The full Kansas House could consider a plan to block the state from using Common Core education standards. That comes after the House Education Committee approved a bill blocking the standards during their final scheduled meeting of the session.
The proposal would throw out the current education standards and require the Kansas State Board of Education to write new ones by mid-2017. Republican Representative Amanda Grosserode says she doesn’t like the top-down idea of Common Core standards and the fact that they’ve been tied to some federal funding.
“New standards are going to be adopted. Let’s look at those standards, have the Legislature review those, and that way we know that we have specifically Kansas standards,” Grosserode says.
But critics of the bill say the standards set high goals for Kansas students and are working well. Democratic Representative Ed Trimmer says they created the bill and passed it too quickly, before people have even seen it in writing.
“We got an amendment that nobody even knows what it is yet and they voted for it. This is just policy making at its worst,” Trimmer says.
Trimmer has concerns the bill could have unintended consequences and risk federal special education funding.
