16 thoughts on “Communicating With The MN DFL: Part VIII

  1. If your “DFL” had any debate abilities, it would ask you what you mean by results?

    I mean for me, as an outsider (my children and grandchildren were/are home-schooled), those results seem to be great. Exactly what Education Minnesota et al want them to be. A few gifted STEM kids who get an education in spite of it all, some vo-tech ready kids who are ignored, a few complete morons who are just promoted through and out of the system, and the rest who are turned into left-wing robots, many of whom will go to college and major in “education”. These groups change in size depending on the school district and its surrounding (ahem) “culture”.

  2. If “education” means “reading, writing and ciphering to grade level,” then Minnesota’s ‘education’ establishment is a dismal failure.

    If “education” mean “free daycare for working parents plus indoctrination into Liberal policies to create future DFL voters,” then Minnesota’s ‘education’ establishment is working splendidly now, and would work even better if schools had more money to hire more drag queens.

  3. MN DFL, “Graduation Rates continue to RISE!!!”
    Parents, “But Proficiency rates are dropping?!?!”
    MN DFL, “You hate children and teachers! You’re RACIST!!”

  4. Fully funded = let me tell you how it will be/that’s one for you, 19 for me.

  5. The DFL has long accepted that state money spent on education is not expected to actually educate children. Why hasn’t the GOP accepted this?

  6. This is slightly off-topic because the quote doesn’t seem to apply here, but I think it could be coerced into being useful in this overall theme of Communicating With The MN DFL.

    From an old, old post at Instapundit (2011), Richard Fernandez is quoted It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation.

    It’s interesting to read something from the time of 2010 or 11. The more things change…

  7. Remember this?

    https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-attorney-announces-federal-charges-against-47-defendants-250-million-feeding-our-future

    From the release:

    “The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service administers the program throughout the nation by distributing federal funds to state governments. In Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) administers and oversees the Federal Child Nutrition Program.”

    More “education funding” like this? Is that what we need?

  8. Too much money going to administrators:

    Half the states now have more noninstructional personnel than teachers.

    Labor Department counts 271,020 K-12 “education administrators,” with an average wage of more than $100,000 a year

    But yeah, anti-education.

  9. If it were merely funding that mattered in education, the results in DC, NYC, and LA would be spectacularly better than the rest of the country.

  10. Yes, kinlaw. Nobody talks about that. And it’s not just education. Medicine too. And more.

    Funny how the various Artificial Intelligence programs are made hand-in-glove to replace these administrators.

  11. jdm
    “to replace these administrators.”

    in the 21st century the administrative state will suffer the fate of the mensheviks 100 years ago – in the long run they pose the greatest risk to the new world order.

  12. Public schools in the US can’t move the needle much on standard measures of learning, like reading at grade level. Money spent versus educational attainment is not linear, it is a curve, it costs you more and more to get the next margin up to the standard. This is obvious, educators, at least the administrators, know this.
    They know that spending more money will not result in more academic achievement by students. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. The US already spends more per student than almost any other country in the world. Spending more per pupil only gets you more teachers and administrators at higher pay.

  13. MP, I’m pretty sure I don’t understand the points you’re trying to make. There was a time when most had at least a rudimentary grasp of reading, writing, and arithmetic by the time they finished 8th grade and for a lot less money too.

    I know this overlooks a whole lot of changes that have occurred in the last 50 years, but honest to god, the way schools teach now is almost as if they don’t want the kids to learn anything.

  14. JDM, the usual standard in public and private schools to gauge overall learning is “reads at grade level.” The most significant input for this measure is parental involvement and investment in the education of their children. If this is lacking, you won’t move the needle much, regardless of class size and the efforts of the teachers. Anecdotally? Sure. But we are talking about hundreds of thousands of students in MN public schools. Anecdotes are not data.

  15. The numbers for community college are awful. It is not uncommon for only one in five students in a two year program to graduate in two years. If you are a state legislator with education money to spend, how much tax payer money are you willing to pay to push that number from 5:1 to 4:1? This problem is everywhere in public education, half of us will always be below average.

  16. My ex-girlfriend’s mother was faculty at one of the schools in Litchfield, years ago at the time I lived in the People’s Republic of MN. She commented on how the school saw fit to have 4 vice-principals for a student body of 200-300. She also remarked how strange it was that every time the school got a funding increase, the teachers didn’t see much of it, on account of the inefficient layers of administration.

    I have a couple of kids of my own now in elementary school. When the COVID lock-downs happened, I was elated that my kids’ parochial school adapted to on-line learning within a week, while it took the public schools in our area more than a month to find their posterior with a map and a flashlight.

    I don’t recall where I saw this argument, but it made sense to me: When a student in a private school isn’t performing at the academic level his/her parents expect, there’s a clearly defined chain of accountability for the funds being spent, and so there’s tremendous incentive to correct the deficiency, whether on the part of the kid, home environment, teacher, etc. But when public schools are underperforming, it seems like the only thought is to throw more money at the problem.

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