Educating Minnesota

What if Minnesota’s schools, taking a page from the best international competition, were open five additional weeks a year? What if the public school day approximated the work day? What if poor kids received the support they needed to arrive at kindergarten competitive with kids from affluent families? What if doing all of the above would cost Minnesota taxpayers no more, relatively speaking, than it cost your parents to educate you?

Minnesota public schools are the best in the nation, but the challenge our system, its students, and its graduates face today is not national—it’s international. Our stiffest competition comes from Asia, where the public schools churn out masses of learners far more technically literate than most of our best. Meanwhile, students from our poorest families face a host of crippling problems outside of school that our public schools are expected to fix. 

But we believe that our schools—properly configured, financed, and equipped—can do a great deal to significantly improve both the achievement of individual students, regardless of their background and environment, and our competitive prospects in the world. We believe that by thoroughly modernizing Minnesota’s public education system, our students will be well equipped to compete in our brave new world.

Here, then, is what we’d change, why we’d change it, what the changes would cost us, and where we’d get the money to pay for them. This would be, by no means, either a quick or complete fix, but it would be a significant start toward radical improvement.

1. Expand the School Year
How’s this for a radical idea? Let’s actually listen to what experienced school administrators say will improve student prospects. Last winter the Minnesota Association of School Administrators formally proposed adding five more weeks of instruction to the school calendar. It’s about time. The Minnesota academic year, at 173 to 177 days, badly lags behind that of our toughest international competitors (see chart on the next page), whose students routinely outperform our students on international tests. Minnesota’s school year also lags behind the U.S. average.

While Americans, who pioneered free public education, have rested on their laurels, many other countries have eclipsed us since World War II in educational intensity. While our academic calendar still follows the ancient rhythm of an agricultural economy, many other nations follow a modern business calendar. It’s time we start to catch up. 

Adding “only” twenty-five instruction days to the school year amounts to a whopping 1.68 additional learning years to a K–12 “career.” In other words, a high school graduate of a 200-day annual system would have completed the learning-day equivalent of a second-semester college sophomore in today’s system. This increased number of school days alone would erase much of the disparity in educational performance between our students and those of other countries.

A longer instruction year will also reduce the well-documented “learning loss” that occurs during our long summer vacations. That lengthy break, by the way, takes the greatest toll on students from poor families. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that low-income and middle-class kids in Baltimore had “essentially no disparity . . . in achievement gains . . . while they are in school.” But, said sociologist Karl Alexander, “while poor children . . . keep pace during the school year, that does not mean they are performing at the same level at year’s end. To the contrary . . . they lag far behind . . . for two reasons: First, they start school already behind, a deficit that their good school-year gains do not erase; second, they lose ground relative to higher socioeconomic-status children during the summer months, when they are cut off from the school’s resources.” It would seem, in other words, that one of the most important steps we could take toward more equitable achievement in public education would be to lengthen the school year.