The usually smooth Asa Hutchinson and the often-cocky Tim Griffin got a little comeuppance Thursday.
The state Education Board, to which Asa will soon make three appointments, voted 7-to-1 not to ditch the basic Common Core student assessment test. Such a move had been recommended by the Common Core review commission that Hutchinson appointed Griffin to chair. Then the governor had endorsed the recommendation.
State Education Board members said the change seemed rushed. They said it fomented instability in student assessment. They said the contracting process for a new test seemed noncompetitive. One member suggested the change perhaps was political: The Asa/Griffin commission might not be able to deep-six Common Core to placate the right wing, but at least could throw the right a bone by dumping the standard Common Core test.
There was incidental vindication in all of that for state Sen. Joyce Elliott of Little Rock, a former teacher and a veteran education-focused legislator. Her view of Monday as expressed in a legislative Joint Education Committee meeting, which drew a reportedly rude or at least an overly combative reaction from Griffin, was precisely what prevailed with the board on Thursday.
First, about that incident with Griffin and Elliott, old foes from 2010 for the 2nd District congressional seat: Griffin had just finished reporting that his commission had recommended and the governor had agreed that the standard Common Core test was a mess and should be replaced by a different one associated with the designers of the ACT test.
So Elliott raised her hand to ask the first question, which was why the commission would make such a recommendation before it had completed its full report. She wondered whether persons yet to testify at two coming public hearings planned by the review group weren't being rendered voiceless.
I cannot say that Griffin went off on her, because I was not there. I can say that a few witnesses have told me he went off on her. I can say that another mentioned being "taken aback" by the abruptly defensive and seemingly hostile manner of the lieutenant governor.
Basically Griffin told Elliott that nobody had forced the governor to yield to a study commission in the first place and that nobody had made the study commission conduct 40 hours of streamed public testimony.
Elliott went on social media two days later to say she'd never encountered such rudeness from a witness in all her years in the Legislature. Later she told me: "He was, specifically, toward me ... off the chain."
Griffin told me later over the phone that no one had said anything to him about an inappropriate tone, and that holding 40 hours of non-mandated sessions for public input "is the opposite of arrogance."
But no one was calling the process arrogant. People were calling the lieutenant governor himself arrogant.
Griffin insisted that he and I ought to talk about the substance rather than style. I agreed, though I must interject: His method of talking about substance entails a style prone to soliloquy.
Once in our long-distance phone conversation he asked me to defer a question until he'd finished his point, then, after a couple of minutes, asked himself the very question I had intended to ask, and then continued to hold forth. I told him I felt like I was getting the Joyce Elliott treatment.
Here is a summary of Griffin's substantive view: By his rough estimate, about 75 percent of the objections to Common Core are based not on the standardized goals or outcomes established by the program itself, but by local plans for implementation. The controversial test was among those implementation complications, and that's why the recommendation was to ditch it. The timing was based on the urgency of planning for the test for the next school year. He denied that the test change was intended for political placation. He said the remaining objections to Common Core indeed had to do with the reasonableness or lack thereof in actual elements of the standardized goals. The question for commissioners and policymakers, he said, is whether Common Core can be accepted generally, but subjected to state-level revisions.
In response to an observation that I got in edgewise, which was that he did not sound inclined to reject Common Core, but to save it somehow, he said: "I can't say that's accurate. I can't say that it's inaccurate, either."
Either way, he said, it's not up to him, but the entire commission, and then the governor and other policymakers.
The state Education Board made that more abundantly clear to him a few hours later.
A source close to Hutchinson called the matter a temporary setback. The Legislature, which reviews all agency contracts via an interim committee, could essentially block any contract renewal for the existing test.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/14/2015