Simple $2.4 billion math

As a Mathematics Teacher (I capitalize) I taught simple arithmetic on what are the current grounds of the Minnesota Supreme Court. I guess it should have been Refresher Math for our legislators and our governor, too. Instead, they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the governor waved two documents. One showed a $2.4 billion surplus for the next year two years, for which he smiled, and a $2.4 billion potential debt for the following two years for which he lamented. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He was in need of another $2.4 billion from us taxpayers to cover the future debt.

My Mechanic Arts students would have immediately known the simple solution: Save the $2.4 billion for two years now and cover the $2.4 billion debt for the costs ahead. Simple math. Simple legislators and a simple governor who once was a teacher, but no longer remembers.

We can’t keep spending what we don’t have. Save it and you can.

Tom King, West St. Paul

They couldn’t denounce movements calling for genocide?

It was beyond belief that three university presidents, representing three of the most prestigious universities in the nation, when testifying before Congress, failed to denounce movements on their campuses calling for “genocide” of Jews as a result of the tragedy that has become the Israeli-Gaza war. Genocide, defined by the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.”

One would hope that such language, notwithstanding the protections of the First  Amendment, would be intolerable in an educated society. Calling for the genocide of a group (remember Hitler, less than a century ago) should not be countenanced or accepted as free speech. Calling “fire” in a crowded theater is a criminal act, one of the first lessons of Torts in a law school. No group, Christian, Jew, Muslim, or any other denomination or persuasion should have to endure such intolerance. Yet we have seen too much of it in our society in recent years.

Perhaps it’s past time for those who sit in their thrones of power to reassess the curricula to encompass civics and humanity.

Alan Miller, Eagan

There’s opportunity here, Republicans, if you’ll focus

In the Dec. 3 Pioneer Press, the Bloomberg Editorial Board shared this startling fact: 43% of students taking the ACT Test last year did not meet even one of the college and career readiness benchmarks for the four core areas of English, math, reading and science. The declining performance of our high school students was well underway before COVID, with 35% of students not meeting the benchmark in even one area in 2018. Bloomberg’s editors blame the decline on any meaningful form of accountability in America’s high schools.

Public schools lost thousands of students to parochial schools during COVID when public schools remained closed in urban areas and most parochial schools opened to in-person instruction. The same teacher unions that now are demanding larger raises at the negotiating table drove the movement to keep these large urban districts closed to in-person instruction. These are also the same unions that argue against standardized testing, and any other measure of accountability, because it is inequitable for low income students in their urban areas. Didn’t these low income students need in-person instruction more than their rural and higher income students during COVID for the same equity reasons they now argue we cannot use standardized assessments of learning? Democrats, whose political success is frequently due to the support of teacher unions, are not likely to make the changes our schools need to turn around these startling trends in student achievement.

This should create a real opportunity for Republicans as more and more political scientists claim that statewide and federal elections are being determined in the suburbs by women voters. Suburban mothers, first and foremost, want their children to learn to read, write and think logically as a result of attending school. Republicans, however, cannot seem to get beyond the politically explosive topics of Critical Race Theory, transgender access to sports and censorship of various books and instructional materials when discussing education. These issues are dominating more and more of our school board meetings despite playing little to no role in student achievement. Republicans are missing a real opportunity to win over suburban mothers with these misguided efforts.

The Department of Education in Minnesota has spent a significant amount of taxpayer dollars creating minimal standards a high school graduate should be able to perform. It is time the department held our schools and learners to those standards instead of setting so many students up for failure in the next phase of their lives whether they are attending college, trade schools, the military or entering the workforce.

Roger Stippel Jr., Star Prairie, Wis.

‘I am going to be restored’

Thanks to contributing writer Elliot Mann for an inspiring portrait of Barbara Espy, the Hudson, Wis., resident who’s recovering from a hit-and-run accident while on her bicycle (“‘I Shouldn’t Have Survived,’” Nov. 10).

Espy suffered a traumatic brain injury, broken pelvis, several fractured vertebra, lacerated liver, fractured hip and nearly severed ankle. She describes herself not as a survivor but as an overcomer, and vows, “I am going to be restored.”

I’d say that if she can be restored, any of us can. You go, Barbara Espy.

Dave Healy, St. Paul

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