Growth & Justice Blog

Less Government? We Tried That. It's Not Working.

The Star Tribune's front-page story today finds that "less government'' is the overwhelming consensus "vision'' for Republican gubernatorial candidates. Peggy Lee and most Minnesotans want to know: Is that all there is?   

Leaving aside that this mantra sounds more like hard-right, activist-energizing radio talk than inclusive vision casting — and has to be extremely disappointing to hundreds of thousands of moderate and progressive Republican voters — we need some context here.   

The Price of Government, an official state Minnesota Management and Budget measure, shows that we DO have less government over the last decade, ever since the no-new-taxes religion, like some southern invasive species, got a hold on the North Star State. (See page 13 of the PowerPoint presented at the capitol last week by State Economist Tom Stinson and State Demographer Tom Gillaspy).

The bar graphs clearly show that our governments are using about two percentage points less (15.5 percent in 2008 compared to about 17.5 percent through the 1990s) of our personal income share than those governments were spending when the economy was actually doing better. Huge income tax cuts in 1999 and 2000 left us with chronic  budget crises, and the promised payoff in sustained, tide-rising economic growth didn't materialize, either.  

Wealth concentration at the top got worse, bridge and road conditions deteriorated, public school course offerings were cut, and thousands of working low-income folks lost their health care. And our economy is slumping and beginning to underperform the national average on some key indicators.  

We surely could use some more judicious restructuring and redesign of how we do our government work. But the basic things government provides are essential for our shared prosperity and quality of life.  

NOTE: The Price of Government measure is one of the most comprehensive of all the measures we have to describe the size and role of government. It counts state and local government revenues as a percentage of total income and therefore accounts for inflation, population growth and economic growth. It was instituted at the behest and with the approval of business groups in the late 1980s.

— Dane Smith

Business leaders focus on success in schools, community priorities

Times are tough in the world of commerce these days but the Minnesota Business Partnership put on an uplifting and clever show Tuesday night, highlighted by a very funny Twitterfest orchestrated by partnership director Charlie Weaver. The fictitious tweets that flashed up on the big screen were inspired, including the one ascribed to Gov. Tim Pawlenty, under the name "veer2right'', in a reference to his presidential prospecting.  

Our favorite part, though, was the recognition afforded to two outstanding public schools, King Elementary in Deer River, and Dayton's Bluff Achievement Plus Elementary in St. Paul, for their progress on student achievement. The videos celebrating and explaining their success should be up soon on the partnership website. (The Partnership is comprised of the CEOs of Minnesota's 100 largest companies and obviously is a major player in policy matters.)

Qwest CEO John Stanoch, a valued member of the Growth & Justice Board of Advisers, and a leader of the partnership's education policy team, pointed out in his presentations of $10,000 awards that both schools have high percentages of poor and minority students and that those conditions "do not have to be synonymous" with low test scores. The principals at each school talked about setting goals and focusing constructive and energetic attention on the students and parents who need help.   

The evening's speakers were focused on community building, with relatively little of the dissing of the public sector or tax rates that sometimes occurs in business gatherings. Even Gov. Tim Pawlenty's keynote address was notable for its rather harsh denunciation of private-sector irresponsibility and arrogance, epitomized by General Motors.  

Doug Baker, CEO of Ecolab, Inc., current chairman of the partnership, took aim at Minnesota's corporate income taxes as a problem, and we agree that those rates could come down as part of an overall revenue-positive tax system reform. But Baker's speech also accurately summarized Minnesota's great tradition of community-minded rather than self-interested business leadership, going back to the Dayton's department store decision a half-century ago to donate 5 percent of its profits to the community. Corporate foundations currently invest about a billion dollars a year in Minnesota, Baker said, "and there's a culture here of stewardship.''  

— Dane Smith

After Labor Day, keep working on economic justice

I had the great privilege of delivering the Labor Day Sunday sermon at my church (Unity Church, Unitarian Universalist, in St. Paul). I offered the best I could find from Abraham Lincoln, the Bible, Catholic and Lutheran teachings on social justice, and recent economic studies to make the case that we have an inequality problem in Minnesota and the nation. And it was a treat to get Donna Summer's great song, "She Works Hard for the Money'' into the liturgy as the postlude.  

