Whether you look at 5, 10, or 20-year stats, education funding outpaces inflation every year, and every metric of student achievement decreases.
Read that again: student achievement decreases. Minnesota, once a leading example of public education, is now sadly lagging and in fact has one of the worst achievement gaps in the country.
Teachers work harder, students are expected to do more learning at home, and the state continues to claim taxpayers are not paying enough for education. But increased budgets do not provide better education. The system is bloated and broken.
Many news reports, Education Minnesota (the teachers union), and districts claim that funding is barely keeping pace with inflation. That is only true if you look at just one portion of the funding sources.
As former State Representative and Chair of the Education Funding Committee for many years, Ken Wolf, recently explained to the Strib:
“The basis for the premise that education funding has lagged inflation is based on exclusively counting only one form of state aid – the basic formula. The basic formula is just one of the formulas used to disburse state education aid: basic, general ed, special ed, combined aid, combined levies, and combined revenues are all ways of looking at state aid to schools.”
It is dishonest and misleading to not look at the entire funding stream. The total per pupil taxpayer funding has increased 4.53% per year in the past 20 years; from $6.4 billion in 2003 to $12.2 billion in 2023. This is a 31.5% increase over inflation.
Statewide 10-year Academic Proficiency trends, which are reported by the MN Department of Education every year show a shocking decrease in MCA scores in all categories. Math has gone from 62.6% proficient to 45.5%; Reading from 57.8% to 49.9%; Science from 52.1% to 39.2%.
It might be tempting to blame the reaction to the pandemic and the shutdown of in person schooling in 2020, but the reality is Math and Science had dropped from 2013 to 2019, only reading was slightly increasing. From 2021 to 2023 scores in Reading and Science decreased each year of the last 2 years; only Math increased slightly.
Even in our local District 196 increased spending is not providing better educational results.
The full “combined funds” ISD196 received exceeded the CPI by 24.6% in the past 10 years. Per pupil funding grew from $10,329 to $14,127, an annual increase of 1.12% per year over inflation (24.6% total increase), and 1.3% average per year over inflation in the past 20 years.
Performance declines in that same 10-year period: Math <22.4%>, Reading <15.6%> and Science <19.9%>. It is alarming that nearly half our kids do not reach proficiency in Math, less than half in science, and only 57% of the students are proficient in reading!
During the 2023 legislative session, there was much celebration of a portion of the “surplus” taxes collected by the state being distributed to schools; but it came with heavy price tags. The $635 million is earmarked for very specific spending, for example providing unemployment payments to part time school year employees during the summer, and free lunch and breakfast for all children whether their families needed the assistance or not and lowering of the teacher retirement age. These programs are not temporary – however the funding is! At the end of this biennium, every district in the state will be faced with expenses for 2026 but no current funding mechanism for them. They will all go into budget crisis without – you guessed it – more taxes.
Education in Minnesota needs an overhaul in funding, in curriculum and methods that are not reaching kids, and particularly in state mandates for social and other non-academic programs which fail to prioritize academic success as the top priority.
The ability for families to evaluate how to best provide for the education of their children is a paramount component of this reform. Families deserve the right to select a school process that fits their child’s needs – and for the state to make those choices affordable and easily attainable. Homeschooling, online schooling, micro schooling, private schooling and the public or charter school of their choice should all be on the table, with funding following the child. This will motivate all schools to enact reforms that will produce academic success, so to attract students and families.
These are hard discussions and decisions. But ignoring the problem is not serving our most precious resource – our children. We have to have a legislature willing and able to have these discussions with families and other stakeholders.
* This isn’t conjecture, this data is reported by the Minnesota Department of Education every year.
Download data compiled from the state about our school district:
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