Samis gets emotional talking about the Core repeal because, she says, the standards were tougher than the state's old standards. And she worries that, with the SAT and ACT both aligning to the Common Core, her students will have a harder time getting into college and out of poverty. Which helps explain why some districts, including Stillwater's, are simply refusing to drop the Core. "We can't go backwards," says Washington.
"Because, for three years, we had gone down a path that we saw was raising the bar, digging deeper." "Well, that's their decision," says Rep. Jason Nelson, a Republican state legislator who co-authored the repeal, "so long as they are teaching, at a minimum, the PASS standards." Hugo, Okla. Nelson says the law only requires districts to meet those old standards. If they think they can do that and use Common Core, he says, so be it. And that's exactly what Gay Washington is doing in Stillwater. If all of this feels a bit messy, Nelson argues that not repealing the Core would have made things even worse. "What we really had was a pending train wreck on our hands with flipping the switch to Common Core for the current school year," Nelson says. Public fear of the Core was just too strong, he says, and adds that a state can't roll out new standards without everyone's buy-in. There's another reason it would have been a train wreck, according to several teachers at that Oklahoma City Christmas tree LED Down Light . They said the state's implementation was a bust. Even after the state spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Core rollout, teachers said they needed more training, more materials and more help.
So ... now what? "Typically, it takes two years to write standards," says Amy Ford of the State Board of Education. "So we've been tasked with doing this in a very short period of time." Ford now finds herself with arguably the toughest job in Oklahoma. She's leading the effort to develop new standards that everyone can rally around — because even Nelson says he wants higher standards. Ford and her team have just a year to build them and hand them over to the Legislature, which has final say. "Everybody needs to realize that this is a challenging time for our teachers, for our districts and for the state," says Ford. That challenge boils down to some pretty basic math: One state ... divided by three different sets of learning standards ... in just four years. Hugo High School in Hugo, Okla.