State lawmakers who've previously pushed for repealing West Virginia's math and English language arts K-12 education standards have filed another bill to do so, this one with House Education Committee Chairman Paul Espinosa and House Majority Leader Daryl Cowles as co-sponsors.
House Bill 4014, which Espinosa called a "starting point" that could see changes, currently would mandate that the state revert back to its pre-Common Core standards next school year and would require statewide standardized tests next school year to be aligned to those old standards. The state currently uses Common Core-aligned Smarter Balanced tests.
By the 2017-18 school year, the bill also would require the state Board of Education to develop and adopt new or revised standards and have statewide tests aligned to them. The bill wouldn't bar the state school board from adopting standards that "may coincidentally align with a Common Core State Standard."
At a roughly hour-long public hearing on the bill Thursday morning, teachers union presidents and officials from the state Higher Education Policy Commission and West Virginia University were among those who spoke in opposition. Angie Summers, of WV Against Common Core, and others spoke in favor of the bill, but there were again little to no criticisms of specific standards - part of the public Common Core debate that is continually lacking despite education officials' requests for what exactly people are opposed to.
A.J. Rogers, executive director of the West Virginia Association of School Administrators, noted most members of the organization supported sticking with both West Virginia's current Common Core-based standards and - after the state school board voted to adopt new standards for next school year - a majority of the group again voted to stick with the new ones. Rogers' group includes almost all county schools superintendents as well as administrators from county school system central offices, the state Department of Education and the Regional Education Service Agencies.
"We need to put this thing to rest and we need to move forward with the issues that are really facing our county superintendents and administrators," he said, noting teacher vacancies, the drastic proposed cuts to teachers' PEIA health insurance benefits and a lack of pay raises for teachers.
Rogers also opposes the Smarter Balanced tests that the bill would also target, but he's part of a testing commission that's tasked with giving State Schools Superintendent Michael Martirano recommendations on what should be done with the state testing system.
That commission appears eager to recommend replacing Smarter Balanced with tests provided by ACT. Though an alignment study between West Virginia's upcoming new standards and the ACT tests isn't finished, Paul Weeks, senior vice president of client relations for ACT, has said the alignment between the ACT exams - including the traditional ACT that many students rely on to get to college - and the Mountain State's new standards will be "very strong." He said that's because the new standards don't veer too much from Common Core, to which the ACT is well aligned.
In December, the state school board voted to replace, effective next school year, West Virginia's Common Core-based standards with new education requirements. The revisions came after a repeal bill last year passed the House 76-20 but died on the last night of the session when the House refused to agree with the Senate version, which would've instead required a review of the standards.
Despite the repeal bill failing, Martirano launched, in partnership with WVU, a special online "Academic Spotlight" review of the standards and eight town hall meetings on the issue across the state. That review allowed the public from early July until Sept. 30 to comment online on any of the more than 900 standards. It garnered more than 240,000 online comments from more than 5,000 individuals. More than 90 percent of the comments supported the standards, and although the website accepted comments from anyone over 18, self-identified West Virginia K-12 teachers were responsible for 91 percent of the comments.
Education department officials said they then used the feedback to draft the standards changes. But the standards that emerged from that review process do retain much of the same wording, down to the same examples and similar ordering, that are in Common Core.
Mason Republican Delegate Jim Butler, a vocal Common Core opponent, is the lead sponsor of the new bill, which also has among its 10 all-GOP co-sponsors delegates Michel Moffatt, R-Putnam, and Pat McGeehan, R-Hancock, two other lawmakers who were vocal in last session's failed repeal effort.
The legislation was introduced Tuesday, the same day Wade Linger resigned from the state school board, citing lawmakers' "encroachment" into the board's domain in multiple areas, including the standards. Linger, in a letter to MetroNews, called the education requirements "the best standards WV has ever had.
"Never has the essential tenant of separation of powers, so explicitly laid out in our constitution, been ignored and trampled as it has been in these last two years," Linger wrote. "Now that Republicans are in charge, they use their newfound political power to attack standards about which they know nothing."
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.