Minnesota’s education ranking drops again, no mention by Gov. Walz

Gov. Tim Walz’s office released a press statement recently touting Minnesota’s ranking as 6th best state in the nation for business by CNBC. (A ranking which, as my colleague John Phelan wrote here, should be taken with a grain of salt.) The media company’s annual ranking considers a number of categories and key indicators to measure all 50 states against each other.

The governor commented on some of these indicators, including job training and workforce development, but did not comment on the main source for workforce talent — a state’s education system.

Perhaps the state’s CNBC education ranking was left out because it has dropped three spots from its ranking in 2023, coming in now at #17. Indeed, this is 12 spots lower than the state’s education ranking in 2018 when it came in at #5, right before Gov. Walz took office. (Consider that decline against Mississippi’s education ranking jumping up over 20 spots from 2018 to 2023, going from #43 to #22.)

According to CNBC, its education ranking considers “multiple measures of K-12 education including test scores, class size and spending,” along with higher ed components such as the number of colleges and universities in a state, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and a state’s career education system.

CNBC doesn’t share a detailed breakdown of each measure, but below are a few thoughts on what the education ranking considers.

Test scores

While CNBC doesn’t name what test scores were reviewed, I’m going to assume it was results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the only national assessment that can be used to compare student performance between states. As I wrote here, Minnesota fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math NAEP scores are the lowest they have been in decades. The average Minnesota fourth-grade reading score is below the national average.

Even these low scores may be placing Minnesota higher in the rankings than it actually is, considering that only using average scores for a state ignores student heterogeneity. This can end up skewing rankings because it treats states as though they have identical students, which “ignore[s] the substantial variation present in student populations across states,” write Stan Liebowitz and Matthew Kelly for the Cato Institute.

Class sizes

State law mandates that education revenue must be used to reduce and maintain the district’s average class size in kindergarten through third grade to 17 to one (17 students to one educator). A 2023 study by Metro ECSU on class size patterns for the 2022-23 school year reports the average elementary class size in Minnesota was 22.8, junior secondary at 24.0, and senior secondary at 25.2. Averages by district vary. An analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data by Zippia has placed Minnesota as #6 among the top largest class sizes.

In the spring of 2023, the Minnesota Legislature made class sizes a mandatory topic of bargaining agreements. Smaller class sizes in schools are typically seen as highly desirable, but research into the effects of class size has generally proved inconclusive — with some studies finding benefits and some not. Numbers that don’t often get mentioned in the class size debate: student-teacher ratios, the corresponding per pupil expenditures, and academic results.

Spending

Compared to states across the country, Minnesota is considered a high-spending state when it comes to education spending. But including spending in calculating rankings risks “giv[ing] extra credit to states that spend excessively to achieve the same level of success others achieve with fewer resources, when that wasteful extra spending should instead be penalized in the rankings,” write Liebowitz and Kelly.

Is our state’s education system still doing better than others? Yes. Is there room for improvement before the state has full bragging rights? Most definitely.