What We Learned From Minnesota’s First Education Attainment Goal—and What the Next One Should Do Differently
MnEEP Executive Director Letter
By Carlos Mariani Rosa
As Minnesota begins shaping its next educational attainment goal for adoption into state law, we have a’n opportunity to build on what the state has learned over the past decade and establish a stronger framework for equitable progress.
Minnesota Educational Equity Partnership (MnEEP) offers this Policy Brief, Six Racial Equity Commitments for Minnesota’s Educational Attainment Goals, as a call to build that next attainment framework with racial equity at its foundation. A new goal must do more than set another statewide percentage target. Racial equity must be part of the purpose, design, implementation, and accountability of the attainment goal itself. That means setting a clear statewide equity standard, using disaggregated evidence to guide action, directing resources and implementation capacity where they are needed, holding systems publicly accountable for equitable outcomes, and ensuring pathways, credentials, and student supports expand opportunity.
Minnesota is a large and diverse state. Small towns and farming communities exist alongside larger regional cities and mining communities, and metropolitan areas with advanced finance, service, and technology enterprises. At the heart of paying close attention to ending racial disparities in our education system’s outcomes is a clear-headed acknowledgment that Minnesota’s well-being is dependent on how well all our communities do in achieving educational attainment goals, inclusive of communities of Color. MnEEP believes that paying attention to race and ethnicity is as important as heeding the diversity across urban and rural lifestyles, or across gender or age.
What Minnesota Learned From Its First Education Attainment Goal
More than a decade ago, the Minnesota Legislature passed a law setting an ambitious goal of 70% of its adult population ages 25–44 having achieved a postsecondary certificate or degree. It did so with the understanding that higher-level educational attainment had become key for Minnesotans to live prosperous, productive, and socially healthy lives.
MnEEP worked with legislators to also set benchmarks for reaching those goals in state statute to account for disparities that existed among racial and ethnic communities at the time of the law’s passage.
This policy recognized that because Minnesotans of Color made up a smaller percentage of the population, we ran the risk of not knowing how they contributed to achieving our overall goal because their measured outcomes could be masked by the far larger population of White adults. Not knowing their realities could also leave education programs without the information needed to understand how effectively they were serving students of Color.
The framework also reflected the reality that those initially smaller populations of students of Color would grow. Setting measurable, visible benchmarks for tracking their attainment rates meant that schools and colleges could better understand where practices needed to change so that our entire state’s social and economic well-being would not be negatively affected by education systems failing to successfully serve students of Color.
That history remains important now. Minnesota’s first attainment framework made racial disparities visible and recognized that statewide success depended on more equitable outcomes across racial and ethnic communities. But it also showed us the limits of recognition and measurement alone. The framework did not define how much disparities should narrow, nor did it require an implementation strategy to achieve that, or establish what actions persistent disparities should prompt.
What a New Attainment Goal Must Require
Minnesota now has an opportunity to build on what that first framework recognized and go further. Racial equity must be built into the attainment framework itself, shaping the standards the state sets, the evidence it gathers and acts on, the resources and implementation capacity it provides, the accountability it establishes, and whether educational pathways and credentials actually expand opportunity across communities.
By setting strong, measurable education goals into law, the Legislature is not just challenging individuals to earn credentials vital to their lives. It is also challenging the state to adequately provide for a public education delivery system that can enable all of our distinct communities to reach those goals and to reach them in ways that support the distinctive social and economic activities we find across our entire state.
By setting strong, measurable education goals into law, the Legislature is not just challenging individuals to earn credentials vital to their lives. It is also challenging the state to adequately provide for a public education delivery system that can enable all of our distinct communities to reach those goals and to reach them in ways that support the distinctive social and economic activities we find across our entire state.
Educational attainment goals should not only call for individuals to earn credentials and develop skills. They can inform us about what we need to do better in education policies and practices at both the state and local level.
At the student and institutional level, that includes cultivating the learning conditions necessary for the successful pursuit of higher-education credentials. Our financial aid system must account for the time students need to focus on their studies. Since rigor is valued in the real-world, student course-taking must maximize exposure to credit-bearing, high-quality coursework. Assessment of student outcomes should use multiple measures beyond the “one size fits all” testing tools so as to powerfully propel students toward their personal aspirations. And student empowerment requires institutional practices that align with students’ cultural strengths and pragmatically maximize student success.
Those conditions are part of what students need and what equitable education systems should make possible. The larger policy responsibility is to ensure those opportunities exist equitably across all communities. That requires making disparities visible so we can act on real-world evidence by investing in education practices that make cultural sense to our diverse students, establishing public accountability, and ensuring that supports and pathways to credentials effectively expand opportunity.
Building a better, more effective education system that can truly support achieving state education attainment goals—and not just counting on the present system to accomplish them—is the exciting opportunity before Minnesota now and the call this MnEEP Policy Brief puts forward.
