Mo. legislation seeks to toss out Common Core

Senate Bill 514 was corrected from SB 518 below.

Officials from the Cape Girardeau School District and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education would prefer to see Common Core standards stay in place because they have been -- or are -- being implemented by most districts statewide.

Combined legislation made up of Senate Bills 798 and 514, proposed by Ed Emery, R-Lamar, and John Lamping, R-Ladue, respectively, would charge a panel of educators and parents with writing new performance goals to replace Common Core standards, The Associated Press has reported. The legislation is set to be debated this week.

A similar bill was passed by the House earlier this month.

Common Core standards define the knowledge and skills all students should master by the end of each grade level to be on track for success in college and career, the DESE website said. Created through a state-led initiative, its standards have been adopted by more than 40 states, including Missouri.

A spokeswoman in Emery's Jefferson City, Mo., office said the proposal stemmed from a conversation the senator had with a Springfield, Mo., educator who told him about Common Core.

Darryl Pannier, superintendent of the Nell Holcomb School District, which has kindergarten through eighth-grade students, said in an email to the Southeast Missourian he had "no major comment at this time, but between the Common Core fiasco, tax cut bill, and voucher bill, public education is once again under siege."

Sherry Copeland, Cape Girardeau assistant superintendent for academic services, said knowing the new standards were coming, districts aligned their curricula accordingly, because new state assessments start in 2015.

While the new standards focus on English and math, Copeland said the district realigned of all its curricula to make sure "that what we are teaching students is exactly what we want the students of Cape public schools to know."

She emphasized the curriculum is designed by teachers and administrators in Cape Girardeau.

"We didn't buy a curriculum from anybody; nobody else told us what our curriculum should be," she said. "That was done locally and approved by our board. We are in our second year of implementation of this curriculum and we are seeing really good results" on the formative and summative assessments. State assessments are being administered now.

Formative assessments are administered on a frequent basis -- such as daily or weekly -- to ensure students are on track in their learning.

Summative assessments are for the end of a unit, end of a semester or end of a year to make sure students learned what they needed to during those time frames.

Copeland said students are doing much better on the assessments than they have in the past.

"We determine curriculum; we decide what textbooks, if any, we use, [and] what resources we use," Copeland said. Many of those resources are online with the advent of the district's 1:1 initiative at Central High School, where students were given laptops that could be converted into tablets.

That initiative will be moving down to Central Middle School in the fall.

"People who don't understand Common Core and are posting on Facebook and Twitter and really haven't read the standards," Copeland said. "That's concerning to me."

"We are constantly changing and improving as a society and education has to keep up with that. Missouri was right: We want our students to be college and career ready," she said.

The legislation to be debated does not say the state has to dump Common Core standards, but talks about forming panels of educators and parents to write new student performance goals, Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education communications coordinator Sarah Potter said.

Missouri adopted Common Core standards in 2010, so at least 70 percent of the state's 520 school districts have implemented the new standards, and tests aligned to those standards are less than a year away, Potter said.

Potter said the bill would give the state a couple of years to devise new assessments, because those things can't happen overnight.

"Everyone has to understand you can't just flip the switch and be aligned to new standards," Potter said. If Missouri decided to rewrite the standards, there won't be any materials to go with that new product and it's going to be tough for districts, as they'll have to redo what they've done.

Potter noted the education community really likes the Common Core standards and "wants to keep going."

Scott Holste, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon's press secretary, said in an email to the Southeast Missourian that the governor has been "committed from Day One to making sure we have clear goals, high expectations and rigorous standards to ensure our students graduate and are ready to compete in the global economy."

"The Missouri Learning Standards -- which include Common Core State Standards in mathematics and English language arts -- have already been successfully implemented on the local level by a significant majority of public school districts across Missouri and are helping us achieve our goals for student learning," Holste wrote.

Meanwhile, David Larson, president of People Actively Promoting Education Reform, said the Senate legislation is "definitely a step in the right direction."

"It brings at least the control of education back to the state level. I would actually like to see it moved back to the school districts themselves, because, if you look at it, Jackson and Cape Girardeau, even though they're right next to each other, have different needs. People who reside in those separate school districts should actually decide what" students are learning.

Larson said he still thinks there will be some state-level control on education, "simply because the state has to look out for its state universities, so somebody from Springfield would have the same qualifications that someone from Cape Girardeau would have."

rcampbell@semissourian.com

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