Wisconsin implemented the first school choice program in 1990. Iowa passed school choice in 2023 under the leadership of Gov. Kim Reynolds. North Dakota is about to pass school choice with help from American Experiment ND.
The money and power wielded by the state’s teachers’ union is the reason we don’t we have school choice in Minnesota. It’s time to connect the dots between union dues, campaign expenditures and student failure in Minnesota.
Education Minnesota spent almost $15 million over the last five years to elect legislators and a governor that supports the union. They are consistently one of the largest donors to the DFL Party, the House DFL Caucus and the Senate DFL Caucus. In those same five years, the union gave just $300 to Republican campaign committees.
Every Democratic member of the current legislature has been funded by the teachers’ union or their affiliates.
Their agenda is always the same and its never about students. More money, which leads to higher salaries for their members. Teachers demand to be treated like professionals while their union acts like the Teamsters.
Connect the dots
We don’t have real school choice in Minnesota because the teachers’ union uses their money and power to oppose it, just as they have opposed every major education reform in the history of our state.
- In 1983, the Minnesota Legislature debated and passed a modest tax deduction for private school tuition. According to a June 15, 1983 article in the national journal Education Week by Nancy Paulu, the teachers’ union staunchly opposed the reform stating, “Local critics of the deduction, including the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union (MCLU) and public-education groups like the Minnesota Education Association and the Minnesota School Boards Association, staunchly oppose the law on the grounds that it violates the constitutional separation of church and state.”
- In 1985, Minnesota adopted the Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program that allowed high school students to attend local colleges and receive dual credit. One of the state’s teachers’ unions filed a lawsuit that eventually failed to block the law from being implemented. Even twenty years later, the union fought against removal of the gag rule placed on schools that prevented them from marketing PSEO to their students.
- In 1988, DFL Gov. Rudy Perpich proposed a first-in-the-nation school choice program called open enrollment, allowing students to move across district lines to attend a different school. Reporting on it at the time, The Christian Science Monitor writes the teachers’ union “vigorously fought all the choice plans.”
- And again in 1991, DFL State Senator Ember Reichgott-Young championed charter school legislation in Minnesota, making us the first state to adopt this now universal reform. The teachers’ union opposed the original charter school bill and has been fighting charter school expansion ever since.
- In 1997, Republican Gov. Arne Carlson used a special session showdown to convince a DFL House and Senate to pass tax credits for low-income families to pay for school expenses such as tutoring and personal computers. Even though the bill included an historic increase in per-pupil spending, the teachers’ union opposed it with a spokeswoman of the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, Diane O’Brien saying, “No bill was better than a bad bill.”
- In 2003, newly elected Gov. Tim Pawlenty hired a national leader in school reform and tasked her with replacing the Profile of Learning with a more robust school accountability system. Part of the new program included ratings for all public schools based on student performance on tests in math, reading, and science. Education Minnesota union president Judy Schaubach, said such labeling could be “counter-productive.”
- In 2003, Pawlenty unsuccessfully tried to improve the teaching profession with a proposal to pay “super teachers” more money if they are willing to teach in schools with the most disadvantaged students. Schaubach said its name alone could create problems among teachers and that the proposal “could lower the quality of teaching.”
- In 2005, Pawlenty successfully passed his second attempt at performance pay for teachers called QComp. Although the union initially fought the idea of tying teacher pay to student achievement, they grudgingly came around to the plan because it did provide more money for teacher salaries. But at the first opportunity the union urged the Legislature to gut the program, once again detaching pay from student performance.
- The teacher’s union helped unravel every major piece of the accountability system put in place in Pawlenty’s first term, from school report cards and merit pay to graduation requirements. In 2012, one of the last remnants of the accountability plan was unceremoniously executed with the help of Education Minnesota. First called the Minnesota Basic Skills Test in 1992, the graduation requirement went through several variations until Gov. Mark Dayton killed it in 2012.
- Surprising the teachers’ union in 2017, Dayton signed Legislation to end the last-in-first-out-process used to layoff teachers — a proposal he vetoed the year before. But union leader Denise Specht defiantly declared local districts and unions will still use the seniority system because “it’s easy, it’s predictable.”
- In 2017, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed school choice legislation in the form of Opportunity Scholarships. The plan would have allowed tax-free donations to organizations that granted scholarships to kids trying to improve their education. National teachers’ union leader Diane Ravitch issued an action alert titled “Governor Dayton, please veto the voucher legislation.”
Choice is popular with Minnesotans
The February Thinking Minnesota Poll showed widespread and sustaining support for school choice. Sixty-nine percent of Minnesotans support the right of parents to use the tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send them to the public or private school which best serves their needs. Support is essentially unchanged from the last time the issue was polled in 2023.
The concept of school choice found majority support among Republicans (90 percent), Independents (66 percent) and even Democrats (51 percent). When it comes to school choice, the middle is more closely aligned with common sense conservatives.
Similar results were found on the more specific $7K for Kids proposal. Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) were supported by a majority of Republicans (64 percent) and Independents (54 percent) and even a plurality of Democrats (49 percent).
Choice in Minnesota
School choice won’t serve every student. That would be impossible. Right now, private schools only serve 7.5 % of our students. Homeschool kids make up just 3% of students. But when enough families use choice (such as an ESA) to pick a different option for their kids, eventually, the public school system will wake up and say, “What are they doing down the street that’s attracting so many of our kids? How are they achieving with the same students we are failing?”
That’s the dual purpose of school choice: give parents real choices for their kids right now because kids can’t wait; and use market forces to improve the entire system statewide.
It’s time for school choice in Minnesota.