By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

A lot’s been happening with Common Core this past couple of weeks.

It started June 8, when a panel appointed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and led by Lt. Governor Tim Griffin recommended that the state dump the end-of-the-year PARCC exam, meant to compare Arkansas with a dwindling number of other states, and instead use one offered by the more familiar ACT. Hutchinson accepted the recommendation, and Education Commissioner Johnny Key and his Department of Education began moving in that direction. After a legislative session in which Hutchinson got almost everything he wanted, it seemed like a done deal.

Only it wasn’t. The actual decision maker, the State Board of Education, which five years ago approved Arkansas’ inclusion in the movement, said no on June 11. Board members said they needed more time and more data before they could approve such a change.

So was that it? No. Legislators, many of whom don’t like PARCC, can use the power of the purse to block future testing contracts. Then on June 22, Hutchinson directed the Department of Education to dump PARCC because Key had found a provision in a five-year-old memorandum which seemed to give him the ability to do that.

So now, we’re back where we started, which is stuck in the middle of a major societal change a lot of people oppose or at least like to complain about.

How did we get here? The Common Core is not a curriculum. It’s a set of common standards in math and English adopted by all but a handful of states – Texas, of course, being one of them. The thinking is that, in a mobile society competing in a global economy, students across America ought to know roughly the same things at roughly the same times.

Birthed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Common Core partly was a reaction to No Child Left Behind. That’s the law signed by President George W. Bush in 2002 requiring every single American student – regardless of mental ability or English fluency – to be at least average by now, with the federal government empowered to financially punish schools who don’t meet that goal.

Sounds crazy? There’s more. No Child Left Behind let states define their own standards, which resulted, not surprisingly, in a lot of easy ones. In Arkansas, 83 percent of fourth-graders in 2014 tested at least “proficient” on the state’s Benchmark exam, which PARCC replaced this year. But the National Assessment of Educational Progress, another test given to a sample of students nationwide and generally considered trustworthy, found that only 32 percent of Arkansas fourth-graders were proficient.

That’s a 51-point swing. When we test and grade ourselves knowing we have a financial interest at stake, we give ourselves high marks. When an outside source tests and grades us, we do poorly. That’s why we might need some form of common goals measured by an objective assessment.

The conundrum, of course, is how to do that while still maintaining local school district autonomy and independence. Common Core was supposed to be the answer, but people still distrusted it, and then of course the Obama administration started handing out grants, and with grants come rules, and with rules comes control. And that, understandably, concerns a lot of people.

Part of the problem is the way Common Core was adopted – by a little-noticed vote of the State Board of Education in 2010. This was a major change in the way students are educated, and yet few Arkansans had heard much about it until kids started bringing home math problems their parents couldn’t figure out. Some people got concerned and others got plain mad, and political leaders reacted accordingly. The PARCC test became a target, and ending Arkansas’ participation in it might help let off a little steam.

This country is such a mess right now that it can be a little discouraging, can’t it? Many problems are so obvious that we can hardly argue about their existence. We know our schools aren’t good enough. We know our immigration system is a failure. Our health care system has been on an unsustainable path for decades. We know it’s wrong to keep adding to the national debt. And yet we can’t ever seem to decide where we are going, make a plan and get the car in gear.

What gear is Arkansas in regarding Common Core? Stuck in PARCC, for now.

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

I’m not the first person to point out that two of the most important people in Arkansas education these days are not educators. Not surprisingly, some educators are not happy about this.

Those two would be former Sen. Johnny Key, the state’s new education commissioner, and Baker Kurrus, the new Little Rock School District superintendent, who was appointed by Key.

Until this past legislative session, Key legally could not have served in his current post. Under previous state law, the state’s education commissioner was required to have been an educator for 10 years with five years’ experience as an administrator. Key has owned a day care but has not worked in education.

Previously, he was chairman of the Senate Education Committee and was the leading legislator regarding education policy. In that role, the Republican won friends and respect because of his cooperative, conciliatory, consensus-building style. You might not agree with him, but he’s fair.

He’s also perhaps the best person to be education commissioner, despite his lack of qualifications.

For the past decade, Arkansas education has been marked by consensus thanks to a common enemy – the fear of returning to court. The state spent many years under the thumb of the Lake View case because the Arkansas Constitution requires a “general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools,” which the courts redefined as “adequate” and “equitable.” To get the state out of court, and keep it out, legislators poured money into schools and then regularly gave them a cost of living raise, at the expense of all other state priorities. When other states were cutting school funding, Arkansas was increasing it.

But thanks to time and term limits, Lake View is a fading memory, and the ties that bound everyone together are fraying. A real divide exists now at the Capitol among education reformers, including some Republican legislators, and the education establishment. If anybody can bring those two sides together, it’s Key, the former Republican legislator known for fairness.

Still, the idea that a non-educator would be in charge of education policy is understandably hard for some educators to accept. He’s never been in the trenches with them. He’s never tried to teach geometry to a struggling student, or administer a standardized test, or deal firsthand with the laws he helped pass. My wife the other day said the president of the United States ought to have served in the military, of which he or she serves as commander-in-chief. It’s the same principle.

