When figuring out messages for the Minnesota GOP, I limited my scope to things that elected officials and representatives in the State of Minnesota actually have some control over.

And the biggest single thing the State of Minnesota controls is education.  Along with building state infrastructure, education is the biggest bill the state pays, year-in, year-out.

Now, on the one hand Minnesota putatively has much to be proud of; our state’s education system ranks at or near the top of the nation in most categories that matter on the major standardized tests – for those of you who place lots of value in standardized tests (which, let’s remember, test the ability of kids to take tests more than anything).

But in whatever part of Minnesota you live, we’re slipping. As per-pupil education spending skyrockets faster than inflation, inner-city minority graduation rates are falling.  In the rural areas, traditional town schools are being consolidated into big consolidated districts, gaining many of the disadvantages of big urban districts – the maddening bureaucracy, the stunted achievement, the addiction to infrastructure and administrative overhead, the “I’m lost in a huge school” effect that makes urban education such a morass – while losing all the benefits of being a small school, changes made purely for the convenience of the administrative beast.  If you live in a ‘burb with a successful school district, mandates on curriculum and funding formulas are having more and more affect on the schools your communities have built.  If you’re a charter school parent, the education/media complex is trying to draw a big bullseye on your schools’ foreheads.  And if you’ve opted to secede from the school system – like so many inner-city black Charter School parents, Christian homeschoolers, Latino catholic-school parents and Asian kids attending school in the ‘burbs due to Minnesota’s Open Enrollment laws, the DFL majority is aiming the whittle down your choices even as it whittles up the bill we all have to pay for all of those diminishing returns.

And while Minnesota’s test scores – whatever they’re worth – are still strong, you’d be blinkered not to notice that neighboring North Dakota pays vastly less per student for about the same results.

Against this backdrop of failure and anti-parent recrimination, the GOP has consistently stood for the full range of answers to the problem:

• More accountability in the public system
• More choices for parents, within and outside the public system.

Or, to sum it up:

Republicans: Parental Control, Choice and Learning.

Against this, the DFL has consistently fought for what’s best for Education – with a capitol “E”, anyway.  This isn’t just bagging on the teachers’ unions; Institutional Education at all levels, from Big Adminsitration to Big Consolidation to Big Union all have their role.  Against this, there is no Big Parent; indeed, the GOP is the closest we’ve got to such a thing.

And the best the DFL can come up with is “the GOP wants to cut education funding”.  It’s a powerful argument – if you don’t dig beneath the facility of the numbers.  Minnesota’s “best” public schools in terms of student achievement are its cheapest; the state’s few remaining one, two and three-room country schools.  Its worst, overall, are the ones that are most “blessed” with resouces.

So we can sum it up:

Democrats:  Bureaucracy and Failure.

The truth is out there; the track record is clear:

Republicans: Parental Control, Choice and Learning. Democrats:  Bureaucracy and Failure.

Tomorrow, “Security”