The Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. A key moment has arrived for decisions regarding education funding, the Star Tribune Editorial Board writes. (Leila Navidi, Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Minnesota DFL legislators and Gov. Tim Walz agreed to devote an additional $2.2 billion to K-12 education over the next two years — a significant 10% increase. Now lawmakers are hashing out how those funds should be spent.

The biggest-ticket items in the increase would rightly boost the general education per-pupil amount. And the increase would wisely raise funding for special education and English-language learning, consuming more than half of the proposed additional spending.

This week, House members approved an education measure that increases the general education formula by 4% the first year and 2% the second. It also indexes that formula to inflation, with a cap of 3%. The Senate version under discussion calls for a 4% increase in the first year and a 5% in the second. There should ultimately be a compromise between those percentage hikes.

Bill author and House Education Finance committee chair Cheryl Youakim, DFL-Hopkins, has called the increased funding "transformational.''

"With divided government, we underfunded our schools year after year and had to compromise away things that we value," Youakim told an editorial writer. "We certainly can't completely turn around 20 years of underfunding in one session, but this bill is a good start toward closing opportunity gaps in our schools."

As included in the House and Senate versions, the final bill should address the steep statewide deficit for special education. School districts are required by federal law to offer those services, but the federal government has never fully funded them. The state Department of Education (MDE) estimates Minnesota districts will collectively have an $811 million shortfall between their special education costs and revenue this year.

Districts have been forced to take funds from general education to cover that difference, so that additional state assistance would free up more dollars for their general operating budgets.

The two bills also sensibly cover a similar though much smaller deficit for English-learner services, with the House covering 100% of the gap by 2027 and the Senate covering 75% by 2026. In addition, proposals in the bills to permanently fund about 4,000 current spots for preschoolers and expand that opportunity to at least another 5,000 kids should also be approved.

Other policy provisions that require students to take civics and personal finance courses to graduate — and to study genocide, the Holocaust and ethnic studies — also merit approval. We trust education leaders, teachers and parents to use this material to better prepare Minnesota students for adulthood.

Many Republican lawmakers agreed that the per-pupil funding amount should be increased. But they criticized the DFL plan, arguing that it does not emphasize improving academic achievement and creates mandates that will be burdensome for districts to meet. Those criticisms are not without merit.

We'd also agree with Republicans and education leaders who oppose a provision requiring staffing decisions and class sizes to be part of collective bargaining. Those decisions, in our view, should be left to district management.

The House passed its education package Thursday, and the Senate is expected to approve its version next week. Both will be the basis for conference committee discussions in the coming weeks before the Legislature adjourns on May 22.

The welcome funding increases for young learners, made partly by the state's $17 billion surplus, can advance the goal of providing a high-quality education for more Minnesota students and improving classroom achievement.