By JOHN BINDER
Slidell news bureau
COVINGTON – The St. Tammany Parish School Board says it unanimously supports a 2014 Louisiana Legislative framework which includes support for raising standards to increase student achievement, but allowing at least a two year transition period for the Common Core State Standards.
The framework, put together by the Louisiana School Board Association (LSBA), outlines a number of issues facing the school system, including the Common Core State Standards, teacher accountability and retirement plans.
As for Common Core, the school board has formally supported a resolution in the past that condemned the standards as being intrusive to student privacy and for supposedly stripping control from local school systems.
However, the framework does not precisely follow that initiative supported by the school board, which essentially asked State Superintendent John White to exempt the school system from Common Core in order to guarantee local control.
Instead, the framework supports a “strategic and cohesive state curriculum framework” which says must be conducted grade level by grade level, unit by unit, with sample activities and properly vetted resources for teachers.
Also, the plan supports state developed assessments and asks that the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) testing be delayed “so that an appropriate, cost-effective national assessment can be determined with local stakeholder input.”
With district, school and teacher accountability, the framework supports the current assessments of student achievement in which school and district performance scores are utilized numerically during the transition period.
Furthermore, the framework asks that the use of letter grade labeling be suspended as well as the consequences during the transitional period. It also states that the state teacher evaluation programs, such as COMPASS and Value-Added Model (VAM), should be revised in order to give local school systems flexibility and accurate assessments.
In regards to the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP), which is the formula that ultimately allocates funding for education to school districts, the framework advocates for an unrestricted 2.75 percent increase in per pupil funding annually by the state.
It also asks that the state stop imposing new, required spending without additional funding such as unfunded mandates and that it addresses initiatives that require additional funding such as career education, dual enrollment, special education and technology upgrades accompanied by local flexibility and local authority.
The framework calls out the Unfunded Accrued Liability (UAL) of the public school employees’ retirement systems as the major financial burden placed on local school systems. Also, the plan adds that the UAL is a state obligation and should be funded by the legislature.
The 2014 Louisiana Legislative Session begins March 10 and will conclude on June 2.