MINNEAPOLIMEDIA EDITORIAL | Minnesota’s Students Cannot Wait for Adults to Finish Arguing About Education

COON RAPIDS, MN (August 5, 2026)

Minnesota’s students are struggling to read, solve mathematics problems and recover academic ground that was lost during years of disruption. The adults responsible for helping them, meanwhile, remain trapped in an argument that has become as predictable as it is unproductive.

One side demands more funding. Another demands more choices. Some want fewer standardized tests. Others want tougher standards. One camp calls for phonics, multiplication drills and a return to academic fundamentals. Another emphasizes mental health, culturally responsive instruction and the social conditions affecting children outside school. Nearly everyone has a preferred explanation, a preferred villain and a preferred reform bearing an acronym impressive enough to require its own orientation session.

Minnesota’s students do not have time for the argument to continue indefinitely.

The latest evidence does not describe a single-year emergency or an educational system in free fall. It reveals something more stubborn: prolonged academic stagnation, unfinished recovery, persistent reading weakness and enormous disparities among students who attend schools within the same state.

STABILITY IS NOT THE SAME AS SUCCESS

Minnesota’s 2025 statewide standards-based assessments, including alternate assessments administered to qualifying students with significant cognitive disabilities, found that approximately 49.6 percent of students met reading standards and 45.2 percent met mathematics standards. Both results were slightly below their 2024 levels. The movement was small enough for state officials to characterize academic performance as stable, but “stable” is not necessarily reassuring when more than half of students are not demonstrating proficiency.

A patient whose temperature remains at 103 degrees is technically stable, too. Stability tells us that the condition has not changed rapidly. It does not tell us the condition is acceptable.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress provides a longer view. Minnesota fourth-graders earned an average reading score of 214 in 2024, statistically indistinguishable from the national average. Only 31 percent reached the assessment’s Proficient level. Minnesota’s score was not significantly different from its 2022 performance, but it was lower than the state’s score in 1998.

Minnesota eighth-graders performed above the national average in reading, but their average score was also below the state’s 1998 result. Fourth-grade mathematics offered a measure of encouragement, with Minnesota students scoring above the national average and showing improvement from 2022, though the change was not statistically significant. That distinction matters because responsible public discussion should not turn complicated results into a false declaration that every score, everywhere, is collapsing.

The larger pattern remains deeply troubling. National fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores fell again between 2022 and 2024. No state recorded a statistically significant reading gain during that period. Eighth-grade mathematics remained far below its pre-pandemic level. Among high school seniors, 2024 reading performance fell three points from 2019 and 10 points from 1992. Mathematics fell three points from 2019.

THE PANDEMIC DID NOT CREATE EVERY PROBLEM

The pandemic plainly caused enormous educational disruption. Students lost classroom time. Schools struggled to reproduce ordinary instruction through computer screens. Teachers attempted to reach children whose internet connections, home environments and available adult support varied dramatically. Some students adjusted reasonably well. Others disappeared from meaningful instruction while technically remaining enrolled.

But the pandemic cannot carry all the blame. National reading performance had begun weakening before COVID-19 closed school buildings. Minnesota’s racial and economic achievement gaps existed long before anyone had heard the phrase “social distancing.” The emergency worsened existing problems, exposed institutional weaknesses and harmed students who already had the fewest educational advantages. It did not invent those weaknesses.

Continuing to describe every disappointing result as pandemic learning loss may eventually become a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened since schools reopened. A child who was in first grade when classrooms closed is now approaching adolescence. Students who entered high school during the disruption have graduated or are preparing to do so. Minnesota cannot continue treating 2020 as both the beginning and the end of its educational explanation.

THE STATEWIDE AVERAGE CONCEALS A DIVIDED SYSTEM

The state must also confront what averages conceal.

In Minnesota’s 2024 eighth-grade reading results, Black students scored an average of 27 points below white students. Hispanic students scored 23 points below white students. Economically disadvantaged students scored 20 points below students who were not economically disadvantaged.

