If we’d played a drinking game during Dayton’s State of the State message that involved taking a hit every time the Governor mentioned education, and killing the container whenever he mentioned Early Childhood Ed, then none of us would have made it back to work.<\/p>\n
Matt Abe at North Star Liberty noticed this too<\/a> (albeit maybe not in exactly the same terms).<\/p>\n The governor’s seven-point education plan is not content with dedicating one or two of these points to early childhood education, he embeds “ready for K” goals into five<\/em> of them:<\/p>\n Considering the state’s barely ten-month old kindergarten-readiness study,<\/a> this obsession with pre-K seems odd.<\/p>\n The Minnesota School Readiness Study found that between 91 percent and 97 percent of Minnesota five-year-olds were In Process or Proficient in five developmental areas necessary for school success: physical development, the arts, personal and social development, language and literacy, and mathematical thinking. This compares to last year\u2019s study with numbers between 87 percent and 96 percent. The increases are within the margin of error between the two years.<\/em><\/p>\n When you couple these findings with national empirical studies<\/a> on Head Start and other preschool programs that show little if any benefit to pre-K programs, you may wonder why Governor Dayton is so bent on a significant expansion of government pre-K and all-day kindergarten.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But that “wonder” is purely rhetorical…:<\/p>\n Dayton’s myopic focus on pre-K and kindergarten to the exclusion of other education reforms such as streamlining the process for sponsors of successful charter schools to open new sites, and education tax credits is a missed opportunity for much-needed education reform for Minnesota students and families. Dayton’s omissions provide an excellent opportunity for the Republican majorities in the Legislature to display some leadership in state education policy initiatives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The big worry: \u00a0If there’s an area where Republicans, especially some of the longer-serving ones, are vulnerable to getting browbeaten, it’s the broad subject of education.<\/p>\n And this is an area where the GOP’s strategy of handling the budget in many small component pieces is going to be important. \u00a0Telling a wobbly legislator “why do you hate children” is one thing; trying to browbeat a legislator into supporting, say, a specific program with real-life empirical consequences is a whole ‘nother thing.<\/p>\n Early Childhood Education is a particularly, cynically noxious fixation. \u00a0It just doesn’t work<\/a>; we knew it twenty years ago, and we know it even more today<\/a>. \u00a0The only thing is succeeds at…<\/p>\n …is putting new Education Minnesota members to work, with lifetime pensions.<\/p>\n Which is what it’s all about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If we’d played a drinking game during Dayton’s State of the State message that involved taking a hit every time the Governor mentioned education, and killing the container whenever he mentioned Early Childhood Ed, then none of us would have made it back to work. Matt Abe at North Star Liberty noticed this too (albeit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,144,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-governor","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18031"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18061,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18031\/revisions\/18061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n