Despite no proven correlation between spending and student achievement, Big Education relentlessly demands—and gets—more and more money. Imagine this scene: On a cold January morning, a mom listens to the local radio station to hear the latest weather report, then bundles up her son in a coat, hat and mittens before sending him off to...
Even with compelling evidence that student performance is slipping, Minnesotans still love their schools. Minnesotans love their system of public education, despite persuasive evidence that schools are consistently underperforming their reputation. The survey was conducted by pollster Rob Autry, president and founder of Meeting Street Research based in Charleston, South Carolina. His company completed 500...
How the Met Council and local governments deny affordable housing to the working poor.
Environmentalists’ call to shutter the Boswell Energy Center would devastate the Iron Range economy, with no measurable impact on future global temperatures. Standing on the banks of the Mississippi River in Cohasset, Minnesota, the Boswell Energy Center is the most productive, lowest-cost source of electricity in the entire state. Because Minnesota’s mining and paper industries...
American Experiment President John Hinderaker interviews acclaimed author Amity Shlaes about the lingering burdens of Big Government domestic policies from the 1960s. Your new book, Great Society, turns out to be very timely because it seems to me that we are seeing a lot of echoes today of some ideas that many people thought were...
Three things Xcel Energy doesn’t want you to know about its massive proposed increase in energy prices. Xcel Energy wants to impose a massive 15.2 percent increase in electricity prices in Minnesota over three years. For that, it intends to underwrite a $466 million spending spree that will also erase customer savings from energy efficiency....
A new memoir, Rocking Toward a Free World, depicts how American pop culture helped accelerate the fall of Communism. On New Year’s Eve 1989, television personality and recording artist David Hasselhoff dangled from a crane above Berlin and sang his song, “Looking for Freedom.” The star of TV shows Knight Rider and Baywatch has since...
Economist John Phelan says government policies undermine Minnesota’s need to replenish its workforce. Here’s a snapshot of his report. Minnesota is a hard-working state with a low-productivity economy. We achieve above average levels of GDP or Personal Income per capita because of the above-average number of people participating in the labor force. As the number...
St. Olaf College ‘requires’ student teachers to join union’s organization. Students enrolled in St. Olaf College’s teacher program “MUST join EMAE” [Education Minnesota Aspiring Educators] if they are licensure candidates completing field experiences or student teaching with the Education Department, according to the school’s website. Education Minnesota—the state’s teachers’ union—runs Education Minnesota Aspiring Educators, a...
After giving themselves a 250 percent pay raise, park commissioner no-shows force the board to cancel meetings. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board regularly makes news for all the wrong reasons. A while back, the board’s chaotic public meetings routinely made headlines for being disrupted and even shut down by activists, some of whom were...
Victoria mayor exposes radical ‘equity’ training in government and schools. The mayor of the western Twin Cities suburb of Victoria has pulled back the curtain on the radical agenda being promoted under the guise of equity in local government and schools. In a letter to the Chanhassen Villager, Mayor Tom Funk said he was shocked...
Xcel exec testifies that customers pay triple the cost of solar energy ‘in an unlimited quantity.’ We have our policy disagreements with Xcel Energy, but it is important to give credit when credit is due. In late February, Rick Evans—director of regional government affairs at Xcel—testified about the huge inefficiencies related to the Community Solar...
Repelling the middle class and high wage earners is not a sustainable strategy for any state. On net, in every year from 2001 through 2016, Minnesota lost residents to other states. This was a source of much discussion in our state, prompting fears of slower economic growth and a lost congressional seat. So there was...
Pay increases for teachers will far exceed the bump in their new contract. The Saint Paul Federation of Educators and its members walked off the job in March to strike for the first time since 1946. For months, the teachers’ union and the Saint Paul Public Schools district (SPPS) had failed to make progress at...
Aspirational Page-Kashkari constitutional amendment will fail. Handing control of education to the courts always does. Minnesota schools, like schools across the nation, have been striving for decades to shrink the stubborn racial learning gap. The frustration caused by repeated failure accounts, in large part, for the support behind the latest proposal: the Page-Kashkari constitutional amendment...