Some things you should know about Karen Woltman

At some point I’ll try to write more about the candidate field in the school board election. But before early voting gets any further, I want people to know some things about Karen Woltman that they may not be aware of.

I am very pleased that Karen is running for the board. Karen first came to my attention through her blog, Education in Iowa, which she’s been writing since 2010. It has been an excellent resource for information and intelligent commentary on education policy issues, and in particular on education-related Iowa legislation. Her extensive writing on educational issues will give you a great sense of who she is; her campaign website identifies several posts in particular that are relevant to school board membership. She has consistently maintained a thoughtful, conscientious, and well-documented commentary on state and local education issues. Moreover, she demonstrates that it’s possible to advocate and to be persistent while also maintaining a measured, reasonable discourse—always focusing on issues and reasoned arguments, not personalities.

Karen also played a remarkable role in one particular educational issue. Karen was a member of the State Assessment Task Force in 2014-15. When the task force recommended that the state require all school districts to use the very expensive and time-consuming Smarter Balanced Assessments, Karen was the sole dissenter. She was concerned about whether the cost of the tests would reduce funding for educational programming, asking whether the tests would cause cuts to music, art, and world languages of the kind we’ve already seen here in our district. She also asked hard questions about whether Iowa school districts had the tech readiness to implement the tests—noting that several states had experienced serious problems with implementation.

Karen’s willingness to dissent from the committee’s otherwise unanimous recommendation is a great indicator of her independence and ability to resist institutional pressure and groupthink. Moreover, her dissent was persuasive enough that it helped derail the state’s movement toward adopting the Smarter Balanced tests. The legislature did not accept the committee’s recommendation, and it looks increasingly likely that the state will end up adopting a less expensive testing regimen instead. The word “single-handedly” is probably never appropriate in politics, but in my view Karen’s dissent was quite possibly the single most influential factor in changing the course of those events.

Karen’s not against standardized testing; in fact, she’s very concerned about addressing the district’s achievement gaps in reading, math, and science proficiency. But she knows that everything has a cost and that the usefulness of any testing has to be weighed against what’s being sacrificed to pay for it—and that ultimately teaching has to have primacy over testing. (Her involvement on this issue makes an interesting counterpoint to the candidacy of Janet Godwin, who is the chief operating officer of ACT.)

In her school board campaign, Karen is arguing for prioritizing issues of curriculum, instruction, and school climate. “Facilities are important, but whether our children are learning, and whether they feel safe and supported at school, is more important than the size of their gymnasiums,” she writes. “Our children need a school board that can work on improving facilities and, at the same time, work on improving the programs that take place in those facilities.” You can read more about her priorities and positions here and here.

Karen is not as widely known as some candidates, and lately some have taken advantage of that fact to try to portray her negatively and in my view unfairly. This has taken the oh-so-progressive form of defining her an as extension of her husband. (Karen is a lifelong active Democrat married to a Republican.) People have also criticized her choice to home-school her younger children through the district’s home-school assistance program. (Her oldest child is a student at North Central Junior High.) In fact, Karen’s decision to home-school her younger children is driven by her longstanding interest in educational practice and not by any extremism, parochialism, or desire to withdraw from society. She has been more active in public education than most of us, to its benefit. Again, if you want an accurate understanding of who she is, all you have to do is look at her seven years of public writing about education issues.

Karen also has a law degree and if elected would be the only board member with that background. I believe it is a very useful qualification and one that has served me well on the board.

Please elect this sensible, smart, capable person. If you’re interested, you can help Karen become better known by hosting a yard sign; contact her campaign at KLWoltman@gmail.com.

Topics on the December 8 board meeting agenda

Some of the topics we’ll be discussing at this Tuesday’s school board meeting:

We’ll hear a review of the district’s progress in addressing disproportionate referral of African-American students to special education services. Info here.

We’ll be revisiting the topic of the Smarter Balanced Assessments. After having failed to persuade the legislature to require these very expensive standardized tests, the State Board of Education decided it had the power to impose them without legislative approval, and did so via an administrative rule (over the formal objection of our board). Info here. What’s the next step?

We’ll discuss the possibility of exploring a year-round school alternative. There are no details about this topic included in the agenda.

We’ll hear the district’s annual financial audit report. Info here.

We’ll hear from the committee that examined the issue of discretionary busing. To be entitled to a school bus under state law, a student needs to live a certain distance from his or her school — over two miles for elementary and junior high, and over three miles for high school. We’re free, though, to provide buses for kids who live closer if we choose to. We can’t afford to do much of that “discretionary busing,” however. A committee has been considering what our standards should be for offering discretionary busing.

