TOPEKA — A policy retreat offered the Kansas Board of Education opportunity to explore how local school boards could be liberated from much of the state’s educational bureaucracy by reshaping standards to emphasize instruction in the basics of reading, writing and math.
Conservatives on the 10-member state Board of Education expressed support Monday in personal and philosophical terms for a shift toward fundamental subjects. During the informal gathering at a Topeka office building, right-leaning members said time had come to curtail state mandates bearing down on 284 school districts serving nearly 500,000 students.
Cathy Hopkins, who serves as chair of the state Board of Education and represents a district covering much of western Kansas, said the board was guilty of piling burdensome responsibilities on teachers and administrators. It could be necessary to jettison a large portion of state mandates to improve the ability of local districts to deliver for students in fundamental subject areas, she said.
Her personal agenda for the upcoming two years centered on helping students excel in reading and writing because prowess in those core areas would create an educational ripple effect on student learning.
“How do we get back to that? The core,” said Leavenworth state board member Danny Zeck, who serves as the board’s vice chair. “Get rid of all this Barbra Streisand stuff that we’re doing. What we’re doing now … is not working. We need to get down to the basic stuff for these kids — that they can read and write and do arithmetic and maybe there’s some computer skills and go from there.”
STATE BOARD member Debby Potter of Garden Plain said accreditation standards for public schools set by the state board had to be condensed.
“There’s a whole range of people and they don’t all have to know math at the level of every other one to be successful,” Potter said.
She indicted the state board should be operating at a 20,000-foot level in terms of academic directives. Local school boards should be allowed to fill in details of academic standards to reflect the character or needs of individual districts.
“God made us to want to learn and gain something we don’t have. All we have to do is provide the tools,” said Hutchinson board member Dennis Hershberger.
He said young children were being harmed by parents who gave them a PlayStation gaming device instead of a box of Crayons. He said he yearned for the past when a jar of pencils on a shelf or a chalkboard at the front of the classroom were keys to the educational experience.
BOARD MEMBER Betty Arnold of Wichita said compaction of instruction to reading, writing and math to the exclusion of other parts of a person’s education ignored reality because many students arrived in public school buildings ill-equipped to learn. Time devoted to mentally preparing students to succeed in school and life shouldn’t be viewed as an extravagance, she said.
“It’s more difficult to teach a kid who does not believe in him or herself,” Arnold said. “No students come to us the same way.”
Hershberger, the Hutchinson state board member, said he was “old-school” and recalled how he struggled emotionally as a child to overcome barriers to reading aloud in class. Students experience real education when they accomplished something they didn’t know they were capable of doing, he said.
“Every child unless there is some mental disability … has the capability of learning to read no matter what their background is,” Hershberger said.
IN RESPONSE, Arnold said it would be wrong for a state board member to transfer personal school experiences from decades ago to decisions about what was necessary to educate children in this era and the future.
“We have to be able to live outside of our own story,” Arnold said.