Those disparities cannot be dismissed as imperfections in a test. They represent differences in access to strong early instruction, experienced teachers, stable housing, health care, transportation, technology, quiet places to study and adults with enough time and knowledge to provide academic help. They also reflect what schools do or fail to do after students enter their buildings.

A standardized assessment cannot explain every cause behind a score. It can still expose a pattern that public institutions have a duty to investigate.

Critics are correct that standardized tests are limited. A timed examination cannot measure a child’s entire intelligence, creativity, perseverance, cultural knowledge or future potential. Test results can be distorted when students are disengaged, unfamiliar with the format or learning in a language they have not fully mastered. Schools serving highly mobile populations or large numbers of students with significant needs face challenges that a single proficiency percentage cannot adequately describe.

But acknowledging those limitations does not require Minnesota to discard measurement. A bathroom scale cannot describe a person’s complete health, either. Most people would still hesitate to throw it away merely because they dislike the number.

Tests should be used as diagnostic evidence, not as verdicts on the worth of children, teachers or communities. Minnesota should examine statewide assessments alongside classroom work, attendance, student growth, graduation, course completion and locally administered diagnostic tests. What the state must not do is lower expectations, rename failure or create a reporting system so complicated that parents need a graduate seminar to determine whether their child can read.

MINNESOTA MUST MEASURE LEARNING, NOT ACTIVITY

Clear public measurement is especially important because Minnesota is investing heavily in literacy reform.

The READ Act is intended to reshape how schools teach reading through structured literacy, evidence-based instructional materials, universal screening, teacher development and intervention for struggling students. Minnesota has trained tens of thousands of educators, established a Regional Literacy Network and required districts and charter schools to submit local literacy plans.

The state’s latest implementation report indicates that nearly 90 percent of Phase 1 educators had either completed or were progressing through the required professional development. More than 5,100 paraprofessionals had received structured literacy training, and more than 90 percent of districts and charter schools had engaged with the Regional Literacy Network.

That is substantial activity. It is not yet proof of improved reading.

Training attendance, curriculum purchases, submitted plans and coaching hours are implementation measures. They tell Minnesotans whether the machinery of reform is being assembled. The ultimate measure is whether more children learn to decode words accurately, read fluently, understand increasingly complex texts and communicate what they have learned.

The Minnesota Department of Education says the full effects of the READ Act are expected to become measurable in the spring 2030 MCAs and beyond. Large instructional changes do require time. Teachers must learn new methods, schools must select materials, administrators must align interventions and districts must establish consistency across classrooms.

But 2030 is a long time in the life of a child. A struggling first-grader in 2026 will be approaching middle school by then. A fifth-grader will be entering high school. Minnesota cannot ask those students to wait patiently while the system completes its transition.

The state should publish meaningful interim indicators every year. How many students identified as struggling readers received intervention? How quickly did that intervention begin? How much instructional time did they receive? Did their decoding, fluency and comprehension improve? Which districts produced strong growth among students who started furthest behind? Which instructional materials and intervention programs produced disappointing results?

Minnesota should not wait until 2030 to discover that some districts implemented the law faithfully while others merely completed the paperwork.

FUNDING, CHOICE AND THE RETURN TO FUNDAMENTALS

The same insistence on evidence should guide the debate over funding. Schools cannot hire tutors, specialists, counselors or classroom aides with encouraging speeches. Intensive academic recovery costs money. High-quality tutoring, particularly when delivered frequently in small groups during the school day, has demonstrated greater promise than loosely organized after-school homework help. Summer learning can help when it includes consistent attendance, sufficient instructional time and strong teaching rather than functioning primarily as supervised recreation.

Smaller instructional groups can allow teachers to identify misunderstandings earlier. Mental health professionals can address anxiety, grief and instability that interfere with learning. Special education services, language instruction and transportation all require adequate staffing.

The case for resources is therefore real. But so is the case for accountability.

Minnesota should not measure its educational commitment solely by how much money enters the system. It must also examine what the money purchases, whether programs reach the students for whom they were intended and whether those students make measurable progress. A tutoring initiative that cannot recruit tutors, attract students or document growth is not successful because its funding announcement sounded ambitious.

