Running on Reputation

For decades, Minnesota coasted on the assumption that its public schools were among the best in the nation. The data tells a different story, and the impulse to dismiss that story is itself part of the problem.

There is a particular kind of institutional failure that is easy to miss precisely because it moves slowly. It does not arrive with a crisis or a headline. It accumulates, year by year, in the widening distance between what a place believes about itself and what the evidence actually shows. Minnesota’s public school system is deep inside that kind of failure. The state still trades on a reputation for educational excellence that was earned a generation ago and has been eroding ever since. The numbers, drawn from a wide range of independent sources, are now consistent enough and alarming enough that the gap between reputation and reality can no longer be politely set aside.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt

When a version of this argument appeared in a recent Star Tribune op-ed, some readers pushed back with a familiar set of responses: the data is cherry-picked, things are not as bad as they look, Minnesota still compares favorably on many measures, and critics of the state are playing into a political agenda. These objections deserve a direct answer, and the answer is this: the dismissal proves the point. The central argument here is that Minnesota is in denial about the condition of its schools. When the response to evidence of decline is to explain it away, to soften it, to reframe it as something less alarming than it is, that response is not a rebuttal. It is an illustration. Denial, as the old saying goes, is not just a river in Egypt. And the particular Minnesota variety of it, reaching for Lake Wobegon reassurances about how our children are all above average and our institutions are fundamentally sound, is not an innocent coping mechanism. It is a political condition that makes reform harder to build and easier to defer.

To be precise about what this argument is not: it is not a brief for the Republican right’s preferred remedies, and it should not be read as one. The conservative case against public education in Minnesota, with its enthusiasm for voucher programs and its hostility to teachers’ unions, does not follow from this data. The evidence on whether private school vouchers actually close racial achievement gaps or improve outcomes for low-income students is, at best, deeply mixed and in many studies negative. A substantial body of research, including analyses of programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio, has found that voucher recipients sometimes perform worse than their public school peers, particularly in mathematics. Pointing out that Minnesota’s public schools are underperforming is not the same as arguing that privatizing them is the answer. The problem is not that public education exists. The problem is that Minnesota has chosen, through decades of policy decisions and political inattention, not to make its public schools work equitably for everyone who attends them.

But the critique runs equally in the other direction. The mainstream DFL response to Minnesota’s education crisis has been, too often, a progressively inflected version of the same denial. The language shifts from Garrison Keillor’s gentle irony to a vocabulary of equity and investment, but the conclusion lands in the same place: Minnesota’s heart is in the right place, its values are sound, and what is needed is more of what we are already doing. That conclusion is not supported by ten years of data from six independent sources. A state can have genuinely progressive values and still be failing its students of color. Good intentions do not close a 26-point reading gap. The focus here is education specifically. That constraint is not a concession. It is a choice about where to concentrate a limited argument so that it lands with the force it deserves. The myths Minnesota tells itself about its broader governance and civic life are numerous and worth examining another time. In education, they have real and identifiable victims.

A falling rank across every measure

The most authoritative benchmark for comparing states is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the NAEP or the Nation’s Report Card. It is administered by the federal government to a representative sample of students in every state, and because it uses a common scale, it allows direct, apples-to-apples comparison across time and geography. On this measure, Minnesota’s decline is steady and well-documented. In 2013, Minnesota ranked sixth in the country for fourth-grade reading. By 2024, it had fallen to twelfth. In eighth-grade mathematics, the state dropped from fourth to ninth over the same period. Scores on both assessments fell sharply after the pandemic in 2022 and recovered only partially by 2024, leaving Minnesota closer to the national average than it has been in modern memory.

NAEP 4TH GRADE READING SCORES
Minnesota vs. national average, 2013 to 2024 (NAEP scale 0 to 500)

NAEP 8TH GRADE MATH SCORES
Minnesota vs. national average, 2013 to 2024 (NAEP scale 0 to 500)

The NAEP results would be troubling enough on their own. But they are far from the only data source pointing in the same direction. Education Week’s Quality Counts, one of the most comprehensive annual report cards on American public education, graded Minnesota a C-plus in its most recent edition, placing the state around seventeenth to twentieth nationally. A decade ago, Minnesota consistently appeared in the top ten. The report grades states across three domains: school finance, K-12 achievement, and the broader chance-for-success factors tied to socioeconomic context. Minnesota’s weakest scores land squarely in the achievement category, the one that most directly reflects what students are actually learning.

MINNESOTA EDUCATION RANKINGS ACROSS SIX SOURCES
Historical rank vs. current rank (lower number = better; out of 50 states)

U.S. News and World Report’s Best States for Education placed Minnesota twenty-second in 2024, a significant fall from its historical top-ten positioning. That composite pulls together preschool access, graduation rates, college readiness, and higher education outcomes. Across all of them, Minnesota has slipped relative to peers. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Book, which tracks child well-being state by state, tells a similar story: Minnesota’s overall ranking remains strong, typically landing in the top five to eight, but its education sub-index has deteriorated faster than its composite score. The gap is driven by third-grade reading proficiency and school attendance rates, both of which dropped sharply during the pandemic and have not returned to pre-2020 levels.

