Miller Dismisses Ducey’s Standards Decree

Miller angry after a SBE Board meeting earlier this year.

Arizona State Board of Education president Greg Miller has made headlines frequently this year; from manhandling the petite Superintendent Diane Douglas to ignoring the voter’s wishes with his pro-Common Core vote last month. Throughout, the irritable charter-school owner has at least given the public some sense that he is serving the Governor.

While his abusive behavior and unpleasant demeanor hardly reflected well on the Governor, comments made this week have education advocates wondering if he does serve the Governor.

Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey, like Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas ran against the current Common Core standards innocently put in place by Arizona officials in the grab for Race to the Top dollars in 2010. The mandate delivered in 2014 election was clear; Douglas ran on nothing more than her commitment to rid the state of the federally crafted Common Core-based Arizona Career and College Ready standards.

While no one questioned Douglas’ commitment to eradicating Common Core, they had doubts about Ducey’s sincerity. However, when Ducey called for a citizen-educator comprised committee to review the English Language Arts and Mathematics standards “in their entirety to ensure that our children are well served by the standards you develop—with full transparency,” people believed he was backing up the campaign rhetoric with action.

He was explicit: “This review should include input from people at all levels of education from every corner of our state – including parents, teachers, principals, and content experts – and the focus needs to be on an Arizona solution. And in any instance during your review, you find situations where Arizona standards can outperform or improve our current standards, I ask you to recommend replacement immediately.”

So when Miller, a donor to Douglas’ General Election opponent and Common Core proponent, David Garcia, told the Capitol Times this month, “The board’s position, and it was basically affirmed by the board, was that unless it was better, don’t bother,” jaws dropped.

Miller disregarded the review process publically.

For some time he has worked behind the scenes to make the process difficult, either by belittling committee members, or stacking the committee with his friendlies, but he had never before made his contempt for Ducey’s direction so plain.

In the article, New state education standards likely to look a lot like Common Core, Miller not only seems to dismiss the review portion of Ducey’s direction, but perpetuates the myth that the standards are adequate.

Common Core based standards are lower for the most part than the previous standards. As Douglas told the Capitol Times reporter, “… the math standards will prepare a student for a community college, but not a university.” Douglas explained: ‘We know there’s no calculus standards on them, we know there’s no trig standards, there’s nothing beyond basic algebra with a little bit of geometry smattered into them.”

One of the most common concerns expressed by lawmakers this year, during the discussion of HB2190 (repeal and replace Common Core), was the achievement gap. That skills gap is glaring when looking at college admissions in Arizona. Too many Arizona students lack the skills to move from high school to college.

Aside from less-than rigorous math standards, the current standards are lacking in literature as well. That shortcoming was noted by Rep. Otondo during the HB2190 discussions. The reading standards are, in fact, detrimental, because Common Core has replaced more than 50% of the literature standards with unproven informational text. This division makes it impossible for English teachers to construct a coherent literature curriculum. To make matters worse, Common Core takes reading literature and purposes it entirely to close textual reading, which is a tool of literary criticism, a purpose that does not serve the reasons why children read.

However, it is the pedagogy – telling teachers how to teach – contained in the current standards that cause the most concern for educators. Unlike traditional standards, Common Core based standards have pedagogy embedded in many of them. Pedagogy is a new data point in a teacher’s evaluation. In Arizona’s non-homogeneous classrooms, evaluations based on a prescribed pedagogy could be very problematic for the most highly effective teachers.

Contrary to the claim made in the Capitol Times piece, by Tim Ogle, president of the Arizona School Boards Association, a complete overhaul would not cost more than $100 million dollars. In fact, the committees can make the changes Ducey called for with little expense to the State or school districts.

Of course, an inexpensive and nonpolitical effort would not serve the interests of those who have made millions on Common Core so far. And – more importantly – it wouldn’t serve the interests of Miller and his cohorts who use the issue to beat Douglas down and make her ripe for recall.

Committee members are currently touring the state to get input from locals, a process that is expected to last until the end of this month. This Friday is the deadline to submit comments on the standards.

A group of parents, known as the Mommy Lobby has developed a set of guidelines upon which the standards should be judged. They say that academic standards should:
1. Be grade level and developmentally appropriate;
2. Be clear, concise, objective, and measurable;
3. Not require a specific teaching methodology or curriculum; and
4. Be consistent with the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Arizona

If it would cost more than $100 million dollars to change our current standards to comply with those guidelines, one has to wonder how bad our current standards are.

The public can weigh-in on the Arizona’s K-12 Mathematics and English Language Arts Standards here

Listen to a discussion of the situation on the James T. Harris show here.