Why Our Children Fail

2. Unstable families and communities
Who’s likely to get the better education? The child whose family moves five times a year, and who spends time in five different schools in five different districts with five different curricula? Or the child who spends the entire year in the same classrooms with the same teachers? That was easy, wasn’t it?

Now compare two Twin Cities school districts, Minneapolis and Edina. Minnesota has developed a crude means of measuring student movement—the Mobility Index. The lower the number, the more stable the school population. In the 1997–98 school year, Edina scored 5 on the index, while Minneapolis stood at 27.7. In 2003–04, the most recent year for which numbers are available, Edina’s index was 5.7 and Minneapolis’s 36.4. Given such disparities in student mobility, does anyone wonder why students in Edina score higher on standardized tests overall than students in Minneapolis?

Children from stable families in stable neighborhoods do better in school and in life. Common sense tells us that. Testing shows it. What should be equally obvious is that it’s harder to teach children who arrive late in the school year and/or leave early. Adding one new child to a classroom is easy. A class with 50 percent turnover, as can be found in some poorer neighborhoods where immigrants flood in and some families move from school to school, is a detriment to both teaching and learning. “The issues of school mobility for ‘unaccompanied’ youth are staggering,” says Tom Gray, Education for Homeless Children and Youth coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Education.

Midway through a recent school year, a Minneapolis fifth-grader who, according to his teacher, “could go either way” moved to St. Paul after his parents separated. For the rest of the school year, that teacher picked the boy up in St. Paul, brought him to school in Minneapolis, and then drove him home at the end of the day, enabling the child to finish the year in his original classroom.

Access to a consistent learning environment, where such heroics aren’t necessary, should be the top priority.

3. A broken finance system; No political courage to fix it
Gerald Christenson, Minnesota’s first finance commissioner and one of the state’s great public servants, died, at age seventy-five, in late November. Thirty-five years ago, Christenson was a key architect of the “Minnesota Miracle” that effectively “erased funding disparities between rich and poor school districts by shifting a large amount of education spending from property taxes to income, sales and other taxes,” according to his obituary in the Pioneer Press. Christenson lived long enough to see his nationally heralded brainchild fall into ruin.

In 2001, Governor Jesse Ventura tried again to shift the school finance burden—which had again become heavily dependent on wildly disparate property taxes—toward state revenues. But the legislature never enacted the broadened sales tax that would have provided a stable revenue stream versus the much more volatile income tax. That failure proved disastrous a few years ago when state income tax revenue plummeted, forcing whipsawed districts into deep layoffs.

Adding to the problem is the chronic shortfall of both state and federal funding, which creates a huge gap between what government demands of our students and the funds it supplies to do the job. How big is that funding gap? Governor Tim Pawlenty wisely impaneled experts to reform the state’s school funding system. But when the panel recommended identifying the cost for schools to meet state and federal requirements, the governor backed away.

Fortunately, a private education advocacy group stepped in. Using data assembled by the governor’s task force, it concluded that the shortfall is as much as $953 million annually. So now that the funding gap is finally on the table, what will the governor and the legislature do to close it?

The current improved revenue forecast should translate into some payback for the schools. But the damage from past fiscal instability has been done, and more damage will occur if this volatile system is not stabilized by a governor and legislature tough enough to face up to and solve the problem once and for all.

Minnesota’s precipitous fall from a nationally acknowledged A in education finance to, in our opinion, a barely passing grade should worry every parent, politician, and business leader in the state.