AUGUSTA, Maine — Lawmakers are reacquainting themselves with ongoing concerns over standardized testing and Maine's education standards.
The Legislature's Education and Cultural Affairs Committee heard public testimony on two bills Monday.
One would delay this spring's statewide assessment test for one year.
The other would throw out the Common Core standards in English and Math.
Opposition to the Common Core standards has grown nationwide in the past few years. Maine joined 44 other states and the District of Columbia in adopting the standards in 2009.
Three states, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Indiana, have since abandoned the Common Core.
Lawmakers on the education committee voted down a bill last year, co-sponsored by East Machias Republican Rep. Will Tuell, that would have dumped the Common Core in Maine. On Monday, just days after reconvening, the issue was before them once again and so was Tuell.
"You've probably heard that this bill wipes out standards and leaves Maine schools to pick up the pieces," he says. "It does not."
Tuell's latest bill, LD 1492, would allow local districts to return to following the Maine Learning Results that were in effect until April 2010. In the meantime, the bill would also create a working group at the Maine Department of Education made up of parents, teachers and other educational leaders from across the state.
"Over the next year, this wide-ranging group of Mainers will review, revise and replace the Common Core standards in Maine," he says.
Under Tuell's bill, the new standards would take effect during the 2017-2018 school year. After a question-and-answer session with Tuell, the committee opened the floor to members of the public.
Gwen Clark, a member of the school board in Baileyville, supports Tuell's bill and told a story about how the Common Core can be confusing for families.
Last year, Clark says her granddaughter came home from school one day with spelling test. The teacher had written a large number 3 on the exam.
"She only got three wrong," she says. "I didn't understand what 3 meant. I had to call the teacher. And I was a board member, I'd been on the board then for three years and I didn't understand what 3 meant. The teacher said, 'No. It means she's met proficiency.' And I said, 'Met proficiency in what? In one spelling test? In writing? In reading?'"
Clark says the Common Core, and the tests used to measure students' proficiency in its English and math benchmarks, has the kids in her district focused more on passing than on learning.
Stephanie Phillips has a daughter in fourth grade in RSU 34, which covers the towns of Alton, Bradley and Old Town. As part of the Common Core standards, Phillips says that her daughter's class has been learning multiplication.
One night, Phillips says her daughter came home with an assignment, requiring her to use three different methods to solve a set of multiplication problems.
"I've got a little girl that's in tears every night," she says. "And it doesn't have to be that way. It is not rocket science to teach multiplication to ten-year-olds."
After hearing from more supporters of Tuell's bill, the committee turned the floor over to opponents of the bill.
"The business leaders and educators that we work with feel strongly that Maine's education standards should be rigorous and that they should prepare Maine students to pursue a range of education and career options after they leave high school," says Ed Cervone, who runs the group Educate Maine.
Cervone says forcing schools to change learning standards again would further destabilize public schools at a time when they've already been forced to absorb lots of changes in the classroom.
"Regardless of where people fell on this issue, a common message that was heard from educators during hearings last year was that the number of changes to date has created an uncertain working environment that ultimately effects students negatively," he says.
Commissioners in Gov. Paul LePage's administration don't often testify before legislative committees. But when lawmakers on the education panel asked whether anyone wanted to speak either for or against the Common Core bill, Acting Education Commissioner Bill Beardsley approached the podium.
"We support the aspects of LD 1492 that propose these substantive reviews," he says. "Yet, we remain attentive to recent concerns, expressed in the field, related to extensive testing, confusion over the introduction of performance-based learning and other implementation changes."
Beardsley says the department would rather spend the next year stabilizing teaching and learning in Maine's classrooms, simplifying standardized testing and helping schools figure out what proficiency-based education actually means.
Another bill, debated before the committee, seeks to clarify the state's testing situation. It would allow districts to treat this year's exam as a pilot project, so schools that simply aren't prepared to give the state's latest standardized test don't have to.