As Labor Day approaches and the school calendars roll over again, it’s worth looking at the state of education in Minneapolis, St. Anthony, Columbia Heights and Hilltop. To be blunt, the reading and math statistics paint a bit of an ugly picture, but things are looking up.
The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) uses the “North Star” system, a collection of five metrics that track students’ “progress towards English language proficiency,” academic progress and academic achievement in both mathematics and reading, graduation rates and attendance rates. More information about this program can be found at https://bit.ly/NorthStarEducation.
As part of this system, the MDE collects data on students’ educational development each year. According to the MDE, in 2025, 42.6% of students statewide met the reading standards for their grade, while 47.6% of students met the benchmark for mathematics. In Columbia Heights, Minneapolis and St. Anthony-New Brighton, however, the stories are a bit different.
This data, which demonstrates a striking disparity in statewide education, comes at a precarious moment for education across the country.
Education Scorecard, a group of researchers tracking academic achievement nationwide, have written that the United States entered a “learning recession” in 2013, citing dwindling progress in mathematics and reading. “Grade 8 reading scores… are now at their lowest point since 1990,” they wrote in a May 2026 report.
“The slowdown in learning,” the report continues, “coincided with a dismantling of test-based accountability and a rise in social media use. It is not clear which was most influential.” The report’s authors also cite high student absenteeism as a pain point for educational development.
These changes come amid a change of broader societal and logistical shifts. High school educators have referred to students using artificial intelligence (AI) “as if it were their own thought” and using chatbots to answer questions on assignments. According to the RAND Corporation, an American think tank, chronic absenteeism in the 2024-2025 school year was nearly six percentage points higher than it was the year before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additionally, one would be remiss to leave out Operation Metro Surge, which upended much of the metro area for the better part of two months in 2026, leading to school cancellations, abducted students and sudden shifts into online learning. It is unclear how, specifically, this impacted students’ learning in the metro area, but it is difficult to imagine it had no impact at all.
In the face of these challenges — more students missing classes, government interventions and work getting offloaded to the internet — what are educators to do?
It’s not all gloomy, though. In 2023, Governor Tim Walz passed the READ Act, which aims “to have every Minnesota child reading at or above grade level every year.” It seems to have been at least a partial success, with 80.8% of children meeting a goal of 95% accuracy in reading by third grade.
Maybe statewide legislation, then, could present a way out of this morass. The READ Act demonstrates that it is possible to raise the bar on educational standards. Other possibilities include increased teacher-to-student ratios and careful recalibrations to a world shaped by AI. Suggesting a blanket solution is tenuous at best, but the base idea — that education needs some kind of reshaping — remains.
Regardless of any complexities, the simple truth is that children deserve a high-quality education regardless of their district, and it’s on local officials to find a way to fix it.