TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas officials involved in drafting new science standards for public schools tried Tuesday to reassure the State Board of Education that retraining teachers and buying new classroom materials won’t be unusually expensive following the adoption of such guidelines.
The issue arose during the board’s meeting when members reviewed a final draft of the proposed standards, which were developed by 26 states, including Kansas, and the National Research Council. The Kansas board doesn’t plan to decide until at least June whether to adopt the standards.
Educators and officials who helped draft the standards said they could significantly change science instruction. The standards presume that schools emphasize hands-on projects and experiments, blend material about engineering and technology into their courses and start teaching basic concepts about key subjects in kindergarten and build on them through the 12th grade.
But they also said schools would adjust over time, so that they wouldn’t have to retrain teachers all at once. They also said schools could replace existing textbooks and materials on their normal schedules.
“My teachers are overwhelmed with the idea of, ‘Can I get all this done in a year?'” John Popp, curriculum director for the Great Bend school district and a member of the Kansas committee working on the science standards, said after the board’s review. “My message to them is, ‘You don’t have to do it all in a year.'”
Kansas uses such academic standards to develop the annual, standardized tests given to students, and the state measures how well schools are teaching through the scores. Decisions about exactly what’s taught in classrooms are left to local boards of education, but the statewide tests influence them.
“This is going to call for some change, but we’re going to take it in little bits,” Popp said.
Some members of the Republican-dominated Legislature already are concerned about costs arising from the board’s adoption in 2010 of similar, multi-state standards for reading and math. Efforts to block the Department of Education from spending any money to put them into effect have been unsuccessful so far, however.
During the board’s review Tuesday of the proposed science standards, members Deena Horst of Salina and Jim McNiece of Wichita, both Republicans, asked officials involved in drafting the guidelines whether schools would face significant costs.
“We can see that it could cost a great deal,” Horst said.
The state and local school districts have set aside more than $18.4 million for the current school year for professional development programs, according to the Department of Education.
State Rep. John Bradford, a Lansing Republican who serves on the House Education Committee, said he and fellow legislators worry that not only will school districts have to retrain teachers and buy new materials but some will want to renovate buildings to accommodate changes in teaching.
The Kansas Constitution gives the Board of Education independent authority to set policy, but legislators approve the state’s annual budget.
“We’re not going to be able to afford this thing,” Bradford said after watching the Board of Education review the proposed science standards.
But Matt Krehbiel, the Department of Education official overseeing the state’s work on the science standards, said schools face retraining teachers and buying new materials every time academic standards are revised. Kansas law requires standards to be updated at least once every seven years.
“There’s nothing inherently more expensive about this,” he said after the board’s review.
Meanwhile, questions about schools’ teaching about evolution or climate change didn’t arise during Tuesday’s state board meeting. The proposed standards treat evolution as well-established science and assume students will learn about the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate and discuss ways to lessen them.
Past work on science standards in Kansas has been overshadowed by debates about how evolution should be taught. The state had five sets of standards in eight years starting in 1999, as evolution skeptics gained and lost state board majorities in elections. The current, evolution-friendly standards were adopted by the board in 2007.
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Existing Kansas science standards: http://bit.ly/11f3wWl
Proposed multi-state science standards: http://bit.ly/13dr1UE
Kansas State Board of Education: http://bit.ly/11eSoc4
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