Educating Minnesota

I visited her classroom; she’s right. One kid sitting quietly alone had arrived a few months earlier from Somalia. I asked the kids how many had no after-school program to go to or adult at home after school. Half the class raised their hands. Financial aid wasn’t the only resource in short supply. When I asked the school’s social worker what was needed, he replied, “More adult bodies.” He contrasted his experience as a parent raising three children in an affluent suburb with his work experience at Tuttle. “In Eden Prairie, staff resources are abundant compared with Minneapolis, which operates with a skeleton crew,” he said. “In Eden Prairie, there are additional licensed staff members, paraprofessionals, and volunteers in each of the schools, while here at Tuttle, none of the four middle school teachers is even full-time.” 

Schools serving the growing numbers of poor, immigrant, and special-needs kids require more money and “adult bodies” to provide the creative, flexible, more individualized programs for which those schools are begging.

Cost: $150 million annually to reduce class size to allow for more individualized attention. Additional resources must be added for poor students.

4. Fully Fund Prekindergarten 
“Only half of Minnesota’s children enter kindergarten fully prepared to learn,” says Todd Otis, president of Ready 4 K, a St. Paul–based advocacy group. We say that’s twice as many as the state can afford.

A fully funded ready-for-kindergarten program would immeasurably help Minnesota students prepare for global competition. Economist Arthur Rolnik of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has used results from cost-benefit studies to show that high-quality preschool programs are sound public investments, with returns to the public of up to 12 percent and combined returns to the public and individual families of 16 percent. Updated findings from a forty-year Michigan study demonstrate even greater returns of 16 and 18 percent, respectively. Even earlier interventions, such as the Nurse– Family Partnership that sends nurses to needy families prior to a child’s birth, show highly promising, cost-effective results.

Early learning makes good economic sense. Families realize better life outcomes, and society benefits from the reduced cost of social services. “Every kid who arrives at school not ready, maybe not even knowing his own name, places a burden on the teacher, who becomes much more efficient if all kids are ready,” Rolnik says. “And that student is more likely to hold a job and not brush up against the very expensive criminal justice system.”

Minnesota lags behind—badly behind—when it comes to prekindergarten education. Several states considered much more progressive—Oklahoma, Kansas, and Kentucky, for example—have already fully funded prekindergarten education or are close to it, because their legislatures and citizens are determined to close the competitive gap. 

Rolnik proposes a prenatal mentor and two-year scholarship for every three- and four-year-old in at-risk families, so the child can attend a high-quality preschool program and also receive a suite of other, already funded services, such as basic health care and family counseling. “If you are looking for the best way to help K–12 education, this will beat any other program you can put on the table,” he says. 

Duane Benson, who has just signed on to run the new Minnesota Early Learning Foundation, agrees. He has thought about this issue from several perspectives—as a parent, a state legislator (and Republican majority leader), and, for fourteen years, leader of the Business Partnership. “It’s a basic economic question,” he says. “Our future is bound to our ability to educate our young people.”

Cost: An additional $185 million per year in state tax dollars would be a major step forward, according to Ready 4 K. “Right now, the state commitment for early care and education is $145 million per year—less than 1 percent of the overall budget,” says Otis. “If we move to just 2 percent, the state would have about $330 million per year to improve access for all families to high-quality early care and childhood programming. This would raise the numbers of children fully ready to succeed in the classroom and in life.”