Minnesota's future: Early ed champions are thrilled, not satisfied

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. (To contribute, click here.) This article is a response to Star Tribune Opinion's June 4 call for submissions on the question: "Where does Minnesota go from here?" Read the full collection of responses here.

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"What are you most proud of accomplishing this session?" Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman's answer to that question posed by Minnesota Reformer reporter Michelle Griffith caught my eye.

Did Hortman say securing reproductive rights, increasing the child care tax credit, increasing the tax exemption for Social Security income, providing free school lunches to all kids or legalizing marijuana? It was none of the above.

Instead, first on her list was something that flew under most Capitol watchers' radar — early childhood education. The 2023 Legislature more than tripled the total dollars flowing to early education (including child care) while launching an overhaul of the child care subsidy program with an aim to incentivize quality.

"It's something I've wanted to do since I got here," Hortman told me last week. She isn't a recent arrival. The need to beef up state investment in little kids was a hot topic in her first winning campaign for the state House — in 2004.

I've followed early ed at the Capitol for at least as long. It has my notice again in the wake of a whale of a legislative session because it typifies a good deal of what just happened and helps forecast what could come next. To wit:

The year 2003 was a big one for early ed in Minnesota. It's when Minneapolis Fed economists Arthur Rolnick and Rob Grunewald released a groundbreaking analysis on the high rate of return that comes from investment in high-quality early education for children from low-income families.

And it's when the Legislature whacked nearly $90 million from subsidies for child care, knocking thousands of kids from low-income families out of quality child care programs.

It took 20 years to restore those cuts. Ten years ago, the state started funding early learning scholarships and all-day kindergarten, but not until this year were the 2003 cuts to child care subsidies fully reversed. Scholarships and kindergarten got funding boosts this year too.

"We have not been funding this at the level we know we need, so that it can reach all the children who need it," Hortman said. She credits Rolnick's work for selling her on making early ed a priority.

A chronic worker shortage and new economic thinking are affecting lawmakers' decisions.

But the care and learning of the state's youngest children is now understood as essential to keeping young parents in the workforce today and providing the state with educated workers it will need in a few decades. Even in the state's reddest regions, mayors have told me that a shortage of child care is constraining their economies.

Rolnick, now a senior fellow at the Humphrey School, says that in the past two decades, economists have adjusted their thinking about how best to build prosperity.

"Economists now recognize that what's critical for economic development is human capital. They used to think it was about investing in machines. Now we see it's more important that we educate, educate, educate," he said. "And we also now know that the best way to do that is to start well before kindergarten and make sure that brain development in the first few years happens as it should."

Minnesota isn't alone in catching on to that idea, he added. "It's now nationally recognized that we have way underinvested in our most at-risk kids. Now it's a question of how do we get the funding."

That's a question this session didn't fully answer.

In the next two years, many thousands more families will be eligible for taxpayer help in paying for child care and preschool.

And in the years after that? A look at the early learning scholarship budget line foretells trouble: A program set to spend $196 million in each of the next two years falls to a $99 million budget in fiscal years 2026-27. Without an additional infusion of dollars, state help will disappear for a lot of disappointed families.

Hortman said she was well aware that using this year's big stash of one-time money for ongoing programs was ill-advised. But in this case — and, I'd guess, a few others — the thinking was to do as much good as possible today, and hope that effort will be appreciated and rewarded in the future.

Even if the next two years' funding levels can't be sustained, "the 3- and 4-year-olds we help now will carry that benefit with them for the rest of their lives," she said.

Rolnick says he's thrilled with this year's result, even though, by his count, the new money will still leave tens of thousands of children from low-income families unserved. He has his eye on what he calls "the ultimate goal" — every low-income child will have access to quality preschool via a scholarship program financed with an endowed-and-dedicated fund.

That thinking tells me one thing more about this year's outcome: Advocates who see state investment as the means to create a better Minnesota are grateful. But they aren't satisfied.