Author: Sarah Cooke

Minnesota voters overwhelmingly elected school board candidates on Tuesday who rejected book bans and supported students’ freedom to learn in safe, welcoming public schools. 

Education Minnesota has increased its outreach to school board voters through a digital advertising campaign in response to a sprawling effort to restrict what Minnesota students may learn and educators may teach. 

Darci Brown, a bus driver from St. Francis, was named Education Minnesota’s 2023-24 Education Support Professional of the Year at an awards ceremony on Saturday. 

Thousands of educators from across Minnesota will attend the annual MEA conference on Thursday, where they will hear from various speakers and choose from dozens of classes intended to help them meet the needs of their students. The Minnesota Educator Academy conference is an annual tradition since 1861.

Nominations for 2024 Minnesota Teacher of the Year opened on Monday and run through Nov. 15, 2023. A winner will be named at a banquet in May 2024.

Advocates for safe and welcoming schools for all students – no matter where they live, what they look like, who they love, or how they pray – will address the rise of dog-whistle politics in Minnesota school board races this fall.

The state of Minnesota must remedy the shortage of trained, professional educators in order to improve the academic achievement of students, who continue to post scores on standardized tests below pre-pandemic levels.

In separate rulings with damaging effects on Minnesota’s educators, their families and their students, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that race-conscious admissions policies are unlawful in higher education, and the court rejected the Biden administration’s plans to forgive billions of dollars in education debt.

Gov. Tim Walz has signed into law historic budgets for education, labor and taxes that could provide sweeping improvements to the teaching and learning environments in Minnesota’s schools and campuses, and which pay for an important step toward true pension reform for Minnesota’s teachers.