To begin the second week of the 2020 legislative session, Minnesota’s Senate Education Finance and Policy Committee held a hearing to discuss Minnesota’s pervasive achievement gap, as well as a brief history of state funding levels and student performance.

One of the testifiers to present to the committee was Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari, who discussed the organization’s October 2019 report that found Minnesota’s educational disparities are “deep, vast, and persistent.”

“We are at an all-hands-on-deck moment,” said Sen. Carla Nelson (R-Rochester), chair of the Senate Education Finance and Policy Committee. “We have a moral duty to make sure every student receives great education, but we are not meeting that standard for too many children. Discussions like we had today are necessary to understand precisely how dire the situation is.”

The damning Federal Reserve report reached a number of conclusions, including:

• Minnesota has some of the largest gaps in the nation on outcome measures by race and socioeconomic status.
• Our educational disparities are not confined to race; low- income white students significantly trail higher-income white students across Minnesota.
• Achievement gaps are evident across a variety of measures, including standardized test scores, graduation rates, and college readiness indicators.
• Minnesota is graduating an increasing proportion of students who are unprepared for college.

Other testifiers included Former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page, who along with Fed President Kashkari is advocating for a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing a quality education to all Minnesota students; Christy Hovanetz, a Ph.D. and Senior Policy Fellow with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education; and Jena Hofer and Bettsy Hjelseth with the nonpartisan Senate Counsel’s office.