This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 1, 2013 - Instead of insisting that only the legislature, not the department of education, can adopt new national standards for Missouri schools, state Sen. John Lamping has changed course.
The new version of a bill filed by the Republican from Ladue gives the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education responsibility for conducting hearings around Missouri on what the common core state standards are, how they would change what Missouri students learn and how much they might cost to put into effect.
And instead of simply having a bill that he said was designed simply to provoke discussion, Lamping now says the new version has a good chance to become law.
Noting that his measure, Senate Bill 210, passed out of the Senate Education Committee unanimously, Lamping said he thinks it "will get through the Senate and the House pretty simply.:
The new version, he said, will help inform both lawmakers and the public in general about what are known as the common core state standards, which have been adopted by 45 states.
"I think it helped those in favor of the common core initiative," Lamping said of the discussion around his bill, "because it provided a mechanism for the public to truly understand it and for the public to get behind it. Up to now, I think the public was pretty much in the dark."
The previous version of his bill said simply:
"Notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary, the state board of education and the department of elementary and secondary education shall not implement the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core Standards Initiative. Any actions taken to adopt or implement the Common Core State Standards as of the effective date of this section are void. Common Core State Standards or any other statewide education standards shall not be adopted or implemented without the approval of the general assembly."
Lamping said he modeled the measure after a companion bill introduced in the House by Rep. Kurt Bahr, R-St. Charles. He claimed that the legislature, not the department of education, had the final say in whether such standards should be adopted in Missouri.
That view was disputed by Chris Nicastro, commissioner of elementary and secondary education, who said such responsibility rests with her department. But, she said in a recent conference call, when she conferred with Lamping about the bill, he agreed to file the revised version.
What the new bill says
It calls for DESE to conduct at least one public hearing in each congressional district in the state prior to full implementation of the standards. At least two weeks prior to the first hearing, the department must make public an estimate of what implementation of the standards would cost for the state.
It must also list what data would be collected as part of the move to the new standards and whatever governmental agency or independent consortium that would have access to that data.
All hearings would have to be completed by the end of this year.
Asked for her response to the revised bill, Nicastro said in an email:
"We appreciate the senator acknowledging the support for the common core and offering this amendment. We are always interested in expanding our communication efforts and will certainly do everything possible to ensure widespread understanding of and knowledge about Missouri's academic learning standards. The Common Core State Standards are key to Missouri’s effort to reach the top 10 of states for education by 2020."
In the conference call with reporters last week, Nicastro and David Russell, Missouri’s commissioner for higher education, emphasized again the role the standards would play in improving student achievement in the state, reducing the cost of remedial courses for college freshmen and increasing the chances for students to be prepared for college or the workforce once they leave high school.
"We’re concerned that we’re losing too many of our students in the academic pipeline right now," Russell said, adding that remedial courses for college students cost an estimated $91 million a year.
He said the standards would benefit students throughout the state, in rural or urban areas, as well as those who move around the nation a lot, like those in military families.
Russell said that the standards help smooth the path from k-12 education to beyond.
“We’re not dealing with two systems of education,” he said. “We’re dealing with one in Missouri.”
Failure to implement the standards, Russell said, "would be a decided step backwards. We can’t afford that."
Added Nicastro:
"I would hope that my children and my grandchildren would be held to high academic standards, and I believe the common core establishes that."
She noted that many education and business groups around the state have expressed support for the effort and have worked to get ready to put the standards into place.
"For us to pull the rug out from under that work at this point would be very, very difficult," Nicastro said.
She acknowledged the additional money the standards would cost, particularly in terms of testing students electronically, because many outstate districts do not have the hardware or the broadband access needed to conduct assessments online. Lamping has put the additional cost at hundreds of millions of dollars.
But even without common core, Nicastro said, Missouri would have to spend money developing new assessments, so working with a consortium of other states can help make the process more cost-efficient.
And, Russell added, "there is also the cost of doing nothing."
A model for the earlier bill
The original bills filed by Lamping and Bahr followed closely recommended legislation put together by the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC. The organization is often cited as the source of model conservative legislation that is introduced and considered by state lawmakers nationwide.
At its annual meeting in 2011, it recommended a resolution that said:
"The State Board of Education may not adopt, and the State Department of Education may not implement, the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative…. Neither this nor any other statewide education standards may be adopted or implemented without the approval of the Legislature."
In the preamble to the model bill, it cited reasons including "the responsibility for the education of each child of this nation primarily lies with parents, supported by locally elected school boards and state governments” and “imposing a set of national standards is likely to lead to the imposition of a national curriculum and national assessment upon the various states."
Nicastro and others have said repeatedly that under the standards the final authority for any curriculum rests with a local school district.
Asked whether ALEC influenced his original bill, Lamping said he wasn’t familiar with the organization and his bill was modeled after the one introduced by Bahr this year and the year before.
He acknowledged that similar bills have been filed elsewhere.
"You just have to Google 'common core standards' and you will find out how many states have taken up legislation like this," Lamping said.
He said he saw "the power of legislation" in being able to open up conversation on a topic like this, and he said that too often, lawmakers don’t have the influence they should have on topics that affect such a wide range of Missourians.
"With term limits," he said, "and the fact that we meet only a few months out of the year, more and more it has become the case that government agencies operate very independently of the legislature."
He said the purpose of the bill is to make sure DESE informs the public and lawmakers in advance of the time when such standards take effect, though he acknowledged that work on the standards have been going on for a few years.
"If I was in charge of the department of education in 2009 or 2010," Lamping said, "and I knew I would have to ask for hundreds of millions of dollars more for testing, I don’t think I would have waited until some legislator from St. Louis County filed a bill."
For her part, Nicastro said she recently attended a meeting with other heads of state departments of education, and many of her peers said similar legislation had been introduced where they work.
"To a person," she said, "every state where this effort has occurred recently has had exactly the same people testifying in favor of the bill. They all come with the same testimony, word for word.
"So someone is coordinating this effort. Who’s behind that, I really couldn’t say."