The bill calls for the controversial standards to be reviewed and
replaced.
Gov. Bill Haslam appears to have
quietly signed a bill to review and replace the controversial Common Core State
Standards in Tennessee.
The bill, which passed through
the Tennessee General Assembly last month, requires the state's board of
education to create two committees – composed of representatives from both
higher education and K-12 schools – that will respectively focus on the review
of current English and math standards and the development of new ones. The
committees will be required to recommend new standards to be fully implemented
by the 2017-18 school year.
According to the website of the
state General Assembly, Haslam signed the measure on Monday.
It's unclear whether the process set
out by the new law will result in a significant step away from Common Core, or
if it will represent a rebranding with minor tweaks. Tennessee school
superintendents in February sent state
lawmakers a letter backing Common Core, although support for the standards has
been waning among teachers – a September survey showed most Tennessee teachers now oppose Common Core.
Tennessee has taken several steps to
move away from the standards in the last year. In May 2014, Haslam, a
Republican, signed a bill that would delay using a Common Core-aligned
standardized test for one year. Haslam in October also initiated his own public
review of the standards.
"One thing we've all agreed on
is the importance of high standards in Tennessee," the governor said in
October. "This discussion is about making sure we have the best possible
standards as we continue to push ahead on the historic progress we're making in
academic achievement."
Haslam's office did not immediately
respond to a request for comment on the new law.
Several other states have taken
middle-of-the-road approaches when it comes to Common Core, attempting to put
distance between politically pressured state leaders and the standards while
not ditching them entirely. Governors in Missouri, North Carolina, New Jersey
and Utah last summer all took actions that allowed for a review of the
standards.
Only three states – Indiana,
Oklahoma and South Carolina – have officially repealed the standards. Common
Core opponents, though, have criticized Indiana's actions, saying new standards
adopted by the state are too similar to Common Core.
David Mansouri, executive vice
president of the Tennessee-based State Collaborative on Reforming Education, says
the state's approach gives teachers and students stability by setting out a
lengthy transition period from the old to new standards.
"This bill lays out a
path of review and refinement that could lead to standards just as high as or
higher than Tennessee's current standards," Mansouri says. "By
comparison, a bill that proposed to repeal Common Core and roll back to old
lower standards failed in committee, and another bill that would have allowed
school districts to pick their own standards, even if inferior, didn't
advance."
If Tennessee, which adopted Common
Core in 2010, does end up moving substantially away from the standards, it
could be a blow for the Common Core movement going forward, says Kaylan
Connally, an education policy analyst at the New America Foundation.
"What is surprising about the
pushback in Tennessee is its position as an early implementation state with a
governor and an education commissioner both strongly supportive of the Common
Core," Connally told U.S. News earlier this year. "For it to be a
state with that level of support, if the state were to drop the Common Core,
the implications for the larger movement are pretty grim."
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/05/12/tennessee-gov-bill-haslam-signs-bill-removing-common-core-standards
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