The Gloves Came Off!

Well, they sorta did.

After weeks of cheery informational hearings, food prizes for finding “weird” symbols in bill language, and generally agreeing with everything everyone had to say, the gloves finally came off a bit this morning in the K-12 Education Policy Committee.  The reason?  They were taking amendments to the K-12 Education Policy Omnibus bill… an 80 or so page piece of legislation that lays out the education policy changes the legislature wishes to enact.  As a political junky, all the lovey dovey stuff from before gets real old real fast.  The disagreement and debate today, with amendments being defeated and divided and re-written and roll call votes and everything was great.  Two things stood out to me:

I still can’t understand he focus that some legislators have on testing to determine if a student is worthy of receiving a high school diploma.  There is a part of the bill that will create an alternative route to graduation for students who can’t pass the high stakes graduation test… and these legislators tried unsuccessfully to remove it from the bill.  They claim that having students receive diplomas without passing the test amounts to a lowering of 1) our expectations of our students and 2) our academic standards.  I can understand why people might think that, but something that one of these legislators said today didn’t sit well with me.  He basically said that knowledge was most important criteria for determining qualification for graduation.  I guess if you believe in high stakes testing that is what you inherently believe.  This seems to be a rather narrow view of what is important in the world.  Non-cognitive skills are just as important as cognitive skills.  If you ask me, being a decent human being and a good citizen is far more important than any test score for determining graduation.  Again, as I wrote before, we use subjective, non-numerical, non-test-like analysis for almost everything in our lives.  Why should graduation be any different?  Rant over.

Similarly the insistence that teachers’ performance be reviewed based on numerical cost/benefit-ish data baffles me.  I won’t rant about this one because the rant is pretty similar to the one I just had.

In the end, thankfully, most of these amendments were blocked.

They had to recess this morning because they ran out of time, but the committee will be back for round two tonight at 6:30 PM.  Let’s hope the excitement continues!