"You lied to me!"
I was running for governor in 2006, and this young woman was on my case before I even got a word out. Once I regained my composure, I asked her what she meant.
"I did everything you adults told me to do," she said. "I went to school every day, did my homework every day, got good grades. I got a diploma from a five-star Minnesota high school. I enrolled in community college. When I got there, they told me I had to take math and English over again because I had not really learned enough in high school. You adults told me that high school graduation meant that I had learned. But you lied to me!"
I was stunned, mad, embarrassed. I went to find the facts. In 2006, 28 percent of high school graduates who went to college in Minnesota (two- or four-year) ended up taking high school (remedial) classes in college. We lied to them. We gave them a diploma that was a fraud.
Now, over 10 years later we read in the Star Tribune that high school graduation is at an all-time high, according to a new report from the Minnesota Department of Education ("Graduation rate at high mark," Feb. 28). The data seem to point in that direction — the percentage of students graduating from high school is up significantly (from 75 percent in 2006 to over 82 percent in 2016), while the percentage of those going to college requiring remedial education is down (from 28 percent in 2006 to 21 percent in 2015).
All true and on the face of it pretty fantastic. The message: In Minnesota we have done what few other places have done: We have gotten more of our students to learn — and to learn at ever-higher levels. It's unbelievable!
Indeed, it is not believable. These two measures — graduation and remedial course-taking — tell us about events in the experience of students but not whether they learned.
We have three pieces of very reliable data on student learning that got left out.