Here's one point I made about labor and fairness, and democratic and religious traditions.

As Americans we mark our progress by looking back at forms of liberation from exploitation of labor. In our western hemisphere, we look back in horror at the forced conversion and attempted enslavement of aboriginal people to Christendom and efforts to bring them under the English and Spanish or French yoke. We are proud of the American Revolution and our fight against the illegitimate seizure, without representation, of our labor. We are proud of the great fight led by liberal religious founders of our own Unitarian Universalist denomination against the enslavement of African people. Interestingly, southern defenders of slavery used the Bible’s apparent approval or neutrality on the subject to advance their secessionist cause.

In the last century, we’ve made enormous progress against the much more subtle forms of semi-slavery that come with unbridled capitalism and the slanted bargaining table set up between employers and employees: the simple and basic right to organize, child labor laws, the 40-hour work week and overtime compensation, the minimum wage, the civil rights movement and ongoing efforts to finish the Emancipation Proclamation and end the de facto slavery imposed on people of color, the migrant workers’ reforms, and in more recent years but throughout history, hugely important, the oppression of women in the workforce.

I urged the congregation to consider the mountains of evidence that show economic inequality growing once again, after we reached a high-water level of overall economic equality in the 1970s. And I urged folks to do whatever they possibly could to change policies and laws to bring about more equal outcomes, chiefly through more and better investment in human capital.   

The full text of the sermon is available here [PDF]. 

— Dane Smith

High-stakes tests don’t raise achievement

April marks the start of the state-wide education testing season. While 4th-8th graders complete the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA-II’s), the class of 2010 faces the strictest high school tests yet — the Graduation Required Assessment for Graduation (GRAD), a series of reading, writing and math tests. 

The GRAD 11th grade math test, however, has created a problem. Roughly half of Minnesota’s students are predicted to fail the exam, potentially denying them a diploma if they cannot successfully pass the test by the end of their senior year. Such a widespread consequence has been deemed unacceptable, at least politically, sending politicians and policymakers back to the testing drawing board.  

The good news, from the students’ perspective, is that the GRAD math test will likely never be a graduation requirement in its current form. The GRAD also has sparked more debate over how testing could affect student learning for better and for worse, but without really illuminating a fundamental issue related to the state’s low test scores. 

Different types of tests are designed to accomplish very different ends. In the nomenclature of the testing industry, a test, regardless of its content, has either a summative or formative purpose. A formative test is any assessment — quiz, test, assignment, etc. — that can inform a teacher’s future instruction. It’s an evaluation designed for improving student achievement.     

The GRAD, however, is a summative test — designed not to inform teachers, but to quantify what a large groups of students has learned over the course of the entire school year. An individual’s score becomes one of thousands of data points used to rank and compare schools, districts or even states as a whole for accountability purposes. 

Here is the crux of the issue: we assume that a summative test like the GRAD — when paired with severe consequences, like denying a diploma to a student — can fix a formative problem.

Recent research is proving the futility of this approach. A review of 30 years worth of state testing data [Download PDF], conducted by the University of Minnesota, found no instance of high-stakes tests raising student achievement. Worse, not only do students face harsh consequences if they fail, passing the test leads to no added benefits: no scholarships, no wage increases, nothing beyond what a regular pre-test diploma would have afforded.      

Unfortunately, there is an inverse relationship between the utility of high-stakes summative testing and its political appeal. The tests seek to replace the complex contradictions and paradoxes of educating students with a black-and-white definition of success and failure, while shifting the onus of success solely onto the students themselves.

The easy refrain becomes: if lazy, underperforming teenagers can’t perform in school, how can we expect them to perform later in life? The tough medicine of the GRAD —  and withholding diplomas from underperforming students, even in the face of high failure rates —  is justified as a necessary mass vaccination that must be done for the common good.         

