Whenever the Minnesota DFL wants to yank at voters’ heartstrings, they invoke the “Minnesota Miracle” – the period in the sixties and seventies where Democrats and liberal Republicans (which was most of them at that time) imposed a slew of government programs and wealth redistributions, and claimed credit for an economic and social leap forward (in a state that had already been amply blessed with brains, resources and geographic accidents, and would have grown like a weed anyway).
Oh, there was definitely a “miracle” in Minnesota – which had been a poor, hardscrabble backwater state beholden to mining, lumber, agriculture and milling until the early 20th Century. Minnesota did grow immensely; it would have grown, I suspect, had government merely gotten out of the way, too.
But government – and today, almost forty years later, big-government advocates – claim the “Miracle” as their own.
And to them, the “miracle” was about one thing; being happy to pay for a better Minnesota.
And they’re baaaaaaaack:
[Complaints that schools aren’t “underfunded”] and the sad state of the economy haven’t stopped DFL legislators from pushing what they hope will be one of the biggest school funding boosts in recent history — and one likely to involve a tax increase.
The plan is dubbed the “New Minnesota Miracle” after the state’s 1971 initiative that shifted most school funding from local property taxes to the state.
The new plan calls for $2.5 billion more a year for K-12 education, though it could be phased in over a number of years. That figure includes $400 million earmarked to lower property taxes for homeowners who have watched their tax bills go up after local school funding requests were approved at the polls. The state now spends more than $7 billion a year, or about 40 percent of the state’s total general fund budget, on K-12 education.
Calling it a “new Minnesota Miracle”, of course, is putting lipstick on a pig; it’s just another DFL tax increase, and yet another sop to another powerful DFL special interest. The plan has no real education reforms; indeed, I think it’s fair to say that it’s at least partly a reaction to the erosion of enrollment caused by the limited school choice that Minnesotans have gotten in the past couple of decades. But schools will stay the same; they’ll just have more of your money.
Look, Education Minnesota and the DFL (pardon the redundancy); show us some reforms. Not just windowdressing, mind you, but reforms, ideas that change things for the better; better still, accomplish something, like increasing graduation rates; then declare a “miracle”.
I got an earful of how unreasonable the NCLB regulations were at a PTO meeting this week, and I do have to agree: they seem unreasonable to me. However, they are making schools do some things that one would expect “professionals in education” to do, without shoveling in loads of extra money.
I would feel sorry for them, but this may be the price they pay for insulating themselves from their customers and their market for so long a time.
Whenever someone says schools are underfunded, I ask them to show me the amount of money the Fed’l and state gov’t spent on education in 2001, and how much they are spending in 2008.
They never have those figures, but if they did, you’d see an increase so high it would make your head spin.
ISD 281 is floating a new, 2-part levy in November. It will “only” cost homeowners an extra $18.88 per month on a $250,000 home.
With K-12 enrollment dropping each year due to demographic changes, there is no reason that the government schools shouldn’t be able to do more with the current level of funding that is being directed at fewer and fewer students.
But government – and today, almost forty years later, big-government advocates – claim the “Miracle” as their own. [….] ideas that change things for the better; better still, accomplish something, like increasing graduation rates; then declare a “miracle”.
Can they show us that they’ve done anything with the vastly increased funding they’ve received so far? No? Then all I can say is that Education Minnesota’s logic reminds me of this classic Sidney Harris cartoon. In short, the logic leaves something a little lacking.