Legislative Leaders Air Frustrations With Ed Board
Legislative leader expresses frustrations with Board of Education
By RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer
Foot-dragging by the State Board of Education on developing school standards has caused “some frustration,” Speaker of the House Jeff Hickman said Wednesday.
“I’ve sent some letters over encouraging them to get moving,” Hickman, R-Fairview, told the Tulsa Regional Chamber. “We passed legislation that required them to develop new standards, and it was all done with an emergency clause, which means we wanted things done sooner rather than later. You don’t pass a bill with an emergency clause because you want someone to sit around six, eight, 12 months and get to it when they get around to it.”
Last spring, the Legislature repealed statutes implementing Common Core, a set of national academic standards that became unpopular for a variety of reasons, most of them related in one way or another to a perceived loss of state and local control of public schools.
The repeal caused the state to lose its waiver from No Child Left Behind requirements, which in turn affected $20 million to $30 million in federal education funding and put as many as 90 percent of state schools in danger of NCLB sanctions.