This line of thinking is logically sound but metaphysically dishonest, because the data gathered by summative tests measures the quality of institutions, not individuals. Dismal performance on the GRAD is not the actual problem — it is a symptom of a systemic disease. And while summative tests are powerful diagnostic tools, they can only measure — not fix — the shortcomings of Minnesota’s educational system.

Solutions need to be instead based around the classroom instruction a child receives from the first day of school until graduation, with particular emphasis on the elementary grades.  Researchers from the Public Policy Institute of California [Download PDF] found they could predict — with a high degree of accuracy — which 4th grade students would eventually pass or fail the California high school exit-exam using a range of emotional, social and academic indicators. If a student’s ultimate success is more a product of early-childhood trajectory than adolescent motivation, effective education policies need to become preventative rather than punitive.

Making that turn, however, will not be possible until we acknowledge the causal relationship between individuals and the institutions they inhabit. Every student in Minnesota should be subject to high standards, consequences, and, yes, frequent testing. But not without access to quality teachers, equitable school funding, and saner testing policies that are designed improve student achievement, rather than just measure it. 

Simply put: the rhetoric in favor of the GRAD is obscuring the inconvenient fact that we have yet to consistently provide the institutional elements necessary for state-wide student success. To do better, we need policy based on evidence rather than assertion, designed for sustained results over the long term. 

Adolescents make decisions based on emotion and impulse; it would be both ironic and unfortunate if our testing policies continue to follow their example.

– Kevin McNellis is an intern at Growth & Justice

Put Federal stimulus dollars to work for our students

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has a lot to say about the value of education. Now the question is how Minnesota will get the most value from its share of the money.

Nearly 13 percent of the overall federal stimulus package — about $100 billion — is directed to education. That amount is nearly double the U.S. Department of Education’s annual budget.

The newly-minted secretary of education, Arne Duncan, appears ready to be a prudent steward of these unprecedented dollars. Secretary Duncan has built in several methods for establishing transparency, accountability and results. When applying for ARRA funds, state governors must specify how they will address key reforms, provide baseline data, demonstrate record-keeping and transparency, plan for improvement and provide evidence of progress.

Around half the stimulus money ($53.6 billion) is in State Fiscal Stabilization Funds (SFSF) directed at keeping and restoring education-related jobs. This is a wise move. Adding unemployed public sector employees on top of unemployed private sector employees is no help to our current economic situation. These stabilization dollars will first be used to back fill any cuts in K-12 and higher education that states have had to implement. 

About $25 billion is directed at increasing special education/IDEA ($12 billion) and Title I ($13 billion), which will be allocated over the next two years. These additional funds nearly double the federal government’s current allocation to these programs. The remaining $36 billion or so will be distributed through federal government formulas and higher education tax credits and Pell Grants.

The Pawlenty budget: what it doesn’t do that federal stimulus does

What this means for Minnesota, according to the latest release of figures on state allocation [Download PDF], is that our state stands to see $1.135 billion dollars in federal aid — about three times what we received in 2008. The bulk of this will be $816 million in new money for state stabilization — which will go through the governor’s office. Another $200 million will go to special education, and about $95 million will be distributed to local districts in the form of Title I aid.

U.S. governors are increasingly driving their state education agendas. The ARRA money creates a new tension between the governor’s office and the federal role, since the state fiscal stabilization funds are received based on a governor’s application — which would likely reflect the governor’s agenda. 

Gov. Pawlenty has already spelled out his education agenda in his budget proposal, “Transforming Minnesota’s System of Education” [PDF]. He calls for: transforming the system of education; recruiting, retaining and retraining effective teachers; and utilizing innovations for improving student achievement. And, he has asked for $188 million in additional dollars from the legislature to advance his agenda.

While we welcome his affirmation that our economy will increasingly be dependent on skilled workers and his move to invest more in our state’s education systems, there is not much of this modest amount directed at Minnesota's students.

Instead, the governor will assign the majority of his “transformative” dollars to testing and professional development for teachers and principals.

