Senate bill would repeal Common Core standards

? Conservatives in the Kansas Legislature will try again this year to repeal the Common Core standards for reading and math, along with several other sets of standards adopted in recent years by the Kansas State Board of Education.

Those are the educational standards that the Kansas State Board of Education adopted in 2010. Kansas was part of a multistate consortium, led by the National Governors Association, that developed the standards.

They were intended to be more rigorous standards to ensure students were prepared for college or the workplace by the time they left high school. But they became highly controversial a few years later after the Obama administration began encouraging states to adopt them, or standards similar to them, to qualify for certain kinds of federal funding.

“My concern is federal overreach, just like in a lot of areas,” said Sen. Forrest Knox, R-Altoona, who requested the bill be introduced. “My concern is that when I visit with my teachers, they know how to teach. They are pushed in so many directions. I’ve read and talked with people about Common Core and have big concerns.”

Members of the state board, including conservatives such as Ken Willard, of Hutchinson, have insisted that qualifying for federal money played no part in their decision to adopt the standards, which are officially known here as the Kansas College and Career Ready Standards.

However, adoption of the Common Core standards did help the state qualify for a waiver from requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which would have required the state to demonstrate last year that 100 percent of its students were meeting state standards on reading and math tests in order to qualify for federal funds for special education, Title I schools and other programs.

Senate Bill 67 would void the new standards for English, language arts and math, as well as the Next Generation Science Standards that the state board adopted in 2011. It would also void the No Child Left Behind waiver.

In place of the Common Core standards, the bill would then reinstate the old standards that were in place before those were adopted in 2010, and it would prohibit the state from administering tests aligned to those standards.

Those old standards would remain in place for the next two years, with instructions for the state board to develop new standards, but they could not contain any material from the Common Core standards.

The state began administering tests aligned to the new standards last year, although the first year’s results could not be reported because the online system used to administer the tests was hacked during the testing process.

The department contracted with Kansas University’s Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation to develop and administer those tests. It paid the center $4.6 million for the 2014 tests and recently approved another contract for $6 million for the 2015 tests.

The bill would also repeal new standards for social studies, health and sex education, and it would prohibit the state board from joining any organization or consortium if participation means ceding any authority over any part of Kansas education. And it would prohibit the state board from adopting any standards written by any outside organization unless those standards are in the public domain, free of any copyright.

Knox had the bill introduced by the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee, a move that means it will be exempt from deadlines that apply to most other bills. It was then referred to the Education Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Steve Abrams, R-Arkansas City, a former State Board of Education member who also opposes the standards.

Abrams said he, too, opposes the Common Core standards, but he said it will be up to the House to pass a bill first this year because the Senate has already passed bills to repeal the standards twice.

“My intent is not to do anything with it this year until the House does something,” Abrams said.

Rep. Jerry Lunn, R-Overland Park, vice chairman of the House Education Committee, said he expects a bill to be introduced in the lower chamber.

“I would be surprised if we don’t see something,” Lunn said. “It’s one in a laundry list of things we’re looking at in deciding how we’re going to prioritize what we do in education.”

Department of Education spokeswoman Denise Kahler declined to comment directly about the bill.

“We’re going to continue to move forward with the direction the board has set until we’re directed to do otherwise,” she said.