State education standards are undergoing a review that could result in substantial changes. What are these standards? How might they change? And what will this mean for your community or school? On this episode of “The State We’re In,” Kelly Burch and Rhianwen Watkins, reporters for Granite State News Collaborative, Fred Bramante, 306 Task Force leader and president of the National Center for Competency-Based Learning, Nicole