Commisioner of education gives LIE to Dayton's editorial

During a fisking of Senator Mark Dayton’s observation that Minnesota public schools are being drastically under funded, I noted that it appeared to me that he was using talking points that had been discredited via a criminal investigation by the Ramsey County Attorney.

Minnesota commissioner of education Alice Seagren seconds my assessment of Dayton’s credibility in an editorial in the Star & Sickle:

“Dayton claimed that K-12 funding in Minnesota decreased over the last 15 years.

This is simply not true. Even after adjusting for inflation, Minnesota's support for public K-12 education increased nearly 27 percent between 1991 and 2007.”

I’d like to have the opportunity to ask Dayton the same question I asked members of the Saint Paul school board when they attempted the same deceitful tactic; “If you are managing your budgets wisely and are truly in need of further funding, why do you resort to lying?”

Seagren continues:

“While I don't know how Dayton arrived at his incredible and untrue conclusion that education funding has decreased over this period, my best guess is that he looked at only one piece of Minnesota's education funding pie -- the basic formula -- while ignoring other important funding sources like categorical aids and local revenues.”

I’d have to disagree with Seagren’s guess; it awards way more thoughtfulness to people like Dayton than is the case in my experience.

The motivations of Education Minnesota, and the myriad of left-wing special interests that are now controlling the day to day operations of the public system are much simpler and much more self-serving.

They are out to enrich themselves and their agencies, and to garner all of the political power that money can buy. And they don’t mind doing it at the expense of kids..yours and mine.
But as Seagren suggests, those who hold positions of power within the public school system, at least those who were not appointed by the last two Governors, do use the cryptoclastic nature of education funding to obscure the true financial picture.

We could argue for changes in the funding mechanisms of public education until we are blue in the face, we could successfully enact legislation that attempts to make public education finances more transparent but nothing will change until we force a sea change in the system’s architecture itself.