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Education Minnesota sets top legislative priorities for 2010

Education Minnesota will concentrate on three priorities in the 2010 legislative session:

• Defending E-12 and higher education funding from further cuts, shifts and unallotments.
• Creating a statewide school employee health insurance pool to address skyrocketing insurance costs.
• Increasing student achievement through policies to help close the achievement gap and research-based methods to support and improve teacher quality.

Although 2010 is not a budget year for the Legislature, the most urgent business this session will be to close a projected budget shortfall of $1.2 billion to bring the state budget back into balance. Education Minnesota will work to protect funding for E-12 and higher education.

The union will urge lawmakers to plan for a funding increase in the next biennium to at least cover the true cost of inflation for school districts, and for long-term reform of state education funding to make it equitable, sustainable, predictable and sufficient.

Education Minnesota will continue to work to enact its school employee health insurance bill and to explore longer-term solutions in collaboration with other unions and organizations.

In addition, Education Minnesota will advocate for stable, equitable and competitive pensions to help recruit and retain excellent teachers, and for passage of the bonding requests from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and the University of Minnesota.

The union will propose an encompassing plan to improve achievement for all students, particularly students of color and those from low-income families. It includes very small class sizes in schools where the achievement gap is a recurring issue, loan forgiveness programs to attract teachers to those schools, and additional training.

Teacher quality initiatives include maintaining rigorous licensing standards, supporting high-quality professional development and new-teacher induction, and increasing recruitment of teachers from diverse populations.

January 29, 2010