Today, teachers and administrator from Tift County will travel by bus to the state Capitol to tell lawmakers that they are demoralized and defeated by the political circus around the Common Core State Standards.
They will detail all the time and money their South Georgia district invested in adopting the reading and math standards, and they will share the progress their students are already showing as a result. They will explain that in their professional opinion, Georgia schools are better because of Common Core.
And they will likely be met with indifference.
Because the primary concern at the 3 p.m. House Education Committee hearing on Senate Bill 167 is not improving the academic odds for Georgia kids. No one who cared about education would recklessly dismantle learning standards that the majority of teachers in the state support, were put in place over the last four years and are raising student achievement.
The House embrace of this legislation is about improving re-election odds for lawmakers who have been intimidated into backing a convoluted, poorly written bill to avoid primary opposition.
In capitulating to extremists who consider Common Core the work of the devil and/or Barack Obama, the state Senate passed a bill last week that isolates Georgia from the rest of the nation, sets our students up for failure and reverses the progress schools have made over the last several years.
The main intent of Senate Bill 167 bill was to abolish the Common Core State Standards in Georgia. Thankfully, it no longer does that after a compromise crafted by the governor and Senate leaders. Instead, it creates a review of the math and reading standards already in place in Georgia schools. (Nine of the 17 appointees to the review panel would be parents or grandparents. Only three would be teachers.)
But Gov. Nathan Deal and state senators should have read the 18-page bill a little more closely, as it still contains plenty of terrible stuff — including a prohibition on embracing any new content or tests that even smack of national standards. It forbids the adoption of science standards that Georgia teachers helped create.
The bill says, “The state shall not adopt any federally prescribed content standards or any national content standards established by a consortium of states or a third party, including, but not limited to, the Next Generation Science Standards, the National Curriculum for Social Studies, the National Health Education Standards, or the National Sexuality Standards.”
A murky section on testing appears to prohibit Georgia students from taking AP exams or the SAT. The bill states: “All state-wide k-12 tests and assessments shall be controlled by the State of Georgia without obligation to other entities, states, consortia, or the federal government and shall not be designed to test national standards or rebranded national standards.”
“In my reading of the bill, it bans assessments that are not created within or by Georgia,” says Dana Rickman, policy and research director for the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education. “What about AP, SAT and ACT? Are we not going to use them anymore? The bill doesn’t allow for assessments or standards based on any multi-state consortium. That means we are not allowed to use the SAT or the ACT, because they are based on Common Core.”
In the pretense of protecting student privacy, the bill places data critical to personalized student learning under lock and key. Even the simple act of offering a struggling child online math activities will require extensive paperwork and parent approvals.
“We won’t be able to say, here’s something that a child can be assigned that would engage him and bring him up to speed. While technology enables us to do that, this bill has so many mandates to get permission that we would become paper pushers,” says Gwinnett County Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks.
In adopting the Common Core State Standards, Georgia had reached consensus that we would no longer tolerate our students scoring well on state tests while failing national assessments. We needed to teach to the same high standards as schools in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Parents understood their children would not only be competing with students from higher-performing states for jobs and college admission; they would be vying with college graduates from New Delhi and Beijing as well.
Apparently, we are giving up that effort.
Proponents call SB 167 the strongest attack in the country against national standards. What they neglect to mention is that it’s coming out of a state with one of the weakest track records in the country for academic excellence.
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