Minneapolis students fall further behind the longer they stay in the district

Students in Minneapolis Public Schools are losing ground, according to an analysis on academic performance.

The analysis, from researchers at Stanford and Harvard, is full of metrics on where Minneapolis schools stand. One that stood out to me is the district’s “learning rate,” which measures how much academic ground students gain each year they’re in the district’s classrooms. Nationally, a rate of 1.0 means a student gains a full grade level of skills per school year.

Minneapolis comes in at 0.87. For every year a student spends in the district, they’re gaining roughly 87 percent of a grade level’s worth of learning. A student who starts behind doesn’t catch up but falls further behind because instruction isn’t moving them forward quickly enough. Over six years (grades 3 through 8), that cumulative shortfall approaches a full lost grade level. And according to the report, the learning rate itself has been slipping, dropping by about 0.02 a year.

The district’s math and reading test scores tell the same story. On average, Minneapolis students perform nearly two grade levels below the national average in reading and math (-1.91). This is worse than the average for “similar districts” (-0.71) and far worse than the Minnesota state average (-0.13). Since 2022, those scores have fallen by about 0.11 grade levels a year. Among roughly 10,000 districts included in the analysis, Minneapolis ranks in the 11th percentile in math and 14th in reading.

Average Grade 3-8 Test Scores, 2022-2025, by District Socioeconomic Status

Academic challenges and stark achievement gaps aren’t the district’s only challenges. Minneapolis is also dealing with a $50 million budget deficit, millions in IRS penalties, half-underused school buildings, declining enrollment, staffing troubles, and chronic absenteeism that has more than doubled since 2017.

Meanwhile, districts serving similar student populations are outperforming Minneapolis. So are private schools like Hope Academy, which serves a lot of the same families. This suggests the problem includes whether students have access to schools that are producing stronger outcomes.

One proposal is to break up the district into smaller ones, an idea that was pitched in the Minnesota legislature a decade ago. Perhaps this would decentralize the district’s structure and decision-making and make schools more responsive to families.

Even if restructuring could help, families whose children are struggling today don’t have that kind of time. Expanding access to schools like Hope Academy would offer help much sooner. Ninety percent of empirical studies on private school choice programs find they help, not hurt, the test scores of students who stay in public schools. States across the country have been chipping away at the financial barriers that keep families stuck in underperforming districts, and Minnesota has its own version of that idea on the table right now. The new federal scholarship tax credit is another opportunity to help Minnesota students, if the governor will opt the state in.

Families deserve access to schools and education resources that will meet their needs now. Will Minnesota give it to them?