Rooker Review: Legislative Wrap-Up, Part 1

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Communities of the 25th District

Fairway
Mission
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Prairie Village
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CONTACT MELISSA

In Topeka:
State Capitol Room 168-B
Topeka, KS 66612
melissa.rooker@house.ks.gov
785-296-7686

At home in Fairway
4124 Brookridge Drive
Fairway, KS 66205
melissa@melissarooker.com
913-961-1555

Dear Friend:

It was a crazy ride in Topeka the past couple of weeks as the regular session raced to a close on Thursday. We are now adjourned until April 27 when we reconvene for the Veto Session. The pace made regular updates impossible - for that reason, my recap will be divided into several parts so I can dig in to the details for you.

Budget news
Revenue numbers for March will be released on April 1 and the Consensus Revenue Estimates for the coming year will be updated on April 20. The news is widely expected to be terrible for the state, and should come as no surprise. The question will be how legislative leadership chooses to deal with it.

Our number one job as legislators is making appropriations. The only funding specifically mandated in the state constitution is public education. On Feb. 11 the Kansas Supreme Court issued a decision regarding the equity portion of the Gannon case. The directive was to provide "reasonably equal access to substantially similar education opportunity through similar tax effort."

Translation: High-property-value districts can easily raise money with a very small tax increase, while raising the same amount of money in low-property-value districts is difficult because it requires many more mills. To prevent funding inequalities, the state provides funding to poorer districts so they can “match” the effort in richer districts without extraordinary increases in their mill levies.

The court warned that if the deficiency is not corrected by June 30, the court will block education funding as of July 1.

Prelude to Equity Fix
Before addressing the serious problem at hand, we were forced to entertain two costly and detrimental bills that would have overstepped the constitutional authority of our duly elected state board of education and created financial hardship via unfunded mandates for our schools.

Statewide procurement
HB 2729 required school districts to route purchasing through a state agency in Topeka rather than in their local communities. Supporters of the bill argued that economies of scale would realize savings in the procurement process. Opponents of the bill pointed to the challenges and cost of transporting and storing perishable goods (think fuel, individual cartons of milk, etc), loss of economic activity in local communities across Kansas, and the increased government bureaucracy created by the scope of such an expansion in the Department of Administration. Questions were raised in debate that could not be answered, so the bill was referred back to committee for further study.

Common Core Standards
The most significant piece of legislation was House Sub for 2292, the anti-Common Core bill. This issue has dominated the work of the House Education committee each of the past four years. We defeated the bill in committee my first year, killed it outright on the floor several years ago, defeated it in committee last year, and finally this week, once again killed it outright on the floor of the House after a 3½ hour debate.

The bill carried a $9 million price tag for the state to redesign the state assessment test and unknown costs for our school districts at a time when we are already struggling with significant budget deficits.
It put AP and IB classes in jeopardy by banning any standards created outside of the state of Kansas. Textbooks, supplemental materials, ACT, SAT, many of the reading programs used in our schools and a host of other things would have been rendered off-limits, and put Kansas kids at a disadvantage when trying to compete for admission to college and job placement outside the state of Kansas.
Debate revealed a great misunderstanding of the differences between standards, curriculum and lesson plans:
- Standards are grade-level goals (learning to count to 100, adding and subtracting, learning to read, learning to use pronouns, etc).
- Curriculum is the set of textbooks and supplemental materials used in the classroom.
- Lesson plans are the specific methods used to teach the subject from day-to-day using the materials provided in order to achieve the goals set by the standards.

Why put so much at risk over education standards?
Opponents argue they were developed by the federal government, contain objectionable required reading material and will lead to massive personal intrusion through a data-mining effort of individual student information gleaned through biometric and computer-based standardized testing. Let’s unpack those arguments.

The states led development of the standards, not the federal government:
- At the urging of our nation’s governors, the states worked together to develop a uniform set of expectations for each grade level across the country. In fact, three current members of the state legislature served on committees that had input into this process, each in a different subject area.

The standards create a framework and ensure that students can move about the country without falling behind:
- They do not get specific about how to teach or what to teach. In Kansas, each local school board decides what books and materials to purchase and each teacher decides how to use those materials in his/her own classroom.
- This uniform framework of expectations does not mean that each student will be on the same page of the same textbook on any given day nationwide, it simply means that by the end of each grade level they will have covered the same set of overall expectations.

The Kansas State Board of Education reviews our K-12 standards every 7 years on a staggered schedule. English and Math standards are up for review in 2017, Science and Social Studies in 2020. The process includes opportunities for public comment and an extensive review by the BOE and educators around the state. As I always tell my constituents, if you have comments, questions or concerns about the standards, please direct them to our state board members for consideration.

Examples given during debate by opponents to the Common Core included selected passages deemed overly explicit and objectionable from specific novels that may or may not have ever been used in a Kansas classroom and new methods of teaching math that parents are unfamiliar with.
- This is an example of confusing lesson plans with standards. The standards do not get specific about what texts to use to achieve the goals. Teachers can still use their discretion about reading lists.

The new standards emphasize teaching a deeper understanding of “why,” rather than relying on simple rote memorization. This understanding is a critical step in developing students to enter the high tech world that awaits.

Data-mining fears were stirred up in 2011 because of a Gates Foundation initiative called “inBloom” that proposed using cloud based storage systems to provide districts a method of maintaining student data. The initiative also proposed creating “dashboards” to track student success (ironically, this is an idea implemented by our own Board of Regents this year so students and parents can analyze the earnings potential and job placement rates of the degree programs offered).
- Kansas never signed on to use inBloom, and in fact the non-profit was shuttered by the Gates Foundation in 2014 because of lack of participation.
- For over thirty years the University of Kansas Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation has written and proctored our state assessment tests. The State Board of Education voted to award the contract to KU’s CETE when deciding how to reformulate our tests to align with the Kansas College and Career Ready Standards in 2014.

We have taken steps to safeguard personal student data and how it can lawfully be used in Kansas in the past couple of years. Aggregate student data can give insight into the success or failure of certain programs, but individual student data should be protected as much as possible.

If you are curious, here are links to the current Kansas standards at the heart of the debate:

The 3½ hour debate began with a procedural rebellion. When the routine motion to adopt the committee report was offered to start debate, the NO votes won on a roll call vote. I have never seen this happen before, in fact even the clerk of the house had never seen this happen. Ultimately, on a motion to reconsider, debate commenced on the amended bill.

A barrage of amendments was offered by the faction wanting full repeal. Most were voted down. A motion to send the bill back to committee failed on the grounds that to really put this issue to bed, the debate and vote by the full House was necessary. Near the end of debate, after a number of speakers referenced the other states that have repealed or banned Common Core, I went to the well to speak. I focused on the three states that had done what we were proposing to do, all with little success and great expense.

My remarks during debate were based on what we could learn from a report about the Oklahoma project here.

In the end, HB 2292 failed by a vote of 44-78, a very strong showing.

In the next installment, I will share a recap of the debate that took place on Thursday regarding the Gannon equity funding remedy. As always, I encourage you to connect with me if you have questions or concerns. I am honored to serve.

Sincerely,

Rep. Melissa Rooker
Kansas State Representative, District 25
Serving Northeast Johnson County