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Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: A record breaking year for charter school failures; Twin Cities apartment construction plummets; early voting returns; cannabis testing shenanigans; and Minnesotans’ electoral power.
Record number of charter schools failing, with more possibly ahead
The Star Tribune reports that nine of the state’s 181 charter schools have shut down this year, with another one facing the imminent revocation of its authorization over financial and management difficulties.
The story focuses on the STEP Academy in St. Paul and Burnsville, which serves a student body that’s 99% Black and predominantly immigrant. The school overextended itself with a recent expansion followed by enrollment projections that failed to materialize. It also had to repay $800,000 to the Department of Education for overstating its enrollment last year.
Charter schools, when run well, can be a bridge to success for students from disadvantaged communities who have challenges in traditional schools. But the overwhelming majority of Minnesota’s charter schools lag traditional public schools on standard measures of student achievement, and some experts argue that by catering to specific minority communities, many charters are bringing about a new era of school segregation.
Minnesota taxpayers spent over $1 billion on charter school funding last year.
Apartment construction projected to drop sharply
Axios reports that apartment construction is projected to drop 43% in the Twin Cities over the next five years, the sharpest decline in the nation. The drop is partly a response to the flurry of new housing construction in the previous five years, which stabilized rents here even as they soared in other major metros. Developers say they’re slowing things down while they wait for existing apartments to be filled.
Places like Wichita, Kansas and Bozeman, Montana, meanwhile, are projected to see new apartment construction explode by close to 250%.
One general word of caution, however: All forecasts are based on assumptions about how people will behave and how events will unfold in the coming months and years, and they often turn out to be off the mark or simply wrong.
Early voting: down from 2020, up from 2022
Minnesota election expert and occasional Reformer contributor Max Hailperin has been keeping tabs on early voting returns. So far, this year, the pattern is mainly what you’d expect: Early voting to date is down from the comparable point in the 2020 election cycle, when we were in the middle of a global pandemic and a massive push to vote by mail.
They’re up, however, from 2022, which is expected given that turnout is always higher in presidential election years.
So far, the decline from 2020 is slightly less steep in greater Minnesota, where many people had been accustomed to voting by mail well before the pandemic.
Data suggests cannabis quality testers are fudging mold levels
An investigation from the Wall Street Journal finds that labs in many cannabis-legal states are four times more likely to report mold levels just under the legal limit than just over. They also found that lab test results were directly tied to their future revenues: Labs detecting less mold got more business in the following year, while those detecting more saw their business drop.
“The improbable pattern suggests tainted samples are being cleared for sale,” the Journal’s authors write, with potentially harmful health consequences for users who assume that legal cannabis products are safe.
Minnesotans’ voting power
Cartography website maps.com recently ran an analysis of each state’s electoral power in presidential elections. Because states are guaranteed at least three electors, regardless of population, smaller states tend to be over-represented in the Electoral College while larger states are disadvantaged.
A vote in Wyoming, for instance, carries about three times as much electoral power as one from California, Texas or New York. Sparsely-populated places like Vermont and the Dakotas have similar advantages.
As with so many other things, Minnesota sits squarely in the middle of the pack. But that could change following the next census, however, as the state is projected to lose a seat in the House of Representatives, which means we’ll have one less electoral vote as well.