The tradition of Iron Range public education excellence once required no explanation.
Most local kids attended grand, palatial high schools with theaters, pools, cutting-edge science labs and vocational training facilities. Range superintendents recruited the best college education graduates in the state to teach the sons and daughters of miners. The children learned about boundless opportunities in a big, fast-changing world. For two or three generations, this created some of the most dynamic upward mobility in the nation, attracting national attention from education researchers.
Today, that education tradition bears the same patina you find on our old buildings. It’s still there, but needs attention and care. Some of those old schools were razed over the past few years. New ones rise in their place, but they no longer stand on tradition. The outcome is uncertain. So is the budget.
Thanks to political machinations before most of us were born, windfall tax revenue from mining companies no longer provide the amenities touted in our education history. When the cost of educating students shifted away from the mines, more people balked at the price tag. State government stepped in to help, most famously in the “Minnesota Miracle” of the 1970s, but political winds no longer blow consistently in favor of schools. Sometimes, the sails fall slack. More recently, some even show aversion to public education.
This isn’t new.
The $4 million Hibbing High School opened in 1923. That’s $71 million in today’s dollars, though practically priceless due to fine details in construction. At the time it was the most expensive high school in America. This attracted Rose Feld, a New York Times reporter, to Hibbing in 1925.
“Hibbing High School is perhaps the most extravagant example of Western prosperity,” wrote Feld. “Standing in the middle of a town built around a mine, drawing its pupils from miners’ families and the farms in the sparsely settled outlying country, it is a strong argument against the notion that industrial towns are owned by the industry that gave them birth. Hibbing isn’t owned by anybody but its citizens, and its high school is shining proof of the fact.”
But Feld also identified local backlash to the school. One miner lamented that his children were learning to enjoy things he could never afford.
“My kids come home from school,” he said. “It’s a good home, a comfortable home. But it hasn’t all them new-fangled things the school has, no paintings, no statues, no soft lights, no electricity for cooking. … What good is a school and all that if it’s going to cause trouble. It’s not preparin’ the kid for the life she’s going to lead. It’s making her curious of things she won’t ever get, maybe.”
Feld suggested to another miner that he might not have to work in a mine had he attended such a school.
“No, I wouldn’t,” the man said. “That’s true. The question is, would I be workin’ anywhere? Would I think myself too good to work?”
The role of public education on the Iron Range was not as universally beloved as it is often portrayed; however, key agreements allowed the system to grow and thrive.
Namely, working people were on the same page as mining executives who otherwise opposed taxes on their industry. The workers wanted their kids to have more status and career options. The executives wanted kids that adapted more quickly to American culture and capitalism. Both groups got what they wanted out of these big schools.
There were several outcomes from the Iron Range education movement:
1) Iron Range schools smashed the notion that only major cities could send kids to college. A relationship between the schools and the University of Minnesota and other colleges were forged from the beginning.
2) The Range demonstrated the value of vocational education. Cutting-edge job training curriculum for boys and girls helped improve the economic prospects of the next generation.
3) In fact, the Iron Range became a proving ground for the state’s community and technical college system. Hibbing Junior College was the state’s first rural community college, and arguably its most successful in those early years. Other Range towns quickly followed suit.
4) Early investment in support services gradually reduced the economic gaps among students in terms of their education. This included dentistry, vaccinations, basic medical treatments, social work and English language instruction.
Today’s education leaders will recognize these same goals today. So how did we lose what we seemed to already have?
As the reporter Feld pointed out, Hibbing High School represented independence for the town, a careful rebellion by community political leaders and even some local mining executives who helped soften opposition from U.S. Steel. This was true in Chisholm, Virginia, Eveleth and Gilbert, too.
But any school opened after the 1920s had less to work with. The mines and their political allies turned off the valve to the ad valorem tax system. A more moderate iron ore production tax took over, a system that could be generous when mines were doing well, but not always and never as generous as before.
And yet, we are still here, and so are our schools. Another generation is coming up the pike, just as they always do. We don’t have as many Iron Range schools as before, and the budget is tighter. But excellence remains a noble goal that, when shared among all classes, produces proven results.
I will be giving a lecture for the Northern Lights Music Festival entitled, “Best in the Nation: How Iron Range Education Led the Nation and Could Again.” That talk will take place at 7 p.m. on Monday, July 15 at the Veda Zupancic Auditorium at Mesabi East High School in Aurora.
Aaron J. Brown is an author and college instructor from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com and co-hosts the podcast “Power in the Wilderness” on Northern Community Radio. This piece first appeared in the Saturday, July 13, 2024 edition of the Mesabi Tribune.
My Father started at Virginia Junior College driving there directly after a night shift at the Douglas Mine..he was tired of it.. The quality of his teachers was very high. I know and knew many from engineers to a dentist and attorney who started off at Ely Junior College and Hibbing Junior College.
Like the miner interviewed by the Times in 1923, there are many people today who question the value of education. Education, by its very nature, changes people, and many parents and others are opposed to children changing. They want to preserve religious beliefs, historical myths, ignorance of science, and social prejudices in their and other people’s children. In some cases, having done poorly in school themselves and having hated it, they fear that if their children become well educated they will lose respect for them. In some ways, it is important for the economic system that some children fail at education. There are not enough jobs as executives, lawyers, engineers, or doctors for everyone if education uniformly succeeded, and there is large demand for people to fill low paying jobs open to those who failed. Politicians need voters who blindly support old prejudices and jingoistic and supremicist beliefs rather than are actually able to think through social, economic, and international issues.
These issues go far deeper than the unwillingness to pay taxes that often acts as a smokescreen for all of this. We are seeing a nationwide trend to give power to parents and others to intervene actively to stop children — and adult learners — from being educated, and to persecute educators and librarians who try to offer good education.
People play lip service to the idea of excellence in education, but it often appears that the current system and its failings are exactly what many people want, and that as many people are actively striving to make education worse as to make it better.