Back to basics

How to break free from Minnesota’s education cartel.

American Experiment has a reputation for boldly engaging the public square, educating the people of Minnesota on issues ranging from education to public safety and economics. The highlight of the year is our booth at the State Fair, which we’ve been doing for several years. We are Minnesota’s think tank, after all.

The response has been consistently and overwhelmingly positive, as evidenced by our nonstop line for patrons to talk with policy fellows, express their opinions on state issues, and spin our prize wheel. This year, the top issues on most fairgoers’ minds were crime, education, taxes, and prolific waste and fraud in the state government. But of these issues, education was our focus — specifically, Minnesota’s K-12 public education performance.

This year at our booth, we prominently featured a banner showing reading and math proficiency levels for every school district in the state. Fairgoers could find their district and compare it with other districts in the state. The data, and reactions, were shocking. Many people could not believe how poorly Minnesota’s students were performing across the whole state.

On Aug. 29, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) released its 2025 reading and math Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs). The results are unacceptable in a state that, historically, has lauded its public education and the persistently good performance of students compared to other states. Now, the only consistency seems to be falling test scores and poor performance. The data shows that 45 percent of students are meeting grade-level math standards and 49.5 percent of students are meeting grade-level reading standards. This is a drop from 45.3 percent and 49.7 percent, respectively, from the previous year. This means less than half of Minnesota’s kids are meeting grade-level standards in math and reading.

Third-grade reading proficiency — often used as a benchmark of future academic success — had similarly dire results: Over 54 percent of third graders are not meeting grade-level standards. This is the fourth year in a row that reading proficiency scores have dropped.

Policy fellow Catrin Wigfall recently wrote of the assessments, “The declines continue a pattern of academic achievement challenges that have existed pre- and post-COVID — despite continued increases in education funding and record-levels of federal aid — and mirror subpar performance on national reading and math assessments.”

As recently as 2017, 60 percent of our students were proficient in math and reading. Further, this dramatic drop in academic performance occurred despite substantial increases in school funding and having a governor who declared himself the “Educator-In-Chief” of the state. So, when we hear about propaganda from MDE, the state teachers’ union, Gov. Tim Walz, and the Democrats that we aren’t “fully funding” our schools and that is contributing to less than stellar academic outcomes, should we believe them?

Not if Mississippi has anything to say about it. In 2003, Mississippi was ranked dead last in student proficiency out of all the 50 states. But all that changed. Mississippi has become the nation’s fastest- improving school system in the country. By 2024, Mississippi’s fourth graders ranked first in math and reading in the nation, according to the Urban Institute. The breakdown compared to Minnesota is just as shocking.

According to Wigfall, “Mississippi black fourth graders have consecutively scored higher than Minnesota black fourth graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test since 2015 and higher on the NAEP math test since 2017.” Mississippi black students make up a far higher percent — 47 — of the state’s student body compared to Minnesota’s 12 percent.

So, what about funding? The proof is in the pudding: Minnesota spends about 33 percent more per student than Mississippi. Instead of the tired, old refrain of throwing money at the problem (like we hear repeatedly in Minnesota), Mississippi took actionable steps toward improvement. According to the Ciresi Walburn Foundation for Children, Mississippi passed a comprehensive literacy law in 2013 aimed at combating lagging reading scores and improving student literacy. The law “requires districts to use a high-quality, phonics-based curriculum; provides funding to train teachers in the science of reading; and bans promotion of students not proficient in reading by the end of third grade.”

To me, this is a return to common sense and back-to-basics education, something lacking in our state these days. Something needs to change in Minnesota. But simply piling more money on a failing system run by the education cartel — which consists of the Department of Education, the teachers’ union, and school boards across the state — is not the answer, and these organizations do not represent the interests of parents and students. Let’s face it, we need to make some wholesale changes to rescue our children from this downward path.

Perhaps the jump start to such change comes out of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). In contrast to Gov. Tim Walz’s stand against any type of school choice for Minnesota families, the Act contains a provision that gives parents the power to direct their children’s education. The OBBBA sets up a federal tax-credit scholarship program that isn’t limited by type of education, such as public, private, or homeschooling. Starting in 2027, a dollar-for-dollar tax credit will be available (up to $1,700 per year) for donations to an educational nonprofit that funds K-12 scholarships for low- and middle-income students.

Parents and students in Minnesota can benefit from this program, but only if Walz opts in. As of this writing, Walz has refused this small step toward empowering parents to optimize educational opportunities for their kids. And although it costs the state and taxpayers nothing to enroll in the program, the governor and the DFL Party, in partnership with the education cartel, have vehemently opposed the proposal. This proves that they are more interested in protecting their economic turf than improving the educational outcomes of Minnesota’s students. This needs to stop. Call Gov. Walz today and tell him to sign the paperwork to allow Minnesota parents to receive access to this much-needed funding. The time is now to free our kids from the grip of failing government schools.