JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – After the Mississippi House passed a bill designed to replace the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), questions are swirling around who inspired the legislation.
Some lawmakers said conservative, anti-public education think tanks may have played a part.
House Minority Leader Rep. Robert Johnson (D-District 94) held the Inspire Act on a motion to reconsider on Thursday. The motion failed, but Johnson alleged that the data the bill was based off of was misrepresented in the House.
The main authors of the bill have said numerous times that the bill was written by themselves with the consultation of teachers and superintendents. They denied it when asked whether they developed the formula alongside any third-party public policy think tank. They said the data was based off of what was given to them by the Legislative Budget Office (LBO).
Johnson said when he went to the office to request the data, they could not produce it.
“When I talked to LBO this morning, the Legislative Budget Office this morning, I was told, ‘These are not our numbers. We don’t know where these numbers come from, but we did compare the numbers they gave us to MAEP.’ And that was not my question. If we’re going to rewrite MAEP and have a totally different formula that’s supposed to be the answer to the needs that we have, we should at least be able to know whether or not we can trust it. And the first place to start is with the people who actually do numbers, who actually work on the budget here in your state. And when they don’t know, we don’t know,” said Johnson.
The bill’s author, Rep. Rob Roberson (R-District 43), defended the bill by saying it was a miscommunication.
“I think one of the issues that popped up was that when we create the bill, it’s our bill. We create the weights and the things that go into that. The answer that LBO gave was that they didn’t create those weights, therefore they didn’t have anything to do with that. We created the bill. It’s our bill,” Roberson stated.
Roberson and the additional authors of the bill said they also used data from the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) in developing the formula.