Omnibus Turbulence and Bipartisan Bright Spots: A Mid-Session Look at Education Legislation

By Madie Spartz

(EdAllies also discussed mid-session updates on our first-ever live recording of the amplifiED podcast on LinkedIn Live You can stream the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or watch the live recording on LinkedIn.)

The 2025 legislative session continues to be one for the record books. After a 3-week stalemate in the House, they finally got up and running in February with one empty seat still waiting to be filled. In March, when a special election resulted in an evenly split House, Republicans and Democrats created a power-sharing agreement which was generally working well—after all, a 67-67 split means no legislation can advance without bipartisan support. Unfortunately, that unraveled in omnibus negotiations: while the House Education Policy committee was able to come to an agreement without much fanfare or proposing significant policy changes, the Education Finance committee is at an impasse. Instead of releasing a budget package by the final deadline, that committee passed a placeholder bill, pushing out negotiations further. 

Over on the Senate side, things are slightly less dramatic (individual member legal troubles notwithstanding). The DFL holds an effective two-seat majority, which requires compromise on some issues, but has allowed them to create both policy and finance omnibus packages in their respective Education committees. Those bills still need to pass off the Senate floor and could be amended there, but it’s safe to say we know the bulk of what the Senate is proposing for education this year.

These dynamics make our mid-session update more complicated than usual, but fear not. We break down what we know so far and what’s still up in the air, including major highlights from the omnibus bills and where things stand with EdAllies’ major policy priorities. 

Policy Omnibus Bills

• • Addressing chronic absenteeism. In a standout moment of bipartisanship, the House voted 133-0 to pass two standalone attendance bills, a rarity in the omnibus-heavy world of Minnesota politics. HF 62 and HF 2067 clarify attendance definitions and procedures to ensure that each school in Minnesota is reporting attendance in a uniform way- something not currently happening. The legislation also ensures that when a student is dropped from school rolls after missing 15 days, the county and in some cases the state are informed to ensure no student falls through the cracks. While it may seem small, this is the first step in fully understanding the scope of the absenteeism problem in Minnesota, which will allow lawmakers to craft targeted and meaningful policy solutions in the future. While other provisions are still in play in the House Department of Children, Youth, and Families and Senate Education omnibus bills, HF 62 and HF 2067 could still be voted out of the Senate and sent directly to the Governor.
  • The Read Act: The Senate’s bill makes several small but meaningful improvements to the Read Act, including the addition of literacy training to re-licensure requirements, increased clarity on the curriculum review process, and new screening requirements for dual language immersion programs. The House did not include Read Act changes in their proposal.
  • Increased transparency and accountability for charter schools. There’s been lots of discussion this session about struggling schools in the charter sector. Some lawmakers proposed a charter moratorium, which would prevent new charters from opening, but not actually address the issues facing schools that already exist. Thanks to strong advocacy, the Senate added transparency and accountability provisions for the charter sector into their bill. The House did not include any new charter policy in their bill, meaning this issue will get taken up in conference committee. 

Finance Omnibus Bills

While the House Education Finance committee does not yet have a full proposal, there are some notable provisions in other committees, including the Senate Education Finance Committee, the Senate Higher Education Committee, and the House Children and Families Committee. With a small, $456 million surplus and a nearly $6 billion budget deficit facing the state budget a few years from now, the House, Senate, and Governor all proposed modest and different funding amounts for K-12 education for the 2026-27 biennium. 

The Senate proposes $0 in additional K-12 spending over those two years, while the House proposes $40 million in new K-12 spending. The Governor, on the other hand, proposed to cut $240 million from the education budget in the next biennium. 

