Peter Hutchinson, president, Bush Foundation

Last update: February 9, 2008 - 6:38 PM

PETER HUTCHINSON, PRESIDENT, BUSH FOUNDATION

We're in a recession. That's something we shouldn't pretend is not true. And it's a different kind of recession, because it's so pervasive.

Since the year 2000, the rate of employment has gone down in this state. A smaller percentage of working-age people are working, and the average wage in real-dollar terms has also gone down. My view is that it's going to last a while. There isn't some snapback, or easy answer.

That means a recession that's spread all across the state, to every family, big towns, small towns -- with the one interesting exception of people who sell farm commodities. If you're a farmer, things are good, in a way they haven't been for a long time.

We're going to hear that state government is $1 billion in a hole. That sounds so abstract -- but that's teachers who would otherwise be teaching kids, medical care that would otherwise be available to families, roads that will never get fixed.

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About education, there are two facts we've got to change. The first is that in the next 10 years, the absolute number of high school graduates is going to go down if we don't change course. We can't afford that. You just can't be a state with a shrinking workforce and succeed.

There are enough human beings to produce a growing workforce. But the number of kids is going down. The number of kids least likely to graduate is going up. You put those two things together and you end up with a very challenging situation -- but you don't have to accept it.

The other thing is this: 36 percent of our kids are being cheated. They graduate and are told when they get to college that they have to take remedial courses. You can't grow the workforce we need if a) we can't get them to graduate or b) when they do graduate, it doesn't mean that they learned what they were supposed to learn.

A third terrible fact is that half the kids who enroll in college never graduate. We don't even have a goal for how many kids ought to graduate from college.

If you put all of those things together, you could double the number of kids with college degrees here. It could be done, but not with the system we're using today. That system is fundamentally broken. If Minnesotans don't change that, there just won't be the workforce to sustain the economy that we've all gotten used to.

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One strategy we could use a lot more: Put people in peer groups. Re-create the communities that used to hold people accountable. I sat in a welfare reform discussion one night with eight single moms who had been on welfare. They didn't like the system very much, but they were really mad at the people who were screwing the system. I kept thinking, get out of the way. Let these people run this. They'll make it work.

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