Nearly a dozen teacher leaders, university faculty members, school superintendents and state agency administrators will present information on the Common Core State Standards to a review council today on the first of five days of hearings at the Arkansas Capitol.
The Governor's Council on Common Core Review, a 16-member group appointed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and led by Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin, is conducting the five hearings in the Old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol and nine "listening tour stops" around the state on the kindergarten-through-12th-grade standards in math and English/language arts.
"The goal is to get facts, facts, facts," Griffin said Wednesday. "This is going to be jampacked, a lot of data, a lot of witnesses."
Today's hearing will start at 8 a.m. and go until 4:30 p.m. The session is open to the public. It also will be videotaped for later posting on the Internet and will be live-streamed so that people can watch the proceedings on their computers at distant locations.
A listening tour session will follow from 5-7 p.m. today at Pulaski Technical College Little Rock-South, Transportation Technology Center, the Community Room, 13000 Interstate 30, Little Rock.
The Common Core State Standards are used in Arkansas and more than 40 other states as the basis for public school math and English/language arts curriculum and instruction. The standards -- phased into Arkansas' public schools starting in 2011-12 -- and the standardized testing based on those standards have generated some opposition from parent groups in Arkansas and elsewhere in the nation.
Today's hearing is structured around four panels of speakers who will focus in large part but not exclusively on the history and description of the standards. Future hearings will delve specifically into the subject-area standards, the testing issues and the questions about the privacy of student data in relation to the testing.
"The witnesses we are calling are very well-versed and respected in their fields and know about Common Core," Griffin said. "I don't know what they are going to say. I know where some of them lean but we didn't pre-interview them the way you might do in an investigative hearing or congressional hearing sometimes.
"What I wanted," he said, "were credible people who know what they are talking about in this area -- pro or con."
The panel members will make short presentations and then respond to questions from the council.
Live-stream viewing of the proceedings will be available on the "video gallery" link on the lieutenant governor's website: ltgovernor.arkansas.gov/. Viewing is also possible on the lieutenant governor's YouTube page http://tinyurl.com/lg79jsa.
All listening tour sessions will be lived-streamed via Google+ at http://tinyurl.com/qz2majd.
Plans call for posting video recordings of all the hearings to the lieutenant governor's website.
Metro on 04/23/2015