Conference Committee Report Put to Bed!  Onward!  CCR doesn’t just mean Creedence Clearwater Revival, it also means Conference Committee Report and the Education Finance Conference Committee has finished its work and the finished conference committee report will now head to its next stop on the floor of the House of Representatives sometime in the next three days.  The conference committee added articles from the Early Childhood Committee bill to the foundation articles from K-12 and that

And Just Like That!  The conference committee process is not unlike making Jiffy Pop.  The ingredients are there, they are shaken up a bit, and voila!, the final product arrives in a jiffy (at least this year).  This has not been a year where vast differences in priorities have existed between the House and Senate majority caucuses and with a limited target of $43 million, there wasn’t much money to move around into a plethora of

Error Message!  In my last blog entry, I wrote that I thought the education finance conference committee would not meet until the week of May 13, but then I look at the schedule on the morning of Friday, May 10, and there it was:  a notice that the conference committee would be meeting at 8:30.  I also reported that I thought the omnibus education policy bill conference committee would not close up its work until education

Late Night/Early Morning Proceedings.  It was the wee, small hours of Tuesday morning when the Senate passed their version of the omnibus education finance bill on a 34-30 party-line vote.  Unlike the six-plus hour debate on the House floor, the Senate took between two and three hours to field eleven amendments (rejecting more than half–all offered by the Republicans), but accepting the rest, several which were offered by Republicans, including an amendment offered by Senator Carla

Long Debate and Partisan Vote.  Fifteen amendments and just over six hours of debate later and the House omnibus education finance bill passed on a party-line vote of 68-61.  Two of the amendments–both offered by the majority–went on the bill.  The first was Representative Edelson’s amendment that updates the READ Act by pushing the deadline for teacher training out one year to 2026.  Although the effort to improve literacy is bipartisan, there are distinctly different approaches