There are signs the state Board of Education, Superintendent Dr. Michael Martirano and legislative leaders are closing in on a compromise to settle the heated controversy over Common Core education standards.
The Board and Martirano are moving to “repeal and replace” the current standards for reading, language arts and math for K-12. Those standards, called Next Generation, are based on Common Core, the controversial standards which opponents fear, among other things, represent a federal takeover of education.
The state Legislature came close earlier this year to an outright repeal, touching off a dispute with the state Board, which supported the standards. However, the Board got the message and decided to put the standards out for more public comment.
Martirano says the new standards are based on the public input and include changes to approximately 100 of the 900 existing benchmarks. They also have a new name: West Virginia College and Career Ready standards.
The Board has posted these for another 30 days of public comment before making a final decision at its December meeting.
The key now is how legislative leaders respond. The staffs of Senate President Bill Cole and House Speaker Tim Armstead are working on a side-by-side comparison of the current standards to the new ones to see what’s changed and whether those changes constitute a legitimate shift away from Common Core and toward West Virginia-based benchmarks.
“We’re not going to sit back and accept a simple ‘smoke and mirrors rename it and we’ve got it done,’ and I don’t believe that’s the direction the Board is headed either,” Cole said.
A legislative leadership source said the battle now is within the Republican caucuses, especially in the House where Common Core opposition is the strongest. GOP lawmakers have options; they can declare victory because Common Core is being repealed and replaced, suggest additional changes for the Board to make, or dig in and insist that any semblance of Common Core is struck from the education benchmarks.
Clearly the Board took the complaints seriously. Public education is a slow-moving bureaucracy, but faced with an outright repeal, the Board and Martirano responded by gathering public input, making suggested changes (including adding cursive writing and multiplication tables back into the standards) and developing a new set of benchmarks that can be adopted before the January session of the Legislature.
This is a reasonable way forward. Public policy makers expressed their concerns, education officials acknowledged them, and now legislators and the public have another 30-day period to make even more suggestions to get the standards right.
With that settled, we can get on with the critical business at hand of educating our children and measuring the outcomes.