Does Your DFL State Representative Vote for You on Education?
October 11, 2024
The DFL prides itself as the "party of education" but do the education bills they recently passed reflect that? Do they promote academic achievement?
With narrow DFL majorities, every DFL Representative, including yours, voted to pass every item in their Party’s extreme 30-point agenda. This means that your DFL Representative in the Minnesota House voted to
- increase education spending not tied in any way to educational performance improvements
- require school districts to offer “ethnic studies” embedded in every part of the curriculum
- make hourly part-time school workers eligible for summer unemployment, an unfunded school district mandate
Does your DFL State Representative really care about educating our kids?
HALF of Minnesota students cannot read or do math at grade level. Your DFL Representative in the Minnesota House voted to increase education spending by 10% ($2.25 billion) with NO requirements for improved results.
Instead, your DFL Representative in the Minnesota House voted to require School districts to offer “ethnic studies” [aka Critical Race Theory] and embed in every part of the curriculum. [Math is racist?] How does this solve Minnesota's nation-leading achievement gap between white and black students?
Does an increased emphasis on “ethnic studies” benefit student performance on history and civics? Education Week reported in 2023 that history achievement fell nationally to 1990s levels on the National Assessment Educational Progress test. Civics scores took their first-ever dive.
Trend & Tradition, the magazine of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Summer 2023 edition, considers these results as the worst reflection yet of a yearslong downward trend.
“The data are irrefutable: A majority of our nation’s children do not know our history. They have a weak sense at best of our founding ideals, and they do not sufficiently grasp the sacrifices of their forebears to achieve more freedom and greater equality for all Americans. Nor do they understand our democratic system of government, much less the vital roles they must have in it.
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation asked teachers what they felt was most important in teaching history and civics. One of the strongest messages they received was the importance of fact-based history. Will our students get that from compartmentalized ethnic studies?
Does your Representative in the Minnesota House striving to do away with unfunded mandates on our School Districts?
The DFL-controlled legislature this past session voted to make Minnesota school cafeteria workers and school bus drivers eligible for unemployment pay during school vacations. This “first in the nation” entitlement was granted even though they are hired as part-time employees. This benefit, going primarily to hourly workers and not teachers, has been paid for through 2025 out of the rapidly dwindling state budget surplus.
Yet ultimately, this is an unfunded mandate on Minnesota’s school districts. As the employer of the cafeteria workers and bus drivers, it is the school districts that are ultimately on tap to pay the employer’s share of this unemployment insurance. This on top of the mandate that all students, regardless of family income, will get free school meals that will cost $80 million more than legislators forecast in 2023.
After the DFL-controlled legislatures spent virtually all of the budget surpluses built up when there was a political balance in St Paul, where do you think the school districts are going to get the money to sustain this new entitlement?
👉 If these votes do NOT represent your values, do you feel that your DFL representative deserves to be returned to the state legislature?