State Board of Ed prepares to revise state standards report
Published March 3, 2016
by Matt Caulder, Capitol Connection, March 3, 2016.
The State Board of Education members were presented with a packet of reference material on Wednesday to assist them in preparing new education standards to replace Common Core in the coming months.
The Legislature voted to replace Common Core State Standards with new state standards and created a commission to study the state’s standards and recommend improvements.
The Academic Standards Review Commission’s (ASRC) report was included in the packet along with supporting materials for the board to review before getting down to business in April.
The Board may modify the recommendations before putting the report in from of the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee for further review and recommendations.
Assuming the recommendations make it through those two bodies, then they would come up for discussions and voting in the General Assembly during the Short Session, beginning in April.
The ASRC was charged with reviewing mathematics and English and language arts (ELA) standards and presenting a report to the state board as well as the Legislature.
“The State Board of Education is committed to the adoption and revision of quality standards,” a report from the State Board of Education said.
The reference material packet was given to the state board members, including the ASRC’s report, to assist the board in understanding the statutory requirements and policies in play with drawing up new standards.
The board is expected to dig into the meat of the matter at its April meeting after thoroughly reviewing the material presented at the March meeting.
In April the board will discuss the definition of a standard and hear a status update on the mathematics and ELA review process.
Changes were blocked at December meeting
The commission’s recommendations, approved late last year, focused on making curriculum more age-appropriate and providing teachers with more training.
But the panel stopped short of offering specifics, especially in mathematics, after failed votes to define the standards during the commission’s final meeting of its tenure.
A vote to direct the state to model mathematics standards after Minnesota’s standards would have been the most concrete recommendation among the more than 40-page report, but the move was rejected in a 5-4 vote.
Minnesota was joined by Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia in rejecting at least parts of Common Core. Minnesota created its own math standards, which have been praised for their clarity, according to Education Week.
According to news reports, in recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math testing, 53 percent of fourth-graders in Minnesota scored at or above “proficient;” in North Carolina, only 44 percent of fourth-graders attained that level.
On the same test for eighth-graders, 48 percent of Minnesota students were at or above proficient; only 33 percent of students in NC reached that mark.
The vote to align with the Minnesota math standards was defeated by an informal coalition of Common Core supporters and those who feared hitching the state to another state’s standards.
The commission also failed to come to a consensus on moving high school math back to the algebra and geometry model used pre-Common Core in 2010.
The commission began meeting in Sep. 2014 to study Common Core and to make recommendations for a replacement.
Tillman: legislature will not accept “makeover”
An influential state lawmaker has already suggested the General Assembly might not passively accept the panel’s recommendations.
At the December commission meeting, Sen. Jerry Tillman (R-Moore) told the commission that if the changes were not substantive and were instead more of a “makeover,” legislators “may decide we want to start all over.”
“The bottom line will be: Did you do a little makeover of Common Core to appease certain people, or did you do a real re-write?” he said.
Tillman specifically mentioned that he liked that the commission was looking at modeling its recommendations after successful efforts such as Minnesota’s.
“The bottom line will be that the public, the parents, are pretty smart in this state and they know a lot about the Common Core standards and I’ve heard from them, I’ve heard from the other side that would like to see the national standards stay the same, but I believe that is waning,” Tillman said.