So, what about our students? Less than $10 million (about 5 percent) would go directly to students — in the form of a summer school program for 8th graders struggling in math.

Some important areas of investment are missing from Gov. Pawlenty's new budget:

• Readying young children for school success — even though we know we get the greatest return on our investment by starting early, and by starting early we increase the likelihood of students reading well by the end of 3rd grade.
• Providing rich learning environments in and outside school that challenge student thinking, promote learning by doing, provide higher-order thinking skills and develop engaged learners and engaged citizens.
• Encouraging best practices in curriculum that have proven to move students from below proficiency in math, reading and science to above average and college-ready.

Minnesota should be thankful that the federal government is providing crucial supplementary aid to support the governor’s agenda with funds for teacher effectiveness, funds for data systems that track student progress over time, and funds for raising standards that are aligned with higher quality and meaningful assessments.

But those investments don't very directly address these realities. One fourth of Minnesota’s students are not proficient on the MCA –II in 3rd grade reading. Almost half (46 percent) are not proficient in 8th grade math — even though No Child Left Behind requires that all students take and pass Algebra I in 8th grade by the year 2013. And what of the 34 percent of Minnesota’s students who need remedial instruction in their first year of post-secondary education — costing the student an additional year of high-rate tuition, plus moderate state aid to fund the classes?

It is clear that the governor’s budget aims at holding the education system accountable for outcomes. But where is the investment in Minnesota’s students that will have a strong impact on those outcomes?

What districts can do

Local education agencies and districts can make the most of unbudgeted ARRA stimulus dollars by making discretionary use of Title I monies to invest in best practices shown to improve student outcomes.

Growth & Justice has worked with state and national scholars and economists to develop a list of proven and promising practices that "work best at the best price.” (See the table below with links to more information.) These will move the needle by addressing the whole student — in- and out-of-school, from 3 years old to the end of high school, and encompassing social and financial as well as academic needs.

In this list, educators may see practices they have already established in their districts and would like to expand, or practices they have wanted to implement but have not had the funding to do so. We hope educators will act swiftly, judiciously and with student improvement in mind as they move to take advantage of this historic opportunity to “reinvest” in our students.

— Angie Eilers, Research & Policy Director

Cost Effective Interventions to Increase Student Achievement

Prenatal to Age 4
Nurse Home Visits
Financial Assistance to broaden access to quality childcare 

Age 4 to Grade 3
Chicago Parent-Child Center

Elementary School
Success for All

Middle to High School
Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID)
Achievement for Latinos through Academic Success (ALAS)

High School
Talent Development High School
First Things First

Out-of-School Time
Big Brother/Big Sisters
Check and Connect

Transition to Higher Education
Admission Possible
Talent Search
Financial Access/need-based aid

Q Comp, teacher quality and Tarvaris Jackson

February was a cruel month for Governor Tim Pawlenty’s Quality Compensation for Teachers (Q Comp) program, Minnesota’s first attempt to couple teacher salaries to their students’ performance. It started with a front-page Star Tribune article, “Is it 'merit pay' if nearly all teachers get it?” — highlighting that only 27 of the 4,200 teachers enrolled in Q Comp failed to receive a raise during the 2007-8 school year.

Two days later, the Office of the Legislative Auditor released the first independent review of the program that found: “Q Comp’s effect on student achievement cannot be adequately measured using existing data.”

As the Governor attempts to implement Q Comp statewide, it is important to contrast his praise of the program with its increasingly well-documented shortcomings.

Over the last three years, roughly a dozen states have implemented performance-pay teacher reforms based on the findings of “value-added” educational research that quantifies the effect of an individual’s teacher’s instruction. Multiple longitudinal studies found that wide discrepancies in student learning — as much as a full year of additional instruction — can be tied directly to a pupil’s teacher, independent of class size or overall school quality effects.

From a fiscal standpoint, an excellent teacher costs as much as an ineffective one, meaning that improving teacher quality may be the most direct and cost-effective way of closing the racial achievement gap. Realizing these potential gains, however, will require significant change in not only how Minnesota pays its teachers, but how we recruit, train and retain them.

