Education and crime are top priorities among Minneapolis residents two months before the city's most contentious mayoral election in a generation, according to a poll conducted for the Star Tribune.
The findings illustrate why many of the most active candidates have spent weeks laying out education plans, despite City Hall's lack of direct control over the city's independent school system.
About 27 percent of respondents in a poll of 800 likely Minneapolis voters said education was the most important issue facing the city. Twenty-four percent said it was crime, while another 17 percent answered property taxes. The other choices given to respondents were affordable housing, transportation, racial disparities and police misconduct.
The poll, conducted by Pulse Opinion Research from Sept. 8-10, has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
Poll respondent John Newman, a retiree who lives on the northern edge of Lake Calhoun, called education increasingly important as the demographics of the city change.
"I'm extremely proud of our state and we're number one or two in so many great things, [but] we're also well up there in the disparity between the educational attainments of minorities vs. the remainder," he said. "Our future, more and more, is going to depend on minorities. So to me, education is really critical."
Newman said he supports mayoral candidate Mark Andrew, but feels that the mayor's race is largely a separate issue from education.
Residents are giving priority to the city's schools as a problem after the federal No Child Left Behind law and a barrage of publicity by self-styled reformers has spotlighted the district's achievement gap. Fewer than half of the district's students graduate from high school within four years, and academic skills lag for many of the district's minority students. The situation has prompted a defection of students to charter schools, some of which are demonstrating better results than the district has achieved despite trying a number of strategies to close the gap.
