West Virginia's governor vetoed bills Friday that would have banned existing statewide end-of-year tests for students, required another review of K-12 education standards and ended the requirement for a minimum of 180 separate instructional days for K-12 schools, even when students miss many days because of snow.
Because the legislative session has ended, lawmakers don't have a chance to override the vetoes.
One bill (HB 4014) would have banned West Virginia, starting next school year, from giving the Smarter Balanced standardized exam, which is aligned to the Common Core national standards blueprint.
Mountain State students are taking the test across West Virginia this spring for only the second time.
In his veto message, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin wrote that the bill would require the state Board of Education to stop using Smarter Balanced "in a very limited timeframe."
He said this "discounts the time and consideration that will be needed to evaluate and establish a new statewide summative test" and could disrupt the state's upcoming A-F grading system for schools. Using a new test could limit the year-to-year comparisons needed to gauge whether schools are improving or not.
"While revisions may be warranted as we move along, we need to be cautious not to undermine stability for our teachers or the children they educate," Tomblin wrote. He said the bill would cause "yet more uncertainty and instability in our system of public education."
Luci Willits, deputy executive director of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, said 15 states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands and three schools in the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, plan to use Smarter Balanced exams this school year, and she expects the membership to stay steady or, perhaps, to add Iowa next school year.
She said she knows of only one other state, Idaho, that had a bill introduced this year specifically to dump Smarter Balanced, and that bill didn't get a hearing, although Michigan has pending legislation that would require that state to redo its assessment system.
"What we're seeing is, in more and more in of our member states, there is a level of stability," Willits said.
The bill Tomblin vetoed would have required West Virginia to adopt a testing system that seemed to greatly resemble the ACT Aspire tests and, for 11th-graders, the traditional ACT.
ACT has said its Aspire tests can prepare students in earlier grades to take the traditional ACT, a college-entrance test widely accepted by higher education institutions.
The bill would have required whatever "college entrance examination" the state school board adopted to be given to all high school juniors next school year. West Virginia currently doesn't require all pupils to take the ACT.
The language that would seemingly force the state to adopt the ACT tests - bill supporter Sen. Chris Walters, R-Putnam, even said the ACT tests were "kind of spelled out in this bill" - drew opposition from the state school board. Yet, most members of a commission that state schools Superintendent Michael Martirano established to give him recommendations on testing want to move away from Smarter Balanced.
Tomblin's veto of HB 4014 doesn't necessarily mean West Virginia will be using Smarter Balanced again next school year.
Sarah Stewart, the state Department of Education's director of policy and government relations, said the department still needs an alignment study between Smarter Balanced and West Virginia's revised math and English language arts standards that are taking effect next school year.
She also said the state's contract with Smarter Balanced hasn't yet been renewed for next school year, and education officials, some of whom have expressed interest in using customized West Virginia end-of-course exams, haven't officially decided what test they'll use next school year.
As originally filed on Feb. 2, HB 4014 also would have repealed the state's K-12 math and English language arts standards. These standards - even the revised ones that the state plans to implement next school year - greatly resemble the Common Core standards.
Those standards revisions came after the education department, in partnership with West Virginia University and other entities, did a special review of the standards following lawmakers' failed efforts in 2015 to repeal them.
By the time the Legislature passed this year's bill - on March 12, the last night of the session - it had suffered the same fate as the 2015 legislative session's Common Core repeal effort: The repeal bill had been turned into a bill that would only require a review.
The state's upcoming new science standards are based on a national blueprint called the Next Generation Science Standards, not the separate Common Core, but a review of them was added to HB 4014.
That came after the House of Delegates changed the bill to outright block the science standards, with some delegates saying they objected to their teaching of human influence on global warming. The Senate later scaled back that provision to just a review.
Tomblin also vetoed a bill (HB 4171) that would have deleted the word "separate" from the phrase "one hundred eighty separate instructional days" in current law.
It also would have added language saying the instructional minutes counties build up over time - by keeping students in class longer each day than the state-set minimum daily instructional time - could be used to make up days lost due to inclement weather or emergencies.
The state school board allows school systems to use these "accrued" minutes to make up time lost due only to late arrivals or early dismissals.
The bill, which passed the Senate and House with broad support, also would have barred traditional calendar schools from having students start before Aug. 10 or leave after June 10.
"With proper planning, a county school system should be able to achieve 180 separate days of instruction without encroaching on summer vacation to a great degree," Tomblin wrote in his veto message. "Because this bill retreats from the comprehensive education reforms I championed in 2013, including the flexible school calendar concept, it is hereby vetoed."
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.