Perhaps the most symbolically significant data point came from the ACT. Minnesota had long been one of the top-performing states on the college readiness exam, with near-universal student participation, meaning its scores were not inflated by selective test-taking. In 2023, Minnesota’s average composite score fell to 19.4, dipping below the national average of 19.5 for the first time in recent memory. For a state whose identity has been so bound up with academic preparation and college-going culture, the moment carries weight beyond the decimal points.

ACT COMPOSITE SCORE TREND
Minnesota vs. national average, 2015 to 2023

“Minnesota still trades on a reputation for educational excellence that was earned a generation ago and has been eroding ever since.”

The achievement gap between white students and students of color makes this concrete. On the NAEP fourth-grade reading assessment, Minnesota’s gap between white and Black students stands at approximately 26 score points, placing it in the worst five states in the nation. Wisconsin, at 28 points, is the only nearby state with a larger gap. For context, the national average gap is 25 points. States like Georgia and Texas, which Minnesota has historically regarded as academic peers or inferiors, now have considerably smaller gaps: Georgia at roughly 14 points, Texas at 18. The uncomfortable implication is that some states Minnesota has historically looked past are actually doing a better job of educating their most underserved students.

WHITE-TO-BLACK NAEP READING GAP: SELECTED STATES (2024)
Score-point difference, 4th grade reading. Minnesota is among the worst in the nation.

Minnesota’s four-year graduation rate illustrates the same fracture. The overall rate has crept upward from around 80 percent in 2015 to approximately 83.5 percent in 2023, which sounds like progress until you note that the national average now sits at 87 percent. More to the point, students of color in Minnesota graduate at a rate of roughly 72 percent, a gap of nearly 18 percentage points compared to white students. That gap has barely moved in a decade.

4-YEAR GRADUATION RATE TREND
Minnesota all students vs. students of color, 2015 to 2023

The Fordham Institute’s State of the States analysis has consistently given Minnesota mediocre grades for its accountability systems, noting that the state weakened its mechanisms for identifying and intervening in failing schools, making it structurally harder to address exactly these kinds of persistent disparities.

What is driving the decline

Analysts and researchers point to several overlapping causes. The pandemic accelerated trends that were already underway, concentrating the most severe learning loss in lower-income urban districts where students had less access to remote learning resources and where chronic absenteeism became entrenched well beyond the immediate disruption. The share of students in poverty and English language learners in Minnesota schools has grown substantially over the past decade without proportional increases in resources or support staffing. Teacher shortages in high-need subjects and high-need schools have become acute, particularly in mathematics, special education, and bilingual instruction. And decades of school finance structures that tie district budgets closely to local property tax bases have meant that the districts with the highest concentrations of need are often the ones with the least capacity to respond.

There is also a policy accountability gap. After opting out of several federal accountability provisions in the years following No Child Left Behind, Minnesota reduced the pressure on low-performing schools to improve. The Fordham Institute and Education Week have both noted that the state’s standards and accountability systems, while not among the worst nationally, are considerably weaker than those of high-performing peers like Massachusetts and New Jersey, states that have maintained or improved their national rankings by building strong feedback loops between data and intervention.

Reputation as a barrier to reform

What makes Minnesota’s situation particularly difficult to address is that the reputation for excellence has functioned, in effect, as a shield against urgency. When a state believes it is doing well, the political will to make difficult changes, to restructure funding, to overhaul accountability, to invest heavily in the districts most in need, is difficult to build. Minnesota has been coasting on its historical baseline while the structural problems beneath it have compounded. The suburban districts that dominate the state’s political and cultural conversation are, in fact, doing well. Their students are learning. Their graduates are going to college. From inside those communities, the system looks fine. The students for whom it is not fine are concentrated in places and communities that have less political voice.

The evidence accumulated from the NAEP, from Stanford’s researchers, from Education Week, from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, from the ACT, and from U.S. News points toward the same conclusion: Minnesota’s public school system is underperforming relative to its own history and relative to peer states, and it is failing a substantial portion of its students in ways that compound across a lifetime. That conclusion belongs to no political party and flatters none. It is an indictment of a bipartisan comfort with the status quo, one side dressing its indifference in the language of markets and parental choice, the other dressing its indifference in the language of equity and shared values, both arriving at the same destination: inaction dressed up as principle.

A state that genuinely cared as much about its schools as it believes it does would treat this data as the emergency it represents. Instead, when the data is presented, the instinct is to contest it, to contextualize it, to wait for it to improve on its own. That instinct is the problem in miniature. Minnesota has not failed its students through malice. It has failed them through the quiet confidence of a place that long ago decided it already knew how good it was, and stopped asking whether that was still true. The students paying the price for that self-assurance are not the ones in Edina or Wayzata. They never were.

SOURCES

• National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — Nation’s Report Card
• Education Week — Quality Counts Annual Report
• Stanford Education Opportunity Project (SEDA)
• Annie E. Casey Foundation — Kids Count Data Book 2024
• U.S. News and World Report — Best States for Education Rankings
• Thomas B. Fordham Institute — State of the States 2023
• ACT — Condition of College and Career Readiness 2023
• Brookings Institution — The Evidence on Charter Schools and Vouchers

•  Star Tribune op-ed (original article)