House Debate of Education Reform Bill Began Last Night, One Controversial Part Already Discarded

By Lynn Campbell
IowaPolitics.com

Members of the Iowa House declined late Tuesday night to be as bold as Gov. Terry Branstad wanted them to be in reforming Iowa's education system.

Forty Republicans joined Democrats in voting, 78-21, against requiring students to have a 3.0 grade-point average to enter a teacher preparation program.

The vote came despite state Rep. Royd Chambers, R-Sheldon, a high school social studies teacher and the bill’s floor manager, urging fellow lawmakers to follow the theme of "raising the bar" when it comes to education.
 
Even Katie Treanor, a long-term substitute teacher at Karen Acres Elementary School in Urbandale, approved of the move. She said she maintained a 3.8 GPA at Grand View University, even if the requirement was 2.5 and has now been increased to 3.0.
 
But state Rep. Guy Vander Linden, R-Oskaloosa, called the move an "unnecessary intrusion" by the Legislature and said people running Iowa's colleges should be the ones to decide who is capable of being a teacher.
 
The Iowa House was poised late Tuesday night to approve House File 2380, a sweeping education reform bill that Branstad has said isn’t bold enough. If passed, the bill moves to the Senate, where majority Democrats have proposed a much smaller, pared-back bill without most of the governor’s initiatives.
 
“What I’m excited about is you’ve got two chambers coming from very different places, talking about kids learning, with the best intentions in mind,” said Margaret Buckton, a lobbyist for the Urban Education Network of Iowa, a consortium of 17 of the largest school districts in the state.
 
House File 2380 would:

•     Retain third-graders who can’t read.
•     Evaluate teachers annually instead of every three years.
•     Require end-of-course exams before graduation.
•     Require high school juniors to take the ACT college entrance exam or    a career-readiness exam.
•     Study online learning.
•     Expand the state's charter school law.
•     Make teacher layoffs based on performance, not seniority.
•     Extend student teaching from 12 to 15 weeks.
•     Allow alternative licensure for people in other careers who want to teach.

Branstad proposed allowing 100 percent online instruction for some students, but the House bill calls for studying the issue and prohibiting students from being taught exclusively online. The Senate bill says online learning can make up only half of a student’s coursework.
 
“Let’s not be afraid of new opportunities and new technology,” Branstad urged this week. “We’ve got so much fear of change — ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to do things the way we always did ‘em.’ This is not 1950. It is a new era, and we do need to look at what works best and most effectively for each individual student.”
 
Chambers proposed going back to Branstad’s original proposal to allow some students to be taught exclusively online. Lawmakers agreed to do so, but only after voting 57-33 to limit those learning online to about 900 students statewide, and 1 percent of each school district.
 
Even as the House worked toward approval of its bill, the debate over online education raged outside the Statehouse.
 
State Education Director Jason Glass said that an opinion from the Iowa Attorney General’s Office validated the Iowa Department of Education’s finding that proposals for online education programs in the CAM and Clayton Ridge school districts meet state law. The online academies are scheduled to open this fall.
 
“This debate isn’t about whether there’s a place for technology in our classrooms to augment and improve learning opportunities that weren’t available in the past,”  said Sen. Thomas Courtney, D-Burlington, a former school board member. “This debate is about whether we want to hand over the education of thousands of Iowa children to for-profit, out-of-state companies that will rely on 100 percent online classes, without the need for students to ever set foot in a classroom with a teacher.”
 
Third-grade retention opposed by teachers’ union
 
Of all the proposals in the education reform bill, the one that would retain third-graders who can’t read has drawn the most controversy among teachers.
 
“We’ll fight tooth and nail to stop that one,” said Mary Jane Cobb, executive director of the Iowa State Education Association, which represents more than 34,000 educators.
 
Nancy Plagman, 61, of Des Moines, who has two children in their 30s, said she didn’t agree with holding back third-graders if they can’t read, or requiring all students to take the ACT college entrance exam. But she said the biggest problem in Iowa’s schools is making sure that Iowa has the best quality teachers.
 
“You can’t get rid of the bad teachers, is one of the major problems I see in education. Once they become tenured, you can’t get rid of the bad ones,” Plagman said. “Not having the choice — in no other business do they allow poor employees to continue to work there."
 
Buckton said the state's largest school districts support upgrading Iowa’s testing and accountability system so it’s more meaningful for teachers and students. The group also backs the ACT requirement.
 
“People have said, not every student should take the ACT,” Buckton said. “There may be some students that are never going to go to college. But we’ll find some that are college worthy who didn’t know, didn’t have a role model that expected that of them, and all of a sudden, it will change their life.”
 
Education reform may affect No Child Left Behind waiver
 
The stakes of this year’s education reform debate are high.
 
Iowa has applied for a waiver from the 2001 No Child Left Behind federal education accountability law. To get the waiver the state must have an alternate plan for accountability, including:

    New student standards and assessments.
    Better identification of top performers.
    Help for struggling schools.
    Improved teacher and principal evaluations.

Branstad and Glass have warned that the Legislature’s failure to approve bold education reforms this year will force the state to withdraw its waiver application.
 
But Cobb said there’s a lot of gray area between what the federal government requires, what’s in the Iowa waiver application and what the Legislature had to do.
 
“When they say they have to pass this bill to get a waiver, that’s not completely true,” she said. “They have to include the things that the U.S. Department of Education requires, but they don’t have to look exactly like what this legislation puts forward.”
 
Branstad’s proposal to move Iowa to a four-tier teacher compensation system has been put on hold until next year, largely due to costs. Iowa House Appropriations Committee Chairman Scott Raecker, R-Urbandale, has said the governor’s plan could cost between $200 million and $300 million in fiscal 2014.