So, where does Tarvaris Jackson fit into the equation? Malcolm Gladwell’s timely review of the value-added movement, “Most Likely to Succeed,” compares the process of identifying and training effective teachers to successfully drafting a NFL quarterback. 

Every year a new crop of highly touted college quarterbacks is selected early in the NFL draft. From a franchise’s perspective, the difference between drafting the right or wrong prospect will not only be measured in wins and losses, but in millions of dollars of revenue. One would assume that, over time, this pressure, plus all the upfront scrutiny and the opportunity to evaluate the results, would create a correlation between when a quarterback is selected in the draft and his performance in the NFL. It doesn’t. Superstars emerge both from the draft’s upper and lower echelons. 

Peyton Manning, three-time league Most Valuable Player, was drafted first in 1998, but other prospects like the Patriot’s Tom Brady — drafted 199th overall, as a fourth-string back-up — can become equally successful. And for every unrecognized late-bloomer there are expensive, high-profile flameouts.  Remember this guy? 

The quarterback problem is a reflection of the fact that successfully adapting to the NFL is not just a question of physical ability. Rather, it requires development of a complex blend of physical and mental attributes that can be learned, but necessarily taught. Peyton Manning was able to make those intangible adjustments, where other gifted athletes — the Vikings' Tarvaris Jackson, for example — struggle to do so. 

Teachers face a similar do-or-die transition during their first several years in the classroom.  Some develop the ability to make split-second decisions and assessments that create a highly-functioning classroom.  Others flounder, year after year, trying to cover a full year’s worth of curriculum. Until the advent of the value-added movement, however, no one was tracking in quantifiable terms who succeeded or failed.     

The performance of quarterbacks is tracked and analyzed in multiple dimensions, play by play, game by game and season by season. Measuring the effectiveness of teachers is much more difficult. The only comparable measure of a teacher’s quality of instruction is their students’ standardized test scores, an extremely small sample size. 

In order to isolate the effects of a teacher’s instruction, it takes a minimum of two, preferably three, years of testing data. Even then, only the top and bottom 15% of teachers can be separated from the mean. Given these statistical realities, any approach to true teacher quality reform must do several things: reward the most effective teachers, remove under-performing teachers and create a data infrastructure that can assess a teacher’s effect on her students.

Q Comp fails to even accomplish the one thing we could reasonably expect it to — raise the salaries of high-quality teachers. 

In its current form, value-added analysis is only one tool among several that a school district can use to create its own definition of teacher merit. But when “merit” is defined along traditional lines, i.e., time-of-service and professional credentials — neither of which has been strongly correlated with increased student achievement — we should expect the status quo to continue. 

If the Governor wants Q Comp to deliver its advertised reforms, he must mandate the use of quantified measures of teacher merit. Otherwise, the majority of districts will follow the path of least resistance and minimal results, all at increased taxpayer expense.

Minnesotans, I believe, would prefer the use of over-hyped, statistically dubious strategies be limited to the Metrodome, and kept out of their childrens' classrooms.        

— Kevin McNellis is an intern at Growth & Justice  

Business-friendly Minnesota needs higher goals, broader thinking

St. Cloud conservative blogger Gary Gross caught my attention with this lead to a recent post:

When the conversation turns to making Minnesota a business-friendly state, most conservatives rightfully think of cutting taxes and reducing small business's regulatory burden. It's time conservatives started thinking in terms of a well-educated workforce and health care reform as important to making Minnesota business-friendly, too.

While his views on how to address these issues don't precisely square with ours, his larger point — that conservatives should put greater emphasis on them — is well taken... especially if the emphasis involves study and empirically driven reforms focused on strategically important goals.

Progressives should have their own list. For starters, I'd say the party perceived as being government- and labor-friendly should start speaking more favorably of entrepreneurism and system reform.

As the current recession shows, building a business-friendly state is not simply a matter of driving down costs and freeing business to operate with minimal restraints. We'll never get there without a healthy, productive workforce and affordable housing and transportation systems.

