Senate should halt education overhaul bill
Most of the opposition to Senate Republicans’ plan for overhauling education standards and accountability has focused on how Senate Bill 1 would de-emphasize the teaching of the arts, humanities and social studies in Kentucky’s public schools.
Alarming as that is, SB 1 should raise even deeper concerns. If it becomes law:
▪ The state would essentially abandon students in low-performing schools for seven years, giving local officials complete control of school turnaround planning.
▪ Expectations could be officially lowered for schools that educate a high percentage of low-income or minority students. (Yes, Senate Republicans are poised to endorse the soft bigotry of low expectations.)
▪ A noxious dose of politics would be injected into the process of deciding what gets taught in classrooms.
Introduced on Jan. 6 and billed as repealing the Common Core Standards (which, interestingly, is one thing it does not do), SB 1 quickly disappeared to undergo a rewrite based on discussions with stakeholders. That came as a relief. GOP leaders would never allow such a wholesale retreat from accountability. So we thought.
When the rewritten SB 1 emerged from the Senate Education Committee last week, it was no better and may have gotten worse.
In lieu of empirical evidence or expert analysis, the backers of this complicated bill offer anonymous anecdotes and bromides such as “let teachers teach.”
While imagining that they are freeing educators from the heavy yoke of the federal government, they would actually recreate conditions that deprived generations of Kentuckians of a decent education. Politics and a lack of local accountability produced one of the nation’s least-educated states.
The legislature already is deeply involved in the process of crafting standards. SB 1 would subject the process to narrow political agendas and create a debating society for creationists and flat-earthers by making the arbiter of standards a committee appointed by the legislature and governor; a Senate spokesman says the education commissioner would also have a vote.
SB 1 ties the Department of Education’s hands when it comes to assisting schools scoring at the bottom of the accountability scale. It would take three years instead of the current two for a school to gain priority status. Then local school boards could hire “a private entity” to lead the turnaround. Only after four years of insufficient improvement could the state intervene. That’s seven years — more than half a youngster’s time in public schools — before the state could step in.
Another provision would group schools of “similar student demographics” when measuring growth in the accountability system. The state constitution guarantees Kentuckians access to an equal education. Lowering expectations on the basis of demographics flies in the face of that equal education guarantee.
The sponsor, Education Committee Chairman Mike Wilson, R-Bowling Green, touts SB 1’s paperwork-reduction benefits, apparently a reference to doing away with program reviews of the arts, humanities, writing and practical living. The legislature created program reviews in 2009 when it did away with testing in those disciplines.
A committee is working on obvious problems with program reviews, on which many school districts gave themselves implausibly high scores. SB 1 creates an even flimsier honor system for quality control in arts, humanities, writing and practical living. Senate Republicans are backing away from their plan to eliminate statewide testing in social studies, the spokesman said. Still, SB 1 creates an incentive for schools to narrow their focus to just what’s being tested.
SB 1 reverses course on a teacher professional growth system that the legislature enacted just a few years ago.
We could go on, but it should be clear that such big changes require a more thorough vetting and understanding of what’s at stake.
The timing also is bad. Late last year Congress revamped federal education programs that are a funding source for Kentucky, but the regulations implementing the new law have not been written. Kentucky should wait until those regulations are in place before launching such a drastic overhaul.
Unfortunately, SB 1 fixes few of the accountability system’s real problems while creating new ones. Senate leaders should apply the brakes.
This story was originally published February 16, 2016 at 5:18 PM with the headline "Senate should halt education overhaul bill."