Education spending and educational outcomes are not interchangeable. Money is an instrument. Learning is the objective.

School choice advocates respond to academic stagnation by calling for vouchers, charter schools, open enrollment and private alternatives. Families should have meaningful options, especially when a child’s assigned school repeatedly fails to meet that child’s needs. Charter schools and specialized programs can test different models and sometimes produce impressive results.

But school choice is not a complete statewide recovery strategy. Moving a portion of students among institutions does not tell Minnesota how reading should be taught, how absent students should be reengaged or how struggling adolescents should receive intensive mathematics support. Choice may alter where a student sits. It does not automatically improve what happens after the student takes the seat.

Charter and private schools should face the same fundamental question as district schools: Are students learning, and can the institution demonstrate it honestly?

The “back-to-basics” argument contains another necessary truth. Students need explicit instruction in foundational skills. Children cannot become strong readers if they cannot reliably connect letters with sounds, recognize words, build vocabulary and comprehend sentences. Students cannot succeed in algebra if basic number relationships and operations remain uncertain.

Practice matters. Fluency matters. Knowledge matters. There is nothing reactionary about expecting students to know multiplication facts or read a grade-appropriate passage with understanding.

But the fundamentals must be taught skillfully, not reduced to endless worksheets or nostalgic reenactments of somebody’s 1978 classroom. Effective instruction combines explicit teaching, guided practice, meaningful reading, rich content and timely feedback. “Back to basics” should describe academic clarity, not an excuse to ignore what educators have learned about language development, disability, motivation and culturally diverse classrooms.

STUDENTS CANNOT LEARN WHEN THEY ARE NOT IN SCHOOL

Minnesota must also address the basic condition upon which every instructional reform depends: students must attend school.

Chronic absenteeism is generally defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, regardless of whether absences are excused. That amounts to roughly 18 days, or about one day every two weeks. A student cannot benefit fully from structured literacy, tutoring, counseling or an excellent mathematics teacher while repeatedly absent.

Attendance problems rarely have one cause. Families may be dealing with illness, unstable housing, unreliable transportation, bullying, mental health challenges, caregiving obligations or a student’s growing disengagement. Punishment alone will not solve those problems. Schools need accurate, timely attendance data and early contact with families before an absence pattern becomes a semester-long crisis.

Minnesota should treat attendance as both an educational measure and a public responsibility. Districts should know within days, not years, which schools and student groups are experiencing serious attendance problems. Families deserve supportive intervention, but the state must also communicate plainly that regular attendance is essential.

What Minnesota does not need is another decade of competing slogans. It does not need adults declaring victory because a bill passed, money was appropriated, a new curriculum arrived or families received another theoretical option. It needs proof that children who could not read are learning to read, students who feared mathematics are building competence and achievement gaps are narrowing because the students furthest behind are progressing faster.

That requires a practical compact.

The state must preserve rigorous and transparent standards. Schools must use evidence-based instruction and intervene before small learning gaps become permanent barriers. Lawmakers must fund programs with credible designs and require public evidence of their results. Districts must address chronic absenteeism immediately. Families must receive clear information and support regular attendance, reading at home and consistent academic effort. Teachers must receive training, coaching, usable materials and enough classroom support to do what the public asks of them.

No single reform will accomplish all of this. Funding without instructional discipline will disappoint. Testing without intervention will merely document failure. Choice without quality control will redistribute students without guaranteeing learning. Phonics without comprehension will produce mechanical reading. Mental health support without academic urgency will leave students emotionally supported but educationally stranded.

Minnesota does not need to choose between caring for students and challenging them. It must do both.

Children currently struggling in classrooms cannot pause their development while adults settle old political scores. They get one fourth-grade year, one eighth-grade year and one opportunity to graduate prepared for whatever comes next. Lost time does not reappear because a legislative hearing ran long or another task force requested an extension.

The debate may continue. Democracy guarantees that it will. But Minnesota’s response to its academic problems must move forward while the adults are still arguing.

The children are already growing up.

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