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CHARLESTON – Advocates and critics of West Virginia’s Common Core education standards gathered Tuesday at the state Capitol Building to discuss the program’s future.
Speakers addressed the Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Education Tuesday morning in the chambers of the House of Delegates, speaking for and against the program. Common Core, which sets grade-by-grade content standards for public schools, has become a passionate national debate.
Those in favor of Common Core say it promotes rigor in classrooms and helps prepare students for graduation and beyond. Detractors say the standards remove state and parental control over education and value student data above student achievement.
Tonette Salazar, state relations director for the Education Commission of the States, said while Common Core has been widely adopted throughout the United States, many states are in the process of reviewing those standards.
In 2010, Common Core was adopted by 45 states and Washington, D.C., Salazar said. In 2014, Oklahoma and Indiana exited Common Core and of the remaining states, 25 renamed their standards.
Salazar said almost all of the states have tweaked those standards, either adding additional topics such as cursive writing or changing some of the requirements.
Dave Spence, president of the Southern Regional Education Board, said Common Core allowed educators to set international student achievement benchmarks while allowing states to determine how to reach those benchmarks. Spence said the central point of the standards is ensuring graduating high school students are prepared for college.
“They actually empirically predict student success in post-secondary education,” he said.
Spence urged legislators to keep the standards in place.
“I think there is some urgency to this,” he said. “West Virginia has already put in a lot of effort, a lot of money, a lot of time.”
Sandra Stotsky, professor emerita at the University of Arkansas and a critic of Common Core, disagreed, saying continuing Common Core would be “throwing good money after bad.”
Stotsky, who was on the validation committee that first reviewed the national standards, said she refused to sign off on what she called “very flawed standards.” Stotsky said the writers of the standards did not have backgrounds in education, many came from testing and assessment businesses and officials blocked any information or transparency concerning how the standards were developed.
“We saw flawed standards from the beginning and knew from the beginning part of the problem was the writers themselves,” she said.
But educators praised the standards. Wheeling Park High School teacher Gail Adams, West Virginia’s Teacher of the Year for 2014, said Common Core has helped her become a more dynamic and energetic teacher and has helped her students become analytical problem solvers.
“They are students who have learned to think and to think about the way they learn,” she said.
Adams said the next-generation standards “have elevated student engagement and learning.”
Angie Summers of West Virginians Against Common Core was perhaps the most outspoken of the program’s critics, calling the standards “the federalization of education.”
Common Core “is about controlling education in America,” she said. “It is about student data collection.”
Summers challenged Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin to address the issue, saying he had “ignored our concern and put children in jeopardy.”
Otha Thornton, president of the National PTA, said too many parents are reacting to rumors and half-truths about Common Core and he called on the state to keep the standards in place.
“Implementing Common Core does not sacrifice educational liberty,” he said. “West Virginia has a lot at stake around your decisions on Common Core.”
Thornton pointed out when the state was first looking at how to align its old standards with the new ones, about 80 percent of the existing standards already meshed with Common Core.
Stotsky said that means it should be relatively easy for the state to return to the old standards.
“If that is the case, why did you even go to Common Core?” she said.