Education Week - April 22, 2015 - 19

State Bills to Curb Common Core Gain Limited Momentum
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
a lesson," said West Virginia Superintendent
of Schools Michael J.
Martirano, who successfully lobbied
against a repeal effort in his state
this year, but has initiated a review
of the standards in the state. "There
was a lack of understanding on the
basic knowledge of what people were
trying to repeal."
Common-core opponents, meanwhile,
have pledged to continue
the fight both in legislatures and
in the public arena. And some activists
believe the battle is a longterm
one that ultimately involves
many issues.
"You can blame it on rhetoric, you
can blame it on misinformation, you
can blame it on whatever you want
to blame it on. But the bottom line is
that people don't like it," said Louisiana
Rep. Brett Geymann, a Republican
who is supporting legislation
that would repeal the standards
in Louisiana this year.
The calendar for state legislatures
is still relatively active-ncsl
reported that only
13 states had or were due to
adjourn their sessions for the
year by mid-April. That situation
makes it too early for
supporters of the standards to
declare them safe for 2015, said
Michael Brickman, the national
policy director for the Thomas
B. Fordham Institute, a Washington
think tank that supports
the common core.
Still, he said that based on the
failure of repeal efforts so far, even
legislation that gets signed by governors
might only tweak the standards
around the edges. Some successful
bills, he noted, might have
both friends and foes of the common
core declaring victory in certain
states, a sign that those bills may
do very little to actually thwart the
standards.
"If victory is something that looks
completely different than common
core, I think some people are going to
be disappointed," Mr. Brickman said.
A Second Look
States also may be more inclined to
take a second look at their standards
than to get rid of what they have. The
ncsl reported that about 80 bills have
been filed in common-core states to
have the standards (or aligned tests)
reviewed; that contrasts with about
45 bills calling for repeal, roughly the
same number as last year. Reviews
of the standards that originated in
legislation are already under way in
Missouri and North Carolina.
"It would make sense that the
number of bills and committees established
to review the standards
would increase, one, as a political
strategy, and two, just to change the
way states will adopt academic standards,"
said Daniel Thatcher, a senior
policy specialist with the ncsl, referring
to such review bills.
In some states, up-or-down votes
haven't been necessary to scuttle
repeal efforts. Legislators in Florida,
Kentucky, Maryland, New Mexico,
and Washington, where legislative
sessions have either ended or are
close to ending, have declined to act
on repeal bills and essentially let
them die on the vine.
This year's most notable anticommon-core
push may have occurred
in Arizona, where the House
of Representatives and then the
state Senate education committee
approved a repeal measure. There
had been a relatively friendly political
climate for the bill, given the
election last year of state Superintendent
of Public Instruction Diane
Douglas, a Republican who built
her candidacy on common-core opposition.
Nonetheless, the Arizona
Senate voted down the legislation,
House Bill 2190, last month, following
remarks by gop Gov. Doug
Ducey that a review of the standards-not
a repeal-would be the
right move for Arizona.
In West Virginia, the House of
pace of implementation.
"I think in a lot of these states,
you've got people doing the work and
ignoring the political situation," Ms.
Williams said.
More broadly, the fate of repeal
bills so far this year shows that many
state legislators can and will distinguish
between volatile, controversydriven
politics and what their various
constituencies want, said Deven
Carlson, an assistant professor of
political science at the University of
Oklahoma.
"There's also on-the-ground realities
that people have to take into account.
It's harder to report, it's harder
to observe, maybe. But those are the
things that influence legislators' decisions
more so than national political
rhetoric," Mr. Carlson said.
Strategies for Pushback
"
There was a lack of
understanding on the
basic knowledge of
what people were
trying to repeal."
MICHAEL J. MARTIRANO
West Virginia Superintendent of Schools
Representatives passed a repeal
bill, but the state Senate altered
it to institute only a review of the
standards, and the bill died. Mr.
Martirano, who said that support
for the standards from the teachers'
union and the state school
board was crucial to their survival,
then initiated a common-core review
primarily to ensure that when
the standards come up again in the
state's 2016 session, the public feels
more involved in the state's use of
the standards.
The Alabama and Colorado Senate
education committees, on the
other hand, approved bills earlier
this month that would repeal the
common core. Other states where
common-core repeal bills are pending
include Massachusetts, Michigan,
New York, and Tennessee.
Political Calculus
In Kansas, lawmakers have
mounted repeal efforts in both 2014
and 2015. Last year, during budget
negotiations, a common-core-repeal
measure was tossed out. This year,
the House education committee
voted down a similar measure.
The resilience of common core in
Kansas is due in part to pressure to
keep the standards from a partnership
of local business groups and
local teachers, administrators, and
school board members, who have
invested time and resources in the
standards, said Cheryl S. Williams,
the executive director of the Learning
First Alliance. The Alexandria,
Va.-based coalition of education associations
supports the standards,
but has urged states to rethink the
Patrick Michel, Ed.D. '04
Superintendent, Salem City school district
Salem, N.J.
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Lawmakers eager to toss the standards
overboard say they still have
momentum, even as some might
change their tactics.
Mr. Geymann, the Louisiana representative,
said that his main goal
was to get repeal legislation to a
House of Representatives floor vote,
where he said election-year pressure
will help push many lawmakers to
vote for repeal.
"It's easy for the big business guys
to control a committee. You only have
to go get 19 people," Mr. Geymann
said. "It's easier to do that than to
hold the entire House floor."
He also endorsed the move to keep
repeal proposals out of the House
education committee, which has
so far rejected such bills, through
any procedural trick necessary. Gov.
Bobby Jindal, a Republican and vocal
common-core opponent, also has announced
his backing for repeal legislation.
(Louisiana's legislative session
started April 13.)
Even if the new standards
strongly resemble the common-core
standards, Mr. Geymann said, if
there's a new adoption process, "At
least everyone's going to be held
accountable for that."
For progressive opponents of the
standards, the push against the common
core involves long and patient
organizing they say is not only growing,
but involves resisting a broad
suite of policies centered on how tests
are used to evaluate students, teachers,
and schools.
Anthony Cody, who runs the
"Living in Dialogue" blog about
education, argued that the true
litmus test for such common-core
opponents will be whether they can
translate their opposition into not
just opposing high-stakes testing
associated with the standards, but
reversing how classroom instruction
and technology has changed
under the common core. And he
said that teacher and student opposition
to the standards will likely
prove more resilient than the current
opposition being shown by
many politicians.
"You have to look at the social
movement that is opposing common
core as primarily a real grassroots
movement that is still just beginning,"
Mr. Cody said.
That activism has helped push
23 states this year to consider some
kind of legislation that would allow
parents to opt their children out of
standardized tests. These proposals
constitute "the new issue that we
haven't seen until this year," Mr.
Thatcher of the ncsl said. One such
opt-out bill passed the New Jersey
Assembly last month and awaits action
in the state Senate.
"I don't think we're going to have
one year of disruption followed by
stability," Mr. Cody said, referring to
activities like the opt-out movement.
"I think we're going to have ongoing
disruption."
However, none of this resistance
to accountability and testing policies
necessarily spells doom for the
common core itself, Mr. Carlson
argued. Unlike the controversy
that preceded the 2010 passage of
the federal Affordable Care Act,
he noted, the backlash to the standards
began in many places three,
four, or five years after they were
adopted, and after schools had
spent millions of dollars implementing
them.
"The status quo has a privileged
position in American politics," Mr.
Carlson said.
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Education Week - April 22, 2015

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