Cookie-cutter education, we bid you adieu

Far be it from us, cynical journalists that we are, to find inspiration in dry, run-of-the-mill education committee hearings.

But we sure liked what we heard Alaska Education Commissioner Mike Hanley say during a House Standing Education Committee at the Wasilla Legislative Information Office Monday.

Hanley took on a topic that has been causing no small amount of concern — changes to the state’s educational standards. Rather than adopt the Common Core State Standards put forward by the federal government, the state has chosen to join the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a state-led consortium developing assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

At this time, 45 states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity have chosen to adopt the Common Core State Standards as developed by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. And Alaska is one of five states — including Nebraska, Texas, Virginia and Minnesota — that has gone another route.

We will leave to others to debate the wisdom of continually “raising the bar” on our public school students and teachers. But what we found refreshing was Hanley’s implicit certainty that Alaska students and teachers can meet these new standards.

In short, Hanley said students can learn the skills necessary to meet those standards in any way the school or the district deems fit.

If a district wants to teach its students how to do arithmetic while also teaching them how to build traditional Yup’ik qayaq, so be it. If they want to incorporate math education into career education or into teaching kids how to knit, that’s OK, too. So long as, in the end, those students are proficient in the requisite skills, districts have the state’s blessing to teach to the standards creatively.

When working toward any long-term goal, it’s worthwhile to step back and review your accomplishments. It wasn’t that long ago that a school like Mat-Su Career and Technical High School that taught welding, or accounting and culinary arts, was a rare and vanishing breed in Alaska, and non-existent in the Valley. It wasn’t until recently even that students enrolled at Palmer High or Wasilla High could also enroll at another school to take a class, like welding at Colony High.

And that’s not to mention options like magnet or Waldorf schools, or language-immersion schools, or alternative schools, or schools where all the homework is done online.

In the past decade alone the Mat-Su Borough has added examples of each of these programs to its offerings, and by most accounts their students are thriving. These aren’t the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all public schools that educated our parents, our grandparents and us. Never before have Mat-Su Borough public schools offered so many educational choices to parents and students.

We applaud the state for recognizing that it is the job of the educator to meet students where they are mentally and emotionally and encourage them to work toward their dreams.

Education can be viewed as a three-legged stool that needs parents, teachers and students to stand. Too often our efforts to improve education fail because they ignore students’ responsibility to seize the day and capitalize on the opportunities our tax dollars provide.