The public benefits when policy makers rise above ideologically derived positions and remind each other that Minnesotans have a lot at stake together. Otherwise, one side sees the health care issue as being driven by unsustainable costs to business, so reducing them becomes the goal of reform — while paying lip service to consumer choice and quality care. The other side wants access and a secure safety net, so universal coverage is their goal — while the costs are either wished away or picked up by the ever-popular "rich."

Of course, this sets up an irresolvable conflict between selfish, numbers-driven business interests and clueless, entitlement-driven socialists, each regarding the other as the root of the problem.

Defining the right strategic outcome is critical, because in politics, the ends don't only justify the means — they determine what we're going to achieve .

Competing for (and investing in) high-income jobs

John Wiley, outgoing chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was writing about issues in his own state, but his words should be heard across the border. (And not just because he compared Minnesota favorably to Wisconsin.)

Here are a few excerpts from Madison Magazine's "From Crossroads to  Crisis."

If there are any two natural allies in economic development, they are higher education and the business community. So where is the business community on these issues? The high-tech community is vibrant and growing rapidly, yet is largely disorganized. Its members are understandably too preoccupied with developing their products and their markets to become much involved in public policy or lobbying, and most of them aren't big enough--yet--to be players in the political process. I know these entrepreneurs: Nearly four hundred of their companies trace their origins to our laboratories.

[...]

According to 2007 U.S. Census Bureau numbers, Wisconsin currently has the eleventh-highest per capita state tax revenues in the nation, and WMC [Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, a business trade organization] cites the statistic as evidence that Wisconsin is a "tax hell." But look at the ten states with higher per capita taxes than Wisconsin: Hawaii, Wyoming, Connecticut, Minnesota, Delaware, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California and New York. Nine of the ten have higher per capita income than Wisconsin. In particular, Minnesota, our demographic twin, has the fourth-highest per capita taxation, and they're knocking our socks off economically. They are currently ninth in the nation in per capita income while Wisconsin has slid to twenty-first. And of the ten states with the lowest per capita taxation in the country--Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Alabama, New Hampshire, Colorado, South Dakota, and Texas--eight have lower per capita income than Wisconsin.

So which economies should we aspire to: the dynamic, high-income, high-tech, twenty-first-century economies of Minnesota, Delaware and Massachusetts, or the economies of South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama?

[...]

The high-tech companies that are the future of Wisconsin's economy couldn't care less about hypothetical "minimum-wage" jobs: They don't have any such jobs. And it's been a long time since organized labor was able to negotiate wages exceeding those already set by normal supply-and-demand market forces. Even in the direct consumer service sector, employers who offer only the official state or federal minimum wage are unable to attract or keep employees.

[...]

Don Nichols, an eminent UW economist, conducted a detailed study aimed at understanding the steadily widening gap between per capita incomes in Wisconsin and those in Minnesota (view the report). In a nutshell, Nichols found his answer in the top ten percent of all wage earners. Wisconsin has too few high-income jobs, and those who earn in the top ten percent still make less than their peers in Minnesota. Wisconsin is already extremely competitive in the bottom ninety percent of jobs.

This is partly just a matter of arithmetic. Per capita income is one simple and useful measure (among many) of the overall economic health of an economy. If our current per capita income is $33,565, or about $17/hour, according to the U.S. Census, then we need lots more new jobs paying more than $17/hour than jobs paying less than $17/hour to raise that average. I know there are many tasks in the economy that do not have an economic value exceeding $17/hour. But, while more $9.50/hour jobs may help entry-level workers survive until they can advance to the next rung, it is the new jobs above $17/hour that will enable Wisconsin to thrive, and lift everyone.

— Charlie Quimby

Eventually, we'll all be minorities. But will we all be ready to succeed?

The importance of our education investment work and the need to focus on minority populations was reinforced in two news items this week in the Twin Cities' largest daily newspapers.

