[This story originally appeared in the June 12, 2009 PIM Weekly Report.]

The school children hadn’t even clambered on to the buses for the final time in their 2008-09 calendar year this week when superintendents and other district and building administrators across Minnesota started trying to get their heads and calculators around what is shaping up to be the worst extended economic climate for E-12 education in modern state history.

Funding under the basic, per-pupil education formula has essentially been frozen in place for the next two years–and that’s the good news.

2 Responses to “”

1. Anonymous Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 7:46 am

   Pawlenty likes to say that there’s broad support among the public for his unallotment plans… have there been any polls to show this? I find it hard to believe that people in Minnesota aren’t smart enough to realize that he’s padding his resume for a presidential run at our expense. Can’t anything be done to stop him? It reminds me of the run up to the Iraq war, when those opposing the war were unable to stop Bush. We shouldn’t have a government where one person can impact so many lives without being required to go through some checks and balances.

2. Anonymous Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 9:38 am

   The financial problems passed down to schools aren’t the end of the troubles. As we’ve seen before in Minnesota, we lay off new teachers and discourage current and future collegians from pursuing education careers. Nowhere is this more true than in already scarce teaching disciplines like math and science. When the economy begins to recover (or legislators and the governor begin doing their jobs) we’ll have a serious generational and experience gap that can take years to fill.

   Unfortunately, we can’t defer students’ lives in the meantime. They don’t considerately go on hold while we screw around with their schools; they keep growing up and progressing through the schools, year by year, regardless of whether we have enough teachers with the right skills to teach them. As their preparation is held back, so will their performance in school and on the job — but of course the conservative crowd will trumpet this as a failure of the schools instead of the failure of the entire education system, of which legislators and the person in the corner office are major stakeholders.