House passes bill to ban Common Core

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By Erika Brock
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – A bill to ban state education officials from using the controversial Common Core standards and replace them with Indiana-based curriculum rules passed the House with bipartisan support on Thursday.

But the legislation no longer appears terribly relevant. The State Board of Education is already working on new standards that are in some parts similar to the Common Core but diverging in other areas.

“It is the right thing to do for Indiana,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jeff Thompson, R-Lizton. “It sets up the guidelines needed to move forward.”

The bill requires new “college and career readiness standards” to be ready for the 2014-2015 school year. It also defines college and career readiness as standards that provide high school graduates with the “requisite knowledge and skill to transition without remediation to postsecondary education or training and ultimately into a sustainable career.”

However, the bill doesn’t require testing on the new standards right away. That would be implemented the following year.

Democratic Rep. Kreg Battles, a teacher in Vincennes, said the bill is “setting kids up for failure” because it doesn’t include a pilot program to try out the standards and testing program.

“If you know anything about testing you do not give a test unless it has been piloted first,” Battles said. He had offered an amendment on Wednesday that would have added a pilot program to the bill but it was shot down.

Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, said that the reason for the pilot would have been to insure that the teachers will not be “teaching one thing and testing another.”

But Thompson said, “Nothing at all in this bill I can find that does not allow a department to do pilot testing.”

Last year, lawmakers passed legislation to pause the implementation of Common Core, which is a set of standards originally written by officials from several states but adopted by the administration of President Barack Obama. Last year’s bill also called for lawmakers and state education officials to reconsider the State Board of Education’s adoption of the standards.

Now, the board is holding public hearings on a different set of standards, which members want to implement by the next school year.

Erika Brock is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

 

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1 COMMENT

  1. Finally, something Indiana has done right. And Erika, the divergence of some common core parts while retaining the gist of common core is the same as painting a pile of crap; you are left with a painted pile of crap.

    This legislation is still relevant under one condition; so long as new curriculum rules contain nothing from common core. I would really like to see the teachers heavily involved and given the final authority over the new curriculum development, sans hiring some “expert group” or the like. I have full confidence with teachers at the school level to be far more cognizant of whats needed than trying to do it from the top down.

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