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DESE members present timeline for standards changes

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Officials from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) presented their updated timeline of adopting new state standards as required by HB 1490 Wednesday before the Joint Committee on Education.

Currently, eight separate entities (two subgroups based on grade level divided amongst the four major subjects of math, language arts, social studies and science) are forming their own standards based on curriculum from the state of Missouri, other states, educational entities and other resources to submit to DESE by Oct. 1 of this year. Some of the current standards being looked at include Common Core standards, which does not sit well with some committee members.

“It was a growing concern among parents and legislators about the Common Core standards that had been adopted,” Rep. Steve Cookson, R-Poplar Bluff, said during the hearing. “They were deemed to be ineffective standards.”

Some people sitting in on the hearing nodded their heads in approval.

Later that month, the committee, the Department of Higher Education and the public will make their own assessments of the standards over the course of a few months and make their final recommendations to DESE near the end of the year.

Then, the department will adapt the standards to fit with the recommendations, format the new standards, and finally implement the new standards by the Spring of 2016 to be used by the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year. Schools can then use those standards to make their own curricula.

From there, the state may have to wait a while before finding any results of their effectiveness, according to chairman Rep. David Wood, R-Versailles. It depends on how drastic the changes are.

Nasheed
Nasheed

“It’s kind of a domino effect,” Wood said. “If we have a large change in learning standards, we want to have the most rigorous and best standards in the state of Missouri. When you start changing the standards, the curriculum has to be aligned to those standards. We can’t test on those standards until the curriculum is adopted. When we ask what the similarity was to current standards, it was more a question as to how soon can we have this developed, and changed and implemented.”

While the standards of curriculum were the main focus of the hearing, Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, argued that last week’s test scores showed that changes in standards to teaching and leadership should be prioritized over what was being taught to the state’s children and whether or not their educations were being politicized.

“Those are the type of things I think we should be having a conversation about on those numbers,” she said. “Politics on the backs of our children needs to stop.”

Edit: An earlier version of this story used the terms standards and curriculum interchangeably. It has been amended to ensure the difference between the two is not confused.