Anyone who reads a Minnesota paper or looks at easily available data knows that Minnesota’s public education system is in serious decline, particularly in the Twin Cities. Teachers and administrators are doing fine, as spending has gone up far faster than economic growth or inflation, but student learning and achievement has gone down just as fast. And anyone who thinks for one minute about this knows that this is because the teachers’ unions and the Dem party are more concerned with political indoctrination than math, reading, science or certainly critical thinking. The Center for the American Experiment lays out up-to-date facts on the decline, based on work from the Annie Casey Foundation. (CAE Post) (ACF Report)
The headline is that in a short time Minnesota has gone from number 7 nationally to number 21. As usual looking at the individual measures is more telling because some of the things Minnesota supposedly still ranks high on are irrelevant in real life. For example, we have a supposedly high graduation rate, but that is because we will graduate anyone, regardless of whether they demonstrate any actual knowledge. In the ACF’s overall ranking, children with access to health care is a metric and Minnesota supposedly does well, but we now know that much of that spending is simply fraudulent; doesn’t actually reflect care to children. Minnesota is spending over $16,000 a year per pupil and getting nothing for it.