• • Eliminating the inflationary adjustment in the basic education formula. In order to address the projected deficit in the next budget cycle, the Senate proposed eliminating automatic increases to education spending based on inflation. This was a signature policy change for Democrats in the 2023 legislative session, so it’s a notable shift from a committee chaired by a Democrat. It’s received a lot of public attention. In the Senate proposal, this would go into effect in the 28-29 biennium. 
  • Eliminating nonpublic pupil aid. Under current law, the state contributes funds for public school districts to provide transportation, books, and counseling services to students in their attendance area who attend nonpublic school. This proposal came from the Governor’s budget and would cut $105 million in state spending.
  • Changes to literacy incentive aid and establishment of a compensatory revenue task force. This change would make the only funding stream dedicated exclusively to literacy more equitable by decoupling it from MCA scores. Currently, districts with higher MCA scores generate more funding, which leads to inequities across the state. The Senate proposes to instead tie funds to student enrollment, concentrated poverty, and the number of English learners. Additionally, they propose convening a task force to improve compensatory revenue, one of the largest sources of education funding in the state, dedicated to providing additional resources to students living in poverty.   
  • Expanding Direct Admissions statewide. Direct Admissions is a new program with a clear impact on expanding college access, by ensuring that qualified high school students are proactively admitted to up to 50 colleges in the state during their senior year of high school. The Senate Higher Education committee included this proposal in their omnibus bill, which provides additional funding to the program and would require all high schools to adopt it by 2030. Despite bipartisan support and a successful hearing in the House, it wasn’t included there, but it remains in play heading into conference committee negotiations.
  • Maintaining support for early learning scholarships. Early learning scholarships saw a major infusion of new funding in 2023, ensuring that low-income families have access to high-quality programming for children 0-5. This is a critical investment with demonstrated returns when it comes to both school readiness and child development, however, the program faces a funding cliff with the budget set to be cut in half. The House Children and Families committee proposed a very small investment to prevent this, at least in part, but with budget negotiations ongoing, this is very much still in flux.

Where Do Things Stand With…

• • Universal Meals? There have been attempts to roll back or limit eligibility for universal meals, but the DFL has made it clear that this is off the table for them. So far, no changes to universal meals have made it into any omnibus bill. Watch the committee hearing where advocates, students, and school nutrition staff speak about the impact of universal meals. 
  • Automatic Enrollment? Students of color and low-income students are underrepresented in advanced coursework across the state– a bipartisan bill aimed to fix that by creating a pilot program for districts to automatically enroll students into rigorous classes for which they’re qualified. The bill passed out of the finance committee in the Senate, but unfortunately was not included in the omnibus bill. The bill did not get a hearing in the House.
  • Teacher Pathways? Despite an impactful hearing in the Senate on how licensure requirements impact teacher supply (and some proposed amendments in the omnibus bill hearing to reinstate the Tier 2 experience pathway), there’s been no meaningful movement on teacher licensure this session. Meanwhile, investments in increasing teacher diversity appear to be on the chopping block. One key program under threat is Grow Your Own, with the Senate proposing to maintain but significantly scale back investment in this program that helps unlicensed district staff become teachers.

Playing Defense

There are plenty of sports metaphors that apply here: advocacy is not always about playing offense on new policies. Some of the most important work lies in defending things already on the books, which EdAllies did a lot of this year, including:

• • Preventing a shift from high school MCAs to ACT or SAT exams. The MCAs are aligned to state standards which are publicly developed and used in our accountability system. If we switched to a nationally normed college-entrance exam like the ACT, we can’t meaningfully measure how students are performing on the standards we expect schools to teach. Our schools and students would instead be held accountable to a privately-designed test with real consequences for college prospects, and with inequities built in due to the costly test prep industry built around these exams. 
  • Defending universal access to algebra. The Senate proposed removing algebra requirements in middle and high school, which would result in fewer students being college-ready. The vast majority of colleges require Algebra 2 for admission; removing it as a graduation requirement means fewer students would be college-ready. This proposal had bipartisan support and a modified version was initially included in the Senate’s policy omnibus bill, but thanks to strong community advocacy it was ultimately removed. 
  • Preventing cuts to special education funding. The cuts proposed in the Governor’s budget, most notably to special education transportation statewide and for students attending charter schools, would harm a student group that’s already pushed to the margins in our education system. Thankfully those cuts were left out of the Senate finance proposal– hopefully the same will be true in the House. 
  • Organizing powerful opposition to discipline rollbacks. Bills heard in the House would have repealed the K-3 suspension ban, an important step in eliminating the well-documented race- and ability-based bias in Minnesota’s school discipline. Powerful testimony from parents, advocates, and students have stopped those bills from moving forward so far.

As you can see, there has been a lot of action on education policy this year. But where will it all land? That is still a major question mark given the political dynamics of the session. With a tight budget and even tighter political margins, deals could collapse or stall at any moment. Leadership will need to find ways to balance competing interests if there’s any hope of finishing the work and building a budget before session adjourns in mid-May. If not, we could face a special session to pass a budget before July 1 in order to avoid a government shutdown.