Key has some fences to mend across the state, especially after one of his first major acts was to appoint Kurrus as superintendent of the Little Rock School District. As education commissioner, Key effectively is a one-man school board for every district under state control, and that includes the state’s largest.

Like Key, Kurrus has crafted education policy but isn’t an educator. A well-respected attorney and businessman, he served 12 years on the Little Rock School Board and has been heading a committee studying the district’s finances. If Key is best described as “conciliatory and cooperative,” Kurrus could be described as “thoroughly competent,” and the district could use a lot of that right now.

But he’s not a competent educator, or at least, not an experienced one. The appointment of a legislator to lead education – that was tough for some to swallow. When that legislator named an attorney and businessman to lead Little Rock’s schools – well, then it became kind of a one-two punch.

Outsiders can bring a needed fresh perspective, and there are many walks of life where an organization’s leader is not necessarily an expert in that organization’s primary mission. It works well when those leaders understand their role and limitations and let the experts do their jobs. When I asked Key about his lack of experience, he cited the example of the hospital CEO who is not a doctor. Would any patient care? Of course not.

Is that a good analogy? Mostly, although in many hospitals, the doctors are the stars with the ultimate power, and the CEO, no matter how well paid, plays a support role. Teachers don’t quite have that kind of sway. The most important single person in Arkansas public education is now Johnny Key. The most important single person in Little Rock public education is now Baker Kurrus, and the person to whom he answers is Key.

This can work as long as they know their roles, let the experts do their jobs, and mend some fences.

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

What do Arkansas teachers think about the Common Core? According to a recent survey, 61 percent would keep it rather than eliminate it, but 87 percent don’t like the testing.

Those were some of the findings of the University of Arkansas’ Office for Education Policy, which asked 2,795 teachers to participate in an online survey and received responses from 975 of them.

Many Arkansas teachers seem to find a lot of positives in the Common Core, which is a set of common standards in math and English language arts currently used by 43 states. Sixty-six percent said they were satisfied with the standards, and 92 percent said they were more rigorous than the previous ones. Large majorities agreed or strongly agreed that the Common Core will lead to improved student learning, help students think critically, and better prepare them for college and the workforce.

Lt. Governor Tim Griffin, who is leading a panel appointed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson to review the standards, found the results somewhat contradictory. Despite the above results, when asked to complete the sentence, “Overall, my students will be ___ after the introduction of the Common Core Standards,” only 46 percent said “better off,” while 28 percent said “the same” and 26 percent said “worse off.”

In other words, less than half of the teachers said the Common Core will make a positive difference overall in the same survey where large majorities were saying it makes a positive difference in the areas that matter – learning, critical thinking, and college and career preparation.

Griffin, a public school father who seems willing to listen to both sides of the Common Core debate, said the survey is “interesting” and “helpful” but “not dispositive” – which, he had to explain to me, is a legal term meaning it doesn’t settle anything.

Polls rarely do, which is why a democracy shouldn’t be based on them. This is not a criticism of the Office for Education Policy, which seems to have conducted a thorough survey. But, as is often the case, of course you get contradictory results when you ask complicated people about complicated issues with only a few simple answers from which to choose. Also, survey respondents often answer the questions they want to answer, not the ones that are asked. (Happens in real-life conversations, too.)

Which brings us to the 87 percent who said they didn’t like the testing associated with Common Core. Of all the elements of the Common Core, the testing is the most controversial. Arkansas is part of a consortium of nine states plus the District of Columbia involved in the PARCC assessment, which compares students across state lines. At one time, there were 24 states, but a majority have left. Legislators considered doing the same here but ultimately decided to renew Arkansas’ participation no more than one year at a time.

There are many questions about the test, including how the data will be used and whether the results will be known in time to do any good. With an 87 percent majority, it’s clear that teachers don’t like PARCC, but many probably also were expressing years of frustration with testing in general. It takes too much time, and they don’t like being judged for how another human performs on a test.

Teaching has undergone many changes in recent years. No Child Left Behind put the federal government in charge of holding schools accountable. The state has instituted a Teacher Excellence and Support System to evaluate teachers and help them improve. New instructional methods are de-emphasizing lecturing. More and more, teachers instead are expected to guide students through technology-driven, project-based learning.

Change is hard. Sixty-four percent of the survey’s respondents disagreed with the statement, “I like teaching more now than before the Common Core Standards were introduced.” Seventy-four percent said that teaching has become more stressful. But 63 percent agreed that the Common Core has made them better at their job.

So maybe many in that 61 percent who said the Common Core should be retained really think it’s better. And maybe some were really just saying they didn’t want to change to something else yet again. Maybe some were just saying, “Let us catch our breath!”

At the very least, this much is clear: A majority of teachers who answered this survey want to keep the Common Core, and a large majority don’t like the testing.

What should Arkansas do with this information? It’s not dispositive.