WILL COMMON CORE’S REAL AUTHORS PLEASE STAND UP

PHOENIX, March 16 – Representative Boyer’s H2180 (schools; menus of assessments) got a boost of sorts today from State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Diane Douglas, who issued a nearly 750 word, almost two page, press release, touting the bill, giving a bleak status report of AZMERIT, and announcing her plan to meet with federal officials to try and get some flexibility with Common Core and the test. The bill, which cleared Senate rules today, requires the Board of Education to adopt a menu of achievement tests from which public schools can choose. The press release included comments from Douglas and Boyer, who both said there must be a choice in the tests school districts and charters can give. “As a teacher myself, I don’t want my curriculum or any other teacher’s curriculum to be driven by a test or bureaucrats in Washington DC,” Boyer said. Douglas said the state can lose up to $600 million in federal funds by not using Common Core, so she’ll be in the nation’s capital next week meeting with the congressional delegation, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and the “actual authors” of Common Core “to discuss giving the state flexibility to make improvements in both standards and in testing.” Douglas said she wants to convince Washington that her goal is to improve the standards and test, not eliminate them. Douglas wants the bill to pass to allow each district and charter to choose its own test, or allow public schools through their boards to vote to opt out of testing this year because of problems with AZMERIT. She reported that 40 percent of the schools will test online, while the rest will be using old-fashioned pencil and paper, and the two types of tests don’t match up, so scores won’t be comparable. She also lamented that test scores will dive in the first year, and improvements in the second year won’t show growth in achievement, but simply adapting to the test.