Anti-Common Core legislation hit some resistance Wednesday as opponents blasted the bill in front of a House committee and Gov. Nathan Deal pointedly said it is not a “finished product.”
Senate Bill 167, which has passed the Senate and appeared headed to smooth passage in the House, would prohibit Georgia from testing students on material tied to the national academic standards called Common Core.
At a hearing on the bill, the House committee listened to 68 speakers. Many of them were educators defending the Common Core standards as helpful to Georgia schoolchildren. State Schools Superintendent John Barge spoke out against SB 167, saying it would cause chaos in the system and put federal dollars at risk. However, other speakers decried Common Core as a federal intrusion.
Opponents of the bill, speaking in favor of Common Core, weren’t just from the education field. The national standards also have supporters in the business world and the military because they standardize when schoolchildren across the country are exposed to concepts.
“We urge you to stick with the Common Core,” retired Navy Rear Adm. Casey Coane told House committee members. “Standards without assessments, however, are useless.”
The committee took no votes on the bill and is scheduled to take the bill up again next Wednesday, when it is expected to vote.
Georgia is one of more than 40 states that have agreed to adhere to Common Core standards. Besides the concern about who controls public education, opponents also argue that the standards are weaker than the ones Georgia used before.
Supporters of Common Core said they would allow students to get a deeper understanding of academic material and harmonize when students across the U.S. are taught that material.
The debate has become a political flash point and complicates Deal’s re-election efforts. Two Republican constituencies — anti-Common Core tea party activists and business interests who support the standards — are on opposite sides of the debate.
Last year, with opposition building, Deal ordered the state Board of Eduction to review whether Georgia should remain in Common Core.
SB 167 piggybacks off that order by calling for the establishment of an advisory panel to review the board’s findings. But SB 167 also bars Georgia from offering a test aligned to any set of national standards, effectively forcing the state to write its own standards and establish its own assessment of material tied to those standards.
SB 167 would allow school districts to opt out of Common Core as soon as this fall.
The bill’s author, Sen. William Ligon, R-Brunswick, said his legislation would establish an orderly, open process for Georgia to withdraw from Common Core.
However, most of the dozens who lined up to speak before the House Education Committee said SB 167 would lead to confusion in public education, derail the teacher evaluation system that will be rolled out this fall and lead to harmful unintended consequences.
Deal seemed to acknowledge the opposition of many educators in describing the bill.
“This is not a finished product at this point in time, so I think until we see what the finished product is, it’s premature,” he said Wednesday after a different event. “I don’t think anyone wants to set Georgians’ education back. I certainly do not and I would not sign anything that I think would be a step in the wrong direction. I do think we have to address concerns, concerns of the public and within the education community. And we have to do it in a responsible fashion.”
Announcing his own opposition to SB 167, Barge said passage of the bill would throw into question as much as $1 billion in federal funding because the federal government requires all states to have standards and assessments tied to them.
“This bill has quite a bit of language that would throw our education system into chaos,” Barge said.
Most of those who followed echoed that theme, but several supporters of SB 167 spoke against Common Core.
Jane Robbins of American Principals in Action, a conservative nonprofit group, urged committee members not to be “bullied” by what she described as the “misinformation” provided by SB 167’s opponents.
“It is not painless to unravel a debacle,” she said. “Senate Bill 167 is a good start.”
More than 70 people signed up to discuss the bill, and 68 actually did speak. Committee members listened to them all, earning applause from the audience as the final speaker concluded remarks.
“I feel like we put on a three-act play,” said Rep. Brooks Coleman, R-Duluth.
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