Some Oklahoma legislators have big concerns about the newly proposed academic standards.
Both the House and the Senate have filed measures seeking to disapprove the standards until changes are made. The House also filed a second measure to approve them.
Senator Josh Brecheen is leading the charge against the standards on the Senate side, and said they need more work before they hit teacher’s desks. His main concern is that neither set of standards, in English or math, contain examples for teachers to follow.
“There are teachers all across the state asking, 'Where are the examples?' We are setting teachers up for failure," he said.
If the standards are disapproved, the State Department of Education will have to make revisions before legislators take another look at them. Brecheen and other lawmakers want math problem samples, and lists of reading materials to be included before they go in to effect.
The Superintendent of Public Instruction, Joy Hofmeister, says there is a difference between curriculum and standards, and that the curriculum is where the book lists and math samples go.
“So as soon as the standards are approved, and this is why it’s so important that those standards move forward, the next work would begin and that is of writing the curriculum framework,” Hofmeister said.
She said the State Department of Education and the writers of Oklahoma’s new academic standards purposely chose not to include examples because they did not want to be overly prescriptive.
“We didn’t want to veer on to the path that was used in Common Core, which was very prescriptive, where they did have those exemplars,” Hofmeister said. “Instead we wanted to provide local decision making, so there would be the flavor of the local community in those particular lists of books.”
Senator Brecheen said he's not a standards expert, so he and Senator Anthony Sykes invited two experts to address lawmaker's concerns via phone conference.
Dr. Larry Gray, from the University of Minnesota, said examples are extremely important because they can be the only way to clarify the intent of the standards, which are often times very technical. He said about 25 percent of Oklahoma’s newly proposed math standards are unclear.
“Lets say a substitute teacher came in and was told to teach a certain standard, and then looked it up and happened to hit on one that was unclear. This would cause a problem,” Gray said. “The credibility of the standards becomes weakened when 20 to 25 percent of them have some ambiguity, or something misleading, or something inaccurate in them.”
Gray was a principal architect of the math standards in Minnesota, which have been praised as some of the best in the nation. He said he and his team spent 100 hours combing through Oklahoma’s proposed math standards.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky, a renowned English Language Arts standards expert from the University of Arkansas, reviewed the proposed English standards, and agreed that the lack of examples is troubling.
“There is very little that teachers-to-be can find in these standards to know how to set up a coherent and rigorous curriculum, because the standards themselves contain so little,” Stotsky said, “Not even examples that would help prospective teachers.”
The Department of Education had listed the two experts as final reviewers of the standards, but both said the department chose to implement very few of their recommendations.
When asked if they would recommend approving the standards, Stotsky gave a firm, "No".
“By now it should be quite clear that I could not approve these standards as a whole, at all,” Stotsky said. “No, these are not the kind of academic standards that Oklahoma wants.”
Gray was more hesitant.
“I want to be very clear on this. The proposed Oklahoma math standards are definitely better than the PASS math standards that are currently in use in Oklahoma. So that should be kept in mind,” Gray said.
But he said there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
Hofmeister said the writing teams did follow much of Stotsky and Gray's suggestions, but there was a fundamental disagreement between them on whether to include examples. She said many experts agree that examples should be a part of the curriculum- that the department will help provide- and not a part of the standards, which are more for setting goals and benchmarks.
Hofmeister also said that Oklahoma’s current teacher shortage should be taken in to consideration when writing the new standards, and so the experts’ advice may lack an important frame of reference.
“So all of this was done in context,” Hofmeister said of the standards writing process. “Now when someone comes outside the close of that context, and wants to give some input—it may be relevant, it may not.”
Hofmeister criticized lawmakers for placing so much emphasis on these outside opinions.
“I just want to point out that House Bill 3399 demanded that Oklahomans write the standards. And yet at the 11th hour, the standards are in danger of being politicized based on the opinions of one or two outside our state.”
House Bill 3399 passed in 2014, and mandated that the State Department of Education write new academic standards that replace Common Core.
Senator Brecheen said the recommended changes would take no more than a month to implement.
"We're not suggesting we scrap this and start over," he said. "We just want to make sure it's done right before we're stuck on it for the next six years."
The new standards are supposed to be utilized by schools this coming school year. You can see the proposed version of them here.
