By Jason Doyle Oden
Monday was the deadline for the Legislature to put its stamp of approval on the new Oklahoma Education Standards which replace the Common Core standards. Common Core was repealed in 2014. Lawmakers gave the State Department of Education the task of creating new education standards which met the needs in Oklahoma. After working through a lawsuit holding up progress and the numerous recommendations and suggestions, the Department of Education delivered the new standards to the Legislature on February 1st.
“In that law, it said after the new standards were delivered to the Legislature, then there would be thirty legislative days that they would have to either approve them or disapprove them or to give them back to the State Board of Education to make changes,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister.
While it took all thirty of those legislative days for the House and Senate to pass resolutions approving the standards, things didn’t go exactly as planned. House Joint Resolution 1070 would have allowed some desired changes to be made to the new standards without them returning to the Legislature for approval. The Senate adjourned before consideration of that resolution, but not before passing its own resolution approve the standards.
The work of putting the new standards into play before the next academic year begins for Hofmeister and the Department of Education.
“We now have standards that have been put in place and adopted for our state. We are just eager to get started on behalf of all those who worked on them.”
Rep. Dan Fisher is concerned about the way forward for the education standards. He sits on the House Common Education committee.
“My concern isn’t so much with the implementation, but with the standards themselves. If you remember back in 2014 when House Bill 3399 was passed which, of course, repealed Common Core, the State Department of Education was given two years to write the new standards required by that new law. They killed almost a year with a group that filed a lawsuit and one of the members named in that lawsuit was one of the members of the State School Board. They ran out a year of those two years suing us and then dragged their feet some more, and finally started to work on the standards.”
He contends even the same experts who helped write Oklahoma’s new standards feel that they need more work.
“One of the things that is not being told is that there is only a handful of states’ standards experts around the country. The State Department (of Education) worked with a number of organizations and individuals, state standard experts. The six people that they named as their state standards experts, three of those have voiced serious concerns that some of the standards are either not able to be tested because they’re so vague, others have actually voiced concerns that they are very closely aligned with some of the Common Core standards.”
Fisher wants to guard against Oklahoma slipping back into teaching for Common Core.
“That’s the reason why many of us are concerned that not any individual person is trying to bring in Common Core, but the very standards themselves will open the door for it.”
However, Hofmeister, who campaigned against Common Core in her bid to win the job of State Superintendent, said Common Core is not coming back.
“We have fought that fight. We have won. Common Core is finally, we can say with certainty, gone.”
