Edina's school system: from Minnesota's gold standard to abject failure

There was a time when the Edina school system was the best in the state. Those days are ancient history. Kathy Kersten's Washington Examiner op-ed gives us a history of what went wrong in Edina that's important to understanding Edina's slide. Kathy Kersten wrote "For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution."

The she pinpoints the start of the decline, writing "The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the 'All for All' strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to 'racial equity.'" It was downhill after that.

Kersten's op-ed continued, saying "'Equity' in this context does not mean 'equality' or 'fairness.' It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting 'white privilege.'"

Jenna Gloeb updates us with this article:

As corporations and federal agencies back away from diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the City of Edina is going in the opposite direction — launching a new Equity Strategic Action Plan (ESAP) designed to further embed DEI into city government.

The plan, adopted in June and currently being implemented, is expected to be completed in 2027. According to a city newsletter, the plan will "improve how the City uses data to best understand the needs of employees and the community," and focus on "creating culturally accommodating public spaces and updating wayfinding signage that is easy to see and understand."

This is the frightening part of Gloeb's article:

Thomas Brooks, the city’s diversity, equity, and inclusion manager, informed Alpha News that the plan was not approved by the city council—nor was there a formal vote.

"The ESAP is an operational work plan adopted by staff leadership," said Brooks in an email to Alpha News. "While there was no formal or public vote or council action, the public and City Council were invited to provide input through a survey conducted earlier this year that received just over 350 responses from staff and community members."

Getting 350 responses in a city of 53,000+ isn't much more than a rounding error. That doesn't constitute a legitimate sample. That's more like anecdotal information than actual data. According to this news report, Edicna has some major problems to fix:

According to the WCCO-TV report, Edina's math scores dropped 5.9% over a 5-year period. Reading scores dropped 3.6% while science scores dropped 10.7%. This is Edina's recipe for disaster:

The Edina school district’s All for All plan mandated that henceforth "all teaching and learning experiences" would be viewed through the "lens of racial equity," and that only "racially conscious" teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap, which they attributed to "barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings."

I've never seen this big of a collection of well-educated fools anywhere before. That it's happening in the city that used to be the gold standard for education in Minnesota is disheartening. Edina's superintendent should be terminated immediately. DEI should be stripped from wherever it's embedded. We shouldn't be in a race to the bottom. We should strive to be like Florida and Mississippi. They're the top 2 states in the U.S. in terms of the national report card.