As we gear up for another legislative session, I predict we will hear more than once that Minnesota’s public school system “just needs more money” to improve its lackluster academic…
The nationwide release of fourth- and eighth-grade student performance in reading and math has been set for Jan. 29, 2025, as announced by the National Assessment Governing Board of the…
Spending on E-12 public education is Minnesota’s biggest general fund expenditure. For the 2024-2025 biennium, E-12 education makes up nearly 35 percent of all general fund dollars and is expected…
A recent headline noting that Minnesota has worse reading scores than Mississippi made me chuckle — not because of the subject matter but because I have been writing about the…
A new book proposes system-wide education reform to reverse our disastrous course.
Minnesota’s education ranking drops again.
The Minnesota Reformer recently ran an article showing some of the ways the state has changed since Gov. Tim Walz took office in January 2019. Reporter Christopher Ingraham used a…
Gov. Tim Walz’s office released a press statement recently touting Minnesota’s ranking as 6th best state in the nation for business by CNBC. (A ranking which, as my colleague John…
Declines in reading and math achievement have contributed to Minnesota’s national education ranking falling once again, coming in at #19, according to a new report by the Annie E. Casey…
Determining a child’s academic progress is complicated. There are many different measures used to help determine how a student is doing academically — teacher observations, in-class assignments, quizzes and tests,…
How relaxing school accountability has hurt academic achievement.
Perhaps another headline about a drop in academic test scores doesn’t faze you anymore, but the projected impact lost learning will have on students over their lifetimes is nothing to…
I have been a broken record on the fact that Minnesota’s academic achievement woes existed years before government policy responses to COVID exacerbated learning declines. In fact, it was because…
I’ve previously written how Minnesota performance on national tests is the worst in 30 years, but what does that mean for the impacted students’ futures? Lower skills, and therefore future…
On average, students across the country know little about American history “and even less about the world,” write Frederick Hess and Mathew Levey with the American Enterprise Institute. This struggle…
Minnesota has slid down to #45 for its overall education freedom ranking, according to the second edition of the Education Freedom Report Card published by The Heritage Foundation. (Florida, for…
In 2016, the Minnesota legislature passed a law requiring the state’s public school students to pass a civics test. It wasn’t a graduation requirement; districts decided what grade level to…
Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has predicted that academic setbacks during COVID-19 could cost each impacted student $70,000 over the course of their careers, or roughly $28 trillion total, reports The…
A recent MinnPost “fact brief” article used national assessment data to show that, on average, Minnesota’s scores for fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading have been slightly higher than Iowa’s…
Not when it comes to choosing a school, according to the roughly 1,500 parents who participated in EdChoice’s 2023 Schooling in America Survey. But academic quality was a top factor…
50 years after its TIME cover story, does Minnesota still work?
Much attention (including by me) has been given to the troubling academic trends in our public schools. But less attention has been given to the schools defying the sobering math…
Minnesota’s Top 5 ranking for business by CNBC caught attention recently, as my colleague John Phelan wrote about here. But the state’s drop in the education subindex over the years…
Average reading and math scores for the nation’s 13 year olds have declined again, with the math decline the largest ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ (NAEP)…