The first, "Nice ACT scores, but ready for college?", in the Aug. 13 Star Tribune, notes that while Minnesota seniors are posting higher scores than seniors in other states, there are significant concerns that “minority students continue to score much lower than white students in the state.”

Scores for black students were more than five points below the average scores for white students. And scores for black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American were all below the national average for all students. In addition, college readiness scores are particularly poor for Minnesota’s black students.

Minnesota Department of Education Deputy Commissioner Chas Anderson said that while those numbers are disappointing “we need to see it as an opportunity to make changes in the system and how we serve those students,” including early intervention with students who fall behind instead of waiting until high school to address the problem.

The second item, “Eventually, each one of us will be a minority,” appeared on the front page of the Aug. 14 Pioneer Press. The message was that by 2042 all Americans will be minorities, and policymakers must start adapting now, “especially in education.”

Why education? “If we don’t invest in education and training African-American kids, immigrants, and Latino kids, we won’t have a middle class," said Mark Sawyer of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in Los Angeles. “We’ll have a very, very poor disposable class that’s largely black or brown.”

Through our Smart Investments in Minnesota's Students project, Growth & Justice is making the case that we must invest cost-effectively in our students to maintain a strong economy and expand prosperity for a changing population. Our very clear and  ambitious goal is to increase by 50 percent the rate of students who achieve a higher education credential by 2020.

We have identified cost-effective interventions from birth to college, and in the coming months, we will be advocating for a statewide investment strategy that will advance Minnesota toward that goal.

— Ellen Perrault, Growth & Justice communications and outreach coordinator

Ensuring an educated workforce is the big issue for Minnesota

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes about a topic very close to our Smart Investment hearts. One reason the U.S. gained so much ground as a world economic power in the last century, he says, was because of emphasis on education that increased high school graduation rates and higher ed attainment.

We're now threatened, he argues, because America's educational progress slowed around 1970, and then stagnated between 1975 and 1990.

This threatens the country’s long-term prospects. It also widens the gap between rich and poor. [Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, authors of The Race Between Education and Technology]  describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

Since that period coincides rather closely with when Minnesota increased its education investment and began showing stronger economic growth than the nation as a whole, I went looking for some statistics on historic attainment rates to see how Minnesota fared.

Sure enough, I found that Minnesota did not stagnate. In fact, it continued to widen what had been a very modest gap above the U.S. average (for percent of the population with at least a high school diploma) by 7 points between 1940 and 2000.

In the chart [click to enlarge] you can see Minnesota was just slightly above average in 1940. Minnesota gained graduates at a rate higher than the average gain in each subsequent decade, with the greatest proportional leap between 1960 and 1970.

The state's college attainment tells a slightly different story, as we lagged the average percent of the population with at least a bachelor's degree until 1970. Then Minnesota's college attainment rates continued to accelerate with each decade.

What's not apparent is that most of Minnesota's gains came from increased attainment for white college students after 1980, when black attainment rates hit the wall after posting big gains the decade before.

Our research for Smart Investments in Minnesota's Students demonstrates that the state still has an opportunity to grow educational attainment rates — especially among low-income students as well as students of color and Native Americans. Minnesota cannot afford only to reinforce the rates of white students, because the demographics of our student population are very different than during our previous expansion of attainment rates. 

It will be tempting to try to ride this apparent lead awhile longer, since budgets are tight and the economy is uncertain. But we've already been gradually under-investing in the college pipeline. In FY 1992, Minnesota ranked 9th in elementary and high school education spending as a percent of total income; by FY 2005, we were 31st.

A growing number of educators, economists and business leaders agree with Brooks on this:

[T]he skills slowdown is the biggest issue facing the country. Rising gas prices are bound to dominate the election because voters are slapped in the face with them every time they visit the pump. But this slow-moving problem, more than any other, will shape the destiny of the nation.

As students head back to school this fall, Growth & Justice will be heading across the state to talk about our strategy for increasing Minnesota's  post-secondary attainment 50 percent by the year 2020. There’s strong consensus that education investment already has shaped Minnesota’s destiny, and enriching our human capital will pay off again.

— Charlie Quimby