We’ll hear a proposal for how to handle athletics as part of the transition to opening Liberty High. When Liberty opens in 2017, students who are juniors and seniors at West will have the option of staying on at West. That will pose some challenges for fielding sports teams during Liberty’s initial couple of years. The administration will discuss its recommendation for how to handle those challenges. Info here.

And more! The full agenda is here; please chime in if anything attracts your attention.

Iowa City Community School District votes to oppose Smarter Balanced tests

The Iowa Board of Education has proposed an administrative rule that would require Iowa school districts to implement the Smarter Balanced Assessments. Earlier this month, the school board of the Iowa City Community School District voted to submit the following comment opposing the rule. A more extended argument for opposing the rule appears here. Comments on the rule are due by November 3; you can read about how to submit one here.

Mr. Phil Wise
Administrative Rules Co-Coordinator
Iowa Department of Education
Second Floor
Grimes State Office Building
Des Moines, IA 50319-0146

Re: Proposed amendments to Chapter 12, “General Accreditation Standards,” Iowa Administrative Code

Dear Mr. Wise:

As the Board of Directors of the Iowa City Community School District, we write to urge you not to approve statewide adoption of the Smarter Balanced Assessments, for these reasons:

First, we are concerned that the state has insufficient information about the full cost of adopting the Smarter Balanced Assessments. In particular, there is insufficient information about how much it will cost to establish and maintain the technological infrastructure that will be necessary to implement these tech-intensive tests. Without information about the full costs of the tests, there is no way to evaluate whether the benefits of the tests are worth the cost.

Second, the partial information that is available indicates that the cost of the Smarter Balanced Assessments will be high. The Smarter Balanced consortium estimates the per-test price of its assessments to be $23.50, and that does not include the cost of the science assessment that the law also requires. The total price is several times higher than the per-student price of the Iowa Assessments, which the state currently requires. The price is also significantly higher than that of the Next Generation Iowa Assessments, which the task force determined was also Iowa-Core-aligned, and which, like the current Iowa Assessments, are produced in Iowa by the Iowa Testing Programs.

Third, we are concerned that the costs of the Smarter Balanced Assessments will fall ultimately on the districts. Even if the state allocates money to pay for the tests, it seems likely that that allocation will result in less money available for state supplemental aid. We are concerned that those costs will force districts to make cuts in instructional programming and other educational needs, at a time when budget dollars are already stretched thin.

Fourth, we are concerned that Iowa districts may not be technologically ready to implement the Smarter Balanced Assessments by the 2016-17 school year as the governing statute would require. See Iowa Code 256.7(21)(b)(2).

Fifth, we are concerned that the State Board of Education does not have the legal authority to adopt the Smarter Balanced Assessments through the administrative rule-making process, given that the governing statute states that the “state board shall submit to the general assembly recommendations” about new assessments. Iowa Code 256.7(21)(b)(4).

Thank you for your consideration,

Board of Directors,
Iowa City Community School District
1725 North Dodge Street
Iowa City, IA 52245

Why Iowa school districts should oppose the Smarter Balanced tests

The Iowa Board of Education has proposed an administrative rule that would require Iowa school districts to implement the Smarter Balanced Assessments. Our school board recently voted to submit a comment to the Department to oppose the rule. (Thank you, fellow board members!) Here is the letter I wrote to the board to explain why I thought we should submit that comment. The comment we submitted is here.

Dear Fellow Directors,

Thanks for your willingness to consider an item that I asked to put on the agenda about the state’s possible adoption of the Smarter Balanced Assessments.

The State Board of Education is currently considering adopting an administrative rule that would require Iowa school districts to use the Smarter Balanced Assessments instead of the Iowa Assessments that the state has required until now. As part of the rule-making process, the State Board has solicited public comment on the proposal; comments are due by November 3. I believe our board should submit a comment opposing the adoption of the Smarter Balanced tests.

In short, the Smarter Balanced tests will be much, much more expensive than the tests we have been using, both because of the cost of the tests themselves and because of the cost of the technology that will be necessary to administer them. It is not clear whether the state will allocate money to cover those costs. Even if it does, every dollar allocated to pay for the tests is likely to be one less dollar available for state supplemental aid. By requiring these tests, the state will, in effect, be deciding for us that we should redirect a large amount of our spending toward high-tech standardized tests, even if, in our judgment, the money would be better spent on preserving curricular programs, preventing class sizes from growing, or providing additional resources toward schools with particular needs (to name just a few possibilities). I’m afraid that the decision to adopt these tests will affect the state’s ability to provide supplemental aid for years, and could lead to additional rounds of budget cuts like those our district saw in 2014.

The purpose of this letter is to give you some background on the issue; I have attempted to provide links to sources or to more information wherever I could. I am separately attaching a first draft of a possible comment letter that we could submit; I mean it only as a starting point for our discussion if it is helpful.