K-12 Bill Passes Both Houses.  I don’t know if any of you share my affinity for Western Swing Music from the 1940s and 1950s, but yesterday’s legislative floor sessions used Bob Wills’ “Stay a Little Longer” as an inspiration in accelerating the pace to finish the 2023 Legislative Session by the end of this week.  The K-12 bill passed the House on a party-line vote of 70-62 around 5 PM and the Senate took up

  It’s Almost in the Books!  The omnibus education funding and policy conference committee met briefly today to officially adopt the conference committee report.  The bill will now head first (perhaps as early as tomorrow–Tuesday) to the House floor for approval and upon a successful vote will go to the Senate.  The bill came together late last week and it certainly is a strong financial commitment to Minnesota’s education system.  There are expectations accompanying the historic

Soups On!  I had no sooner hit send on my last blog entry when the Conference Committee released its spreadsheet outlining the agreed-upon appropriations that will comprise the 2023 omnibus education finance and policy bill.  I will provide a more comprehensive description of the bill tomorrow as I have to digest the entire document. The big furniture is situated like this: General Education Basic Formula–4% for 2023-2024/2% for 2024-25/future increases tied to inflation with 2% floor

A Major Provision Adopted in Conference Committee. For those of you who were at the April SEE meeting, you may recall my praise for Representative Heather Edelson and the work she put into the Read Act.  The Read Act is a comprehensive approach to improving reading instruction and, more importantly, students’ reading results.  Representative Edelson has worked on the reading improvement issue since her election to the House of Representatives in 2016 and along with Senator

Just Gotta Have an Obscure 1970s Music Reference.  I keep forgetting how old I am and how much music I’ve listened to, but I couldn’t resist titling this entry after an old Todd Rundgren song from his masterpiece album Something/Anything.  The song One More Day (No Word) is the tale of a heartbroken guy whose girlfriend has left him and day-after-day he doesn’t hear from her.  Not a word.  Well, those of us in the education community

Short Meeting with Some Forward Motion.  The old Zen saying goes something like, “Every journey begins with one step.”  Well, we took a third step today and like the two previous meetings where language was adopted, it was a small step.  The important thing is that they are working through provisions that had language differences or provisions that were present in only one of the two bills.  They closed up the charter school article today and

Conference Committee Adopts First Budget Items.  The conference committee on the omnibus education finance and policy bill met briefly this morning and adopted provisions that contained funding for the first time during the overall proceedings.  The conference committee approved Article 4, which deals with both funding and policy items related to American Indian Education.  The funding portions of the Article spend a total of $59.3 million over the biennium, which in the neighborhood of the amounts

Conference Committee Begins Adopting Provisions.  The conference committee took its first steps in putting together the 2023 omnibus education finance and policy bill by adopting close to seventy identical provisions during its proceedings this afternoon.  The criteria for adoption is that the provisions had to be identical in both bills and not have an impact on the state general fund. The articles of the bill that included sections that were adopted were:  Article 1 (General Education),

Not Much to Report.  The conference committee on the omnibus education finance and policy bill met again this afternoon.  The principal order of business was finishing going through the side-by-side comparison.  At this juncture, it has been perfunctory for the most part with very little discussion of each provision beyond a simple description and whether the provision is contained in both bills.  It’s a valuable exercise, even for those of us who have followed the construction

Brief, but Insightful, Conference Committee Meeting.  The Education Finance and Policy Conference Committee met for two hours on Tuesday morning and continued to go through the side-by-side comparison of the two bills.  After finishing a comparison of Article 2–the Education Excellence article that contains a number of programs that aim to increase student achievement–the two sides discussed the logic they used in developing their proposed increase in the general education revenue basic amount.  As has been