Education bills moving through Legislature
"MN Education"04/22/2005
Norman Draper, Star Tribune
April 22, 2005
Bills that would pump hundreds of millions of new dollars into K-12 education were approved by education funding committees in both the Republican-majority House and DFL-controlled Senate Thursday.
It’s the first time the two chambers have officially laid out in black and white how much they want to spend for K-12 education over the next two years, and what in particular they want to spend it on. On the key component of education financing—the basic funding formula that goes to all schools—the House proposal calls for bumping that amount up 3 percent in the coming year, and up another 3.1 percent in the 2007 budget year. According to House budget figures, that’s a $359 million boost over current spending for the two years. The Senate proposal is for a 5 percent increase this year and a 4 percent increase the next year. Senate figures put that at a $636 million increase for the two years. Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s proposal calls for 2½-percent increases in the basic formula for each of the two funding years.
Other provisions in one or both of the bills include proposals to beef up school gifted-and-talented programs, statewide anti-bullying measures, a measure to encourage the use of America’s founding documents in the classroom, and new ways to pay teachers. The House bill contains a provision that would bar truant students from getting their driver’s licenses and one that would encourage schools to include “character education” in their curriculums. In the Senate bill are calls for changes in the federal No Child Left Behind testing law and a proposal to drop out of the law’s requirements if those changes aren’t made.
The bills still must go through more legislative committees before they can be voted on by the full House and Senate. Then conference committees would work out differences between the two bills. But Thursday’s actions constituted the first big steps in the process. Both the Senate K-12 Education Budget Division and the House Education Finance Committee are the ones that molded the big education bills out of dozens of proposals that have been debated over the last several months.
Both bills call for spending a total of $12 billion to $13 billion on K-12 education over the next two years. But the House and Senate figure out their revenues and expenses in different ways, making it tough to do apples-to-apples comparisons between the two total figures.
For instance, the House K-12 bill contains an $181 million appropriation for family and early-childhood programs for the two years. Such programs aren’t included in the Senate bill. The two chambers also use different ways to calculate the impact of property taxes on state revenues and expenditures.