Vision

One of the most important responsibilities of the State is to develop and provide all students with access to a quality public school system. Students deserve to have the opportunity to graduate ready for 21st Century success – whether they go on to a college, university or technical school or head straight to the workforce. Remediation after high school should not be necessary regardless of the path they choose. Also, all students need affordable access to higher education.

In these tough times, we are told that we need to cut education funding – writing off a generation of students – just when we most need to recognize the importance of education. Minnesota invested in education even during the Great Depression, and the entire nation did so after World War II, with the GI bill. John Marty believes that in order to achieve a world-class education for Minnesota students, we need strong state investment. Minnesota will not succeed if we expect our schools to rely on higher property taxes and the funds that parents and students can raise from bake sales and box tops.

John Marty believes that education funding is a responsibility of the state, instead of the property taxpayers. The quality of our children's education, their school's facilities, and the educational opportunities available to them, including extracurricular activities, should not be based on property taxes and the property wealth of the community in which they live.

John Marty supports comprehensive education. Schools today must teach more than just the fundamentals of reading, writing, math and science. While these are vital parts of the core curriculum, education must include a broad spectrum of learning, including financial literacy, arts, world languages, service learning, physical education, technical competence, and nutrition. Schools should ensure that students become caring, informed, knowledgeable, compassionate, and productive people, prepared for life and work in a global society.

John Marty supports educating the whole child. He knows that, while schools do an outstanding job with many students, they face growing challenges. Many students have mental and physical health problems, others do not speak English at home, and homeless kids bounce from school to school, with no stability in their lives. Children who go to school hungry or ill can’t concentrate on learning.  Addressing the needs of the whole child requires family and community support and early intervention with health and other problems. Children whose needs are not addressed languish in school or disrupt their classrooms, and neither they nor their schools can succeed.

John Marty believes that, while the ultimate responsibility for individual schools is with the local community, the state should evaluate academic excellence in a variety of ways that are fair and meaningful measures. For example, we should evaluate rigor and value-added in a manner that recognizes the diversity of ways in which students learn, and allow school districts the flexibility to achieve results accordingly. Accountability for results and monitoring to close the opportunity gap is essential, but too much testing, and failing to measure the appropriate things is a problem, too. Too much testing takes time and money away from teaching and learning. Comparing class averages between years is a poor measure of school and teacher effectiveness, and does nothing to help parents and teachers find out how their students are doing. Also, many valuable things that teachers teach are not possible to measure in any standardized test, e.g., character development or teaching kids to care about others. Although there is no objective way to measure character, individual teachers can see it in their students and help them develop empathy, respect, and other important values. Senator Marty says that standardized tests may work for math and other skills, but when the hyper-focus on such tests takes away a teacher's ability to build character and help students in times of personal crisis, we are not helping their future or ours.

John Marty's Record

1) Senate author of the New Minnesota Miracle, an education finance reform proposal that provides needed funding in a way that is fair and equitable for all types of students and districts. This legislation was developed by Rep. Mindy Greiling from the P.S. Minnesota coalition recommendations and principles that spell out what is needed to ensure success for all students, throughout Minnesota.

2) Authored legislation and advocated for full funding for cost-saving programs: Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE), sliding fee child care, the Women, Infants, Children (WIC) nutrition program, Head Start, Crisis Nurseries, and the School Readiness and School Breakfast programs.

3) Developed and authored the Minnesota Health Plan, legislation which would provide comprehensive health care, including mental health and chemical dependency treatment to every Minnesotan, ensuring that all students and their families get the care they need so that they can thrive in school.

4) Authored legislation for funding Environmental Learning Centers, legislation for Adult Literacy Programs, legislation to enable schools to create healthy youth development community programs, and legislation increasing funding for schools and restoring the budget cuts to education and early childhood education funding.

John Marty’s Agenda for Education in Minnesota

1.  Fully fund our state’s commitment to education.

Underfunding of schools is taking a huge toll on our societal foundations. According to the Education Trust, the United States is the only industrialized country in which current students are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school.

Education funding in Minnesota has not kept pace with inflation in recent years. Minnesota now ranks 37 in amount of K-12 spending as percentage of personal income, despite polls showing that Minnesotans are willing to pay for a quality educational system.

Schools cannot thrive when the funding they receive does not keep up with inflation, or when they face outright state cuts in education funding. In recent years, state accounting shifts have forced schools to borrow money just to pay operating expenses. John Marty believes the state must re-pay the school aid funding and levy recognition shifts and abide by its commitments to local school districts.

Proper funding is essential for strong schools. There is no magic reform bullet that can substitute for that funding. Too many school "reforms" that have been proposed in recent years are bogus solutions used by politicians as a smokescreen to cover for their unwillingness to provide proper funding. A good example is Governor Pawlenty’s “70 percent solution.” He claimed that as much as 40% of education spending was going to administrative costs instead of educating students, so he proposed requiring that 70% of school funds must be spent "in the classroom," an artificial distinction that suggested that school libraries, computer labs, special education, school nurses, counselors or social workers, working with parents, transportation to and from school, and numerous other education expenses simply all wasted money, that had nothing to do with the success of students. This was a purely political move intended to persuade voters that he was concerned about waste in school funding.

Thoughtful reforms are needed, and John Marty will work to ensure that every dollar is spent wisely; however, we need to recognize that schools need more funding. Laying off teachers and increasing class sizes, cutting or eliminating essentials such as the arts, world languages, vocational classes, and extracurricular activities are not the way to improve schools. Money is needed to run quality schools.    Investing time, energy and dollars in our schools is the only way to ensure that Minnesota's children become productive citizens and leaders in our multi-cultural society. In these challenging economic times, investing in education also is the most effective way to grow jobs and stimulate our economy. The bottom line, the most important factor in student success is more funding for their schools.

• Change education funding from property taxes to state taxes. Property taxes are a regressive and unfair means of paying for education and other services, because the quality of a school often reflects the property wealth of the community in which it is based. Statewide taxes provide a more equitable basis for funding education, as our state constitution explicitly requires. Currently, educators and volunteers are forced to devote far too much time and effort to convincing taxpayers – even the majority who want to help students – to vote for local levy referenda, when they recognize that property taxes are the least fair means of paying for schools.

John Marty wants to maximize the impact of parents and other adult volunteers, using them in school classrooms to provide extra attention to individual students. It is a terrible waste for parents, volunteers, teachers, and school board members to spend their time trying to pass levy referenda, collecting box tops and soup can labels, and supporting school kids in peddling magazines, candy, and other products.  John believes it is wrong to expect parents, teachers, and students to spend countless hours begging for money to keep their schools open, when their talents could be better used to improve educational quality.

• Improve the fairness of the statewide school funding formula. In providing needed funding, we must ensure the school funding formula is fair to the needs of differing types of students and districts. School districts have different expenses in such areas as transportation, technology, and salaries. In order for individual students to have a fair opportunity to graduate ready for success, their differing needs – e.g., challenges related to special education, gifted and talented, English Language learning, and poverty compensatory funding for students who are poor – must also be factored into the funding system. School districts also have differing abilities to raise money through local property tax levies for things like school buildings and their maintenance.

John Marty is the Senate author of the “New Minnesota Miracle,” as a fair funding reform proposal. The legislation is based on recommendations from P.S. Minnesota. P.S. Minnesota is a non-partisan coalition of statewide education organizations and parents, who hired independent experts to complete and analyze a report issued by a 2003-2004 Pawlenty task force on education funding. Based on their analysis of the Governor’s task force report, the experts estimated that the state needs to invest at least an additional $1 billion a year, above inflation, to adequately fund education and meet the needs of a 21st century high quality education system.

The New Minnesota Miracle is designed to provide enough funding, and allocate it fairly, to meet the needs of every student and every district, in order to reach the academic expectations we set for them.  It provides an adequately funded formula that is linked to inflation and targets dollars for special student and district needs. In addition to better funding, the formula is simple, equitable, and fair.  Recognizing the tough economic times, it is designed to allow for a phase-in period. By fully funding the state’s share of special education, it would end the current practice of compromising general education funding in order to meet state and federal mandates for special education. Voluntary, all-day kindergarten is state-funded making it equitably available to all children, and districts are provided flexibility to fund early childhood programs.

Student differences are funded: English Language Learners, special education, gifted and talented, career and technical, as well as compensatory funding to address the needs of poor children.

District differences are funded: Declining enrollment, sparse funding for low-populated areas of the state that are spread out, transportation, salary differences, school facilities and debt service aid, and agricultural school bond credit to lessen impact of school building projects on agricultural lands.

The reformed funding formula provides for an equalized school property tax system, reducing the differences between high and low funded districts through levy referenda offset.

A final highlight of the New Minnesota Miracle is the creation of a new funding stream for Innovation Revenue. Districts whose students are making progress receive this new funding and can serve as "best practices" districts for those whose students need to improve. Districts whose students need to improve also receive the funding, but only after they produce an approved plan that spells out how they will use research, evidence-based, or promising practices to enable their students to make better progress.

2. Close the opportunity gap and invest in early education programs

Minnesota has one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation. Starting early, especially with at-risk children, is the cheapest and best way to prevent an opportunity gap in the first place. The tools we give our young children to learn and the expectations we set for them will determine their readiness for kindergarten and for the future.

• Invest in early childhood programs like Head Start, School Readiness, Sliding Fee Childcare, and Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE). These learning opportunities give a big boost to young children and save money by enabling schools to focus more on kindergarten education and less on remediation and acclimating and disciplining emotionally and behavioral-disturbed children. John Marty supports a quality rating system for evaluating programs to enable families to know they are providing quality opportunities for young learners. He is fighting for full funding of these cost-saving programs, knowing that they are an essential part of a strong education system. Current waiting lists are unacceptable. All-day kindergarten is needed in every school district to maintain early learning academic gains once children reach the K-12 system.

• Provide individualized attention. Every child counts. Measures of academic excellence that focus attention on the progress of each student and recognize differences in student needs prevent them from falling through the cracks. Children have different learning styles and backgrounds, so schools need resources to challenge gifted and talented students, provide education to special needs children and give alternatives to those who don't thrive in a traditional classroom. Educational equity requires the acknowledgment of student cultural diversity and divergent strategies to address it. Many students today also need individual attention from school counselors, nurses, social workers, chemical dependency specialists, and psychologists. Well-stocked, culturally competent libraries and instructional materials, and up-to-date technology enable schools to tailor and personalize their education.

• Address the needs of the whole child and family. Homeless children and those who go to school on an empty stomach are unable to focus on learning. Likewise, students who live in dysfunctional households, with abusive or neglectful parents, are not able to thrive in school.  John Marty recognizes that we must address these inter-related social needs: he is the author of the Minnesota Health Plan, which would provide comprehensive health care, including chemical dependency and mental health treatment. He has been leading the fight to address hunger and homelessness and has fought for economic and social policies that would ensure that every student arrives at school ready to learn.

3.  Teacher Quality

Research demonstrates that, next to quality parenting, quality teaching is of utmost importance to student success. From teacher training to ongoing career staff development, teachers must be given every educational opportunity and tool to enable them to be the best possible teachers for each unique student. John Marty believes teachers must be paid commensurate with the important and challenging work that they do, and supports alternative teacher pay that pays teachers for taking on extra professional responsibilities and enables them to learn from each other. John supports giving teachers the time and autonomy to share their individual creativity and talents to benefit their students.

John is open to consideration of alternative routes to licensure, if and only if this is done in a manner that will improve education, rather than be used as a cheaper way to hire additional teachers. Adding bright and energetic teachers to challenging schools with teacher shortages can be good for students, so long as the new teachers are properly trained and maintain a good attitude and relationship with veteran, teaching staff. Students need a comprehensive team of professionals working together on their behalf.

4.  Choice

John Marty supports a sensible, balanced school system to educate our kids. He believes that charter schools have provided more options to meet students’ needs, and some have helped kids who learn in a different way. However, this must be done in a manner that complements regular schools and that does not segregate students. Segregation in charter schools has become a significant problem. While it can be helpful to highlight a culture, the environment, etc., we need to be sure that every student has the opportunity to interact regularly with a diverse population and to develop the skills necessary to be successful in the real world.

John Marty supports the newly enacted option of site-governed schools. Teachers and parents can create site-governed school within their school district. The schools have the same flexibility as charter schools, but remain part of the public school system, with organized employees.

5.  Share resources and programs to benefit schools and the community

The vast majority of Minnesota school districts are successfully sharing services. In these tough economic times, even more opportunities are being developed locally. John Marty believes change happens best from the bottom up and that the state’s role is to facilitate innovation and cooperation whenever possible. For example, for economic and practical reasons, schools should have access to the resources and facilities owned by state and local governments and vice versa.

• Encourage new partnerships between schools and communities to maximize the use of our resources. These partnerships might include public library/school library collaborations, cooperative efforts between community recreation and school athletic programs and facilities, joint purchasing for cheaper prices, or partnerships between schools and the business community to ensure technical preparation, e.g., service learning, apprenticeships and mentorships.

• Keep schools open by sharing facilities and inter-district cooperation. Demographic and economic realities have forced the consolidation of many rural school districts. This is often a painful but necessary choice for communities. Where possible, the state and communities need to devise a way of keeping schools open. One option would be to determine if health and human services could share facilities with the schools to deliver care for children and families.

• Use technology to broaden curriculum choices. Access to sufficient, up-to-date technology is critical in many ways -- among them, to cut testing time and costs, to have access to educational resources in homes and workplaces, to provide college prep courses to K-12 students, and to ensure access to a broad curriculum in all school districts. The purpose of online learning is to benefit students, not to cheapen the quality of their education. Sharing teachers and courses between districts can enrich students’ opportunities for lower-incidence classes, such as Chinese or calculus. Online learning should not be used as a cash cow for those providing a remote, impersonal, factory-mill type of education, and it must be provided by qualified teachers.

• Integrate the best features of the smaller schools into the statewide system. John Marty believes that we need to recognize that small schools have often been the most successful in educating students because teachers can offer more individual attention. Large schools can benefit from this example by creating "school within a school" programs. Research shows that small schools, where each student is individually known and cared about, can have an even bigger impact on students’ success than small classrooms, though smaller class sizes are also critically important to student success, especially for younger students.

6.  School Government

John Marty supports the P-20 Education Partnership, charged to create a seamless education system, from pre-school through higher education.

He supports a depoliticized Department of Education, whether that means recreating the state board of education, a revitalized Office of Education Accountability, or a combination of the two. The governor and legislature would benefit from responsible, nonpartisan information and sustained advice from a group of respected, non-political leaders.