Randall Watson

Topeka ? Randall Watson has made his mark on public education in Kansas by going against the tide.

As superintendent of the McPherson school district, he was one of the first to get a waiver from regulations under No Child Left Behind that allowed McPherson to use a different kind of testing system instead of the state-mandated assessments used in other school districts.

And earlier this year, he led McPherson to become one of the first two districts to be granted waivers from a host of state laws and regulations governing public schools under the state’s new “Innovative School Districts” program — a program that many State Board of Education members and staff at the Kansas Department of Education opposed.

Because of that, Watson may have seemed like an improbable choice to become the next Kansas Education Commissioner. But that’s who the Kansas State Board of Education has chosen to lead the very agency whose policies and regulations he has so successfully gotten around.

“I’m really humbled by the trust the state board has put in me,” Watson said in a telephone interview. “I plan to do what I’ve always done, which is try to bring people together to form a common vision of what Kansans want from their education system and how we deliver that to their students.”

Watson will take over the reins of the Kansas public school system at the beginning of what he sees as a new era in education, one he hopes will put less focus on test scores in reading and math and more focus on the “whole student” and what it takes to become a successful young adult.

“If you look at the transition in Kansas and schooling across the country, prior to the mid-1980s most districts operated entirely under local control,” Watson said. “Kansas started to dabble in mid-’80s with minimum competency tests. By the late ’80s-early ’90s, we transitioned to Quality Performance Education.”

Kansas formally adopted Quality Performance Accreditation, or QPA, in 1992. That was the law that said school districts would be judged and accredited on the basis of student achievement, and it required the state board to adopt curriculum standards in each subject area and to administer tests in certain core subjects to measure how well schools were performing.

It was part of the same bill that also shifted the bulk of funding for public schools away from local districts and established a state funding mechanism based on a uniform, per-pupil formula.

In the early 2000s, Congress took that a step further by enacting No Child Left Behind, a kind of national QPA system that tied access to federal education funding to growth in student achievement.

Although the Obama administration has tried to move away from No Child Left Behind, granting states waivers from its requirements in exchange for adopting other reform measures, that testing system still forms the basis for how schools are held accountable at both the state and federal levels.

Watson said he still believes in accountability based on outcomes, but he wants to see the focus shift.

“The outcomes that we want are a successful young adult, not necessarily reading and math scores,” he said. “Those are just inputs. The next step is to identify the skill sets that make up a successful adult and then go backwards to map that.”

He said that involves looking beyond just the K-12 school system and integrating with higher education.

While pursuing those lofty goals, however, Watson will also have to deal with a host of more immediate concerns, not the least of which is future funding for public schools.

While a constitutional lawsuit is pending in state court over the adequacy of current funding, the most recent revenue estimates show Kansas facing a $278 million shortfall in the current fiscal year and even bigger shortfalls in the years ahead.

Traditionally, Kansas education commissioners have not gotten directly involved in the legislative process, lobbying lawmakers and the governor for more funding. That job is usually left to the elected members of the state board and other school advocacy groups.

Watson said he doesn’t plan to do anything differently.

“It’s certainly the job of the Legislature to fund public education,” he said. “I can weigh in about where we want to go with education. But it’s true that the state has less money than what was predicted six or eight months ago. There are difficult decisions that will have to be made. But I have confidence they will continue to support k-12 education in the future.”