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Minnesota 4th graders are performing worse on standardized reading tests than their peers in Mississippi. At least six state lawmakers have been arrested and charged with various crimes while in office. Bong water can send you to prison for decades.
Those are a few of the more startling things I’ve learned in a year of reporting on life in Minnesota. As December draws to a close and we brace for whatever the new year will bring, here’s a look back at some of my favorite stories from 2024.
Falling behind on education
The elevation of Gov. Tim Walz to vice-presidential candidate prompted a closer look at Minnesota students’ educational performance during his tenure. Things aren’t great: Under Walz, fourth graders’ reading proficiency fell behind the national average for the first time in history.
The state dropped 13 places in a leading national education ranking, with our elementary kids faring worse than those from Mississippi, long the butt of jokes for its abysmal quality of life.
In dozens of schools, mostly public charters, entire classrooms aren’t meeting bare minimum standards for reading or math.
Many of those problems are due to factors, like persistent racial and economic disparities, that predate Walz and will continue to be in place long after he leaves office. Lingering effects of the COVID-19 shutdowns also get some blame, although we also found that in some grades student achievement has continued to fall long after the initial crisis passed.
I also visited a rural school whose students had to raise cash to save their own classrooms after voters twice rejected funding levies. The state’s reliance on local levies to fund education creates some of the disparities driving achievement down, especially in rural areas where there isn’t a large tax base to draw from.
Our embarrassing officeholders
One of the weirder stories I wrote this year was about Republican legislation, inspired by the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory, to regulate non-existent phenomena including “xenobiotic electromagnetism and fields.”
It was one of several bills pushed by conspiracy theorists at statehouses around the country, and thankfully went nowhere given Democratic control of the Legislature. Several of the bill’s co-authors, including Senate Assistant Minority Leader Justin Eichorn, R-Grand Rapids, dropped off it after we published our story.
I don’t expect we’ve heard the last of it, however. Just this month state Sen. Eric Lucero, the bill’s chief author and a Saint Michael Republican, was pushing nonsense about “orbs” purportedly appearing in the sky. When you don’t understand how anything works, everything is a conspiracy theory, as they say.
There were more mundane embarrassments as well. I also covered the six lawmakers who were arrested and charged with various crimes while in office. Five out of six of those cases involved drunk driving, while the last is DFL Sen. Nicole Mitchell of Woodbury, who is facing first-degree burglary charges for allegedly breaking into her stepmother’s house while dressed like a literal burglar.
A pretty good chart
Sometimes you see a number in the news and have no idea how to make sense of it: Last January, for instance, I learned that the state of Minnesota spreads about 445,000 tons of salt on the roadways each year.
But how much salt is that, exactly? Is it enough to fill a pool, or a barn, or some even bigger, more arbitrary volume?
I decided to find out, and using a little math from a trade group I was able to determine that much salt would create a pile about 160 feet tall and 500 feet wide: roughly the size of the U.S. Bank Stadium.
To the high school geometry teacher who insisted that knowing how to derive the volume of a cone was a useful life skill: you were right, and I was wrong.
Drug policy
This year saw the attempted rollout of the Office of Cannabis Management’s social equity policy, intended to give people harmed by the War on Drugs a leg up in the forthcoming legal marijuana market.
One issue with the policy is that lawmakers ended up writing it very broadly, making it so a wide range of people could plausibly be considered a social equity applicant for a cannabis license. Many of the qualifiers ended up being based on where people live, rather than how they personally had experienced the effects of marijuana enforcement.
As a result, somewhere between 30% and 40% of Minnesota adults could be considered for a social equity license, I reported in May, virtually ensuring a massive crush of applicants for the special leg-up license.
That’s exactly what ended up happening. There were close to 2,000 applications for the initial batch of 182 licenses. The Office of Cannabis Management ended up disqualifying more than 1,000 of them for various reasons, alleging people were flooding the zone to get a leg-up on the leg-up license. Several of them sued over it. As a result, the OCM cancelled the license lottery and pushed everything back until next year at the earliest, making it questionable whether the social equity program will even be able to grant the early mover advantage lawmakers had envisioned.
I also wrote about the case of Jessica Beske from Fargo, who is currently facing the prospect of decades in prison on account of the water from a meth bong allegedly found in her car. While the Legislature has taken steps to decriminalize drug paraphernalia, there’s a loophole in state law that allows zealous prosecutors to treat bong water as if it were the pure, uncut form of the drug itself.
Beske’s case is ongoing, and she’s currently being represented in court by the ACLU of Minnesota. Nobody would have known about her story if Beske herself hadn’t reached out to us, so if you’ve got any tips about authorities using their power in questionable ways be sure to drop us a line