Monday Churn: Quiet hearing for CDE
The Department of Education’s annual hearing before the Joint Budget Committee drew a big crowd of lobbyists, bureaucrats and others last Friday afternoon – not to mention a phalanx of CDE staffers – but they didn’t get much of a show.
Past hearings (the event is held every December) have provided lively discussions on testing, school finance and other big issues. But the 2010 version of the event didn’t provide any big policy discussions as CDE leaders worked their way through a 204-page document containing answers to 47 questions that had been posed earlier by JBC members. (See this story about the prior committee briefing on K-12 spending.)
The department’s document did provide one interest factoid – it would cost $3.2 million a year to add social
