Education bill top priority in Senate
by Brad Bowman

Claiming the Republican Majority Caucus in the Senate wants to get back to controlling educational standards in the state, Senate President Robert Stivers said the Senate’s number one priority bill is personal.

The Republican controlled Senate filed 13 priority bills Wednesday, many of which, like “right-to-work” and “informed consent” prior to an abortion, have been priority bills in the past.

Stivers told The State Journal the Senate’s “Education Reform Bill” has been the chamber’s priority bill in the past, but after his long journey seeking educational reforms 20 years ago he wanted it to be a priority this session.

“This is my 20th year. I always wanted to do things that I said were best for my kids,” Stivers said. “If I did things that I thought were good for them, I think they would be good for a lot of children. Education and the educational component of what this plans to do would be good for my children.

“I think that is really what we should do as a government – that which the individual can’t do for themselves — provide a good quality public education. Workforce readiness, preparing children for opportunity when they become adults...that’s what we need to look at as a priority.”

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Mike Wilson of Bowling Green, would change Kentucky’s current common core standards with a standards and assessment review structure that would recur ever six years and mirror the original Senate Bill 1 from 2009.

Wilson said teacher reviews would go back to principals not the Kentucky Department of Education, it would put education control on the local level.

Those standards would be evaluated, Wilson said, by practitioners that are “engrained in subject area, not affiliated with any testing vendors or curriculum vendors so we have teachers, boots on the ground, actually reviewing these.”

The standards and assessment review structure would involve a public review component in math, science, language arts and social studies.

The Kentucky Board of Education would have website solely for receiving public comments, a third party would be charged with collecting and disseminating those public comments to the advisory panels at the middle school, elementary and high school levels.

The advisory panels would consist of six teachers for each subject and various grade levels and one Kentucky Higher Education representative. Those panels would pass on their recommendations to a standards and assessments development committee comprised of a committee for each subject, six teachers in those subject areas and two higher education representatives with one from a public institution.

Those standards and findings would in turn go to a recommendation committee consisting of three governor appointees, three senators appointed by the Senate president and three representatives appointed the by the House speaker which ultimately would send their refined recommendations to the Kentucky Board of Education which would implement those standards and alignments no later than the second academic year of the review.

“We want to get back to controlling our standards. There has been such misinterpretation of what we were trying to do years ago that it has become a total distraction to the educational process,” Stivers said. “Teachers will feel more like they can teach. We won’t have as much testing therefore teaching to test — we can still measure accountability, we can have measures, look for workforce readiness. Ideas and theories become toxic and become impediments of themselves.”

Other top notable bills

• Senate Bill 2 “Pension Reorganization” would require more transparency for the state pension systems, including fees and transactions with third party services;

• Senate Bill 3 “Right to Work” prevents the requirement employees joining a union and paying union dues as a condition of employment;

• Senate Bill 4 “Informed Consent” requires women seeking an abortion to have a face-to-face, in person consultation with a physician 24 hours prior;

• Senate Bill 5 “Marriage License Fix for County Clerks” codifies Bevin’s executive order removing county clerks’ signatures from marriage licenses;

ª Senate Bill 7 “Defunding Planned Parenthood” would prohibit any non-Medicaid state tax dollars from funding Planned Parenthood;

• Senate Bill 9 “Repeal Prevailing Wage” on public funded school construction projects allowing schools not pay workers based on average calculation of an area’s skilled workers;

• Senate Bill 25 “Prohibiting Sale of Fetal Tissue” to ensure profits  are not obtained by individuals or organizations by selling fetal tissue from an abortion.