Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill in Boston, MA
Photo credit: Daderot via Wikimedia Commons (CC-By-SA 3.0)
The Massachusetts Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education held a hearing yesterday on H.3929 which, if passed, would rescind the Common Core State Standards, going back to the state’s previous Math and English language arts standards.
The bill also establishes a review process:
The process shall include committees made up exclusively of public school teachers and academics from private and public colleges and universities established and operated in Massachusetts. The commissioner shall copyright the frameworks, which shall be wholly owned by the department; permission shall be granted to copy any or all parts of these frameworks for non-commercial educational purposes…
…There shall be three review committees, one for each discipline of math, science and technology and English. Each review committee shall have three members appointed by the governor who shall choose said members from private or public research universities established and operated in Massachusetts for each of the disciplines. For the purposes of this section, a “research university” is any university that awards doctoral degrees in the arts and sciences. Each review committee shall warrant by a two-thirds vote that the frameworks are equivalent to the standards of the most educationally advanced nations as determined by the Trends in Mathematics and Sciences Study. No framework shall be approved by the board without such a warrant.
The petitioners for this bill are: Donna M. Colorio, Sandra L. Stotsky, Michael Sentance, Ryan C. Fattman, Kevin J. Kuros, Donald R. Berthiaume, Jr. , Agatha A. Bodwell, Peter Robert Hoogerzeil, Shanon Ann Dahlstrom, David M. McGeney.
If the bill is not passed the petition will go before the voters of Massachusetts. Grassroots activists have collected enough signatures to be on the ballot, but are currently facing a legal challenge.