31 August 2024
Student achievement in Minnesota has been lagging for much of the past decade. While students in all states have struggled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruptions of classroom instruction, test scores in Minnesota have fallen more sharply here than in the rest of the country.
“There are many factors that contribute to student academic achievement, and test scores are one important measure to help us understand how our students are doing,” said Anna Arkin of the Department of Education, in a statement. “The Walz-Flanagan administration has made historic investments in education to improve academic outcomes — including signing the largest education budget in state history and ensuring every student receives breakfast and lunch at school.”
As a former public school geography teacher, Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has long said education is one of his top priorities.
Walz has earned the enthusiastic endorsements of teachers unions through vigorous support of policy goals like school funding increases, along with opposition to conservative-driven privatization efforts.
He has committed to a goal of making Minnesota the “best state in the country for kids,” in part by making Minnesota schools “the very best in the nation.” With the help of Democratic-Farmer-Labor lawmakers, Walz has in recent years signed major pieces of education legislation in furtherance of those goals, including universal free school lunches, billions in additional school spending, early education support, and curriculum changes.
The DFL’s 2023 education law boosted school funding and indexed the funding formula to inflation. It also increased special education subsidies, put $300 million toward early childhood education programs, and provided permanent funding for thousands of pre-K slots.
Despite these efforts, Minnesota students are being surpassed by their peers more and more often.
Minnesota recently ranked 19th among the states in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s long-running education quality rankings, a drop from sixth place less than a decade ago. National benchmarks showed that in 2022, Minnesota fourth graders’ reading proficiency fell below the national average for the first time in history.
Elementary school students in Mississippi, a state that has long been the butt of jokes about its poor quality of life, now perform slightly better on national reading tests than their peers in Minnesota.
Experts say a number of factors have driven the decline.
Persistent economic and racial disparities
Minnesota has some of the highest rates of racial inequality in the U.S., and the inequality begins well before students step foot in a classroom. Racial gaps in health, income and homeownership are among the worst in the nation.
The disparities are also reflected in school.
White Minnesotans are 15 percentage points more likely to graduate than Black ones, the sixth-highest disparity in the nation, according to federal data.
Racial gaps on standardized test scores are similarly large and have been increasing, according to a 2019 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. These racial gaps are especially concerning as the public school system has become more diverse: The share of white students in Minnesota schools fell from 70% in the 2014-2015 school year to 62% in 2022-2023.
The gaps are not merely racial, however, according to the Fed report: “Low-income white students significantly trail higher-income white students across Minnesota.”
Some teachers’ advocates say funding issues are to blame for the state’s educational inequalities.
“Chronic underfunding of our schools has created a racialized system of haves and have-nots,” according to a report commissioned by Education Minnesota, the state teachers union. “And underfunding has left teachers under-resourced and driven many out of our classrooms because these professionals simply do not have the tools to do their job effectively.”
However, a 2019 report by the Education Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable education, gave Minnesota high grades for ensuring education dollars flow to the districts and students that need them most.
Another factor likely driving those gaps: rising levels of school segregation, especially in the Twin Cities. The state’s liberal open enrollment system, which allows parents to choose where they send their kids regardless of home address, appears to be increasing the racial homogeneity of schools.
Charter schools, many of which focus on serving specific immigrant and minority communities, are also driving up school segregation in ways that may be reinforcing racial achievement gaps.
The net result: growing divides along the familiar fault lines of race and income, bringing aggregate achievement levels down with them.
COVID’s long shadow
While the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to learning losses across the nation, some education experts believe Minnesota was especially hard-hit. Schools remained closed or in remote instruction here longer than the national average during the pandemic, according to at least one estimate.
In 2022 Walz claimed “over 80% of our students missed less than 10 days of in-class learning.” His staff was later forced to clarify that he was referring to the 2021-2022 school year, by which time the worst of the pandemic had passed.
The extended closures had an effect beyond just test scores. Student absenteeism rates exploded, with poor and majority non-white schools especially affected.
More than half of Minneapolis students missed 10% or more of school days in 2022, according to state data. Among Black students the chronic absenteeism rate was closer to 70%.
Districts with high numbers of Indigenous students have also fared poorly. At the public high school on the Red Lake reservation the chronic absenteeism rate was greater than 95%.
“We just did not have an aggressive COVID recovery plan,” said Joshua Crosson, executive director of Minnesota education nonprofit EdAllies. “We’ve been reacting to these problems rather than attacking them head on. Other states have been more aggressive.”
Walz signed a bill this year that includes a pilot program to improve attendance; a legislative study group on the issue; and a $625,000 grant to a nonprofit to work on it.
“Where all the children are above average”
Crosson points to another, more nebulous factor lurking behind all of this: a complacent sense of exceptionalism.
“Minnesota really lacks a sense of urgency around improving its educational outcomes,” he said. Until recently, “the general ethos was we’re great already or we’re good enough.”
Other states, meanwhile, have been aggressively working to improve their educational outcomes. One area where this is apparent is in reading instruction. For many years schools across the country, including Minnesota, were teaching reading based on a faulty understanding of how kids learn.
“It was actually in statute that the wrong way to teach reading was the default,” Crosson said.
Beginning in 2013 states began moving away from the flawed teaching methods and back toward a more traditional, phonics-based instruction supported by evidence.
Minnesota has been on the slower side of that shift, according to EdWeek reporting. The state didn’t fully adopt scientific reading standards until 2023, with the passage of the READ Act.
Incidentally, the first state to adopt science-based reading standards was Mississippi, whose fourth-grade reading scores recently surpassed our own.
Crosson said he expects the READ Act to yield tangible results. While it’s still early, “We’re already starting to see our earliest learners improving their literacy rates.”
This story was originally published on MinnesotaReformer.com.
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