduate in 2010, projected their lost future earnings through the midpoint of their careers and extrapolated to estimate the amount of spending they would not do and the number of jobs that, by extension, would not be created.

An estimated 15,200 students dropped out of Minnesota’s class of 2010, the group reported [PDF]. If half of them had graduated, the group projects their earnings would have spurred the creation of 200 jobs, put $2.6 million in additional sales tax revenues into state coffers each year and by midcareer would have increased the state’s gross product by $27 million.

On a national level, cutting the dropout rate by half would generate $4.3 billion more in earnings per year, supported 30,000 additional jobs and increased the GDP by $5.4 billion by the midcareer mark, the Alliance found. 

Will the money GOP leaders put back in the final measure be enough to head off a gubernatorial veto? Scott Croonquist, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts — the organization that created the explanatory funding charts embedded above — doesn’t think so.

Nor is he relieved that the bill describes segregation as “prohibited.”

“If there is no rule,” he points out, “then you can’t be out of compliance if you don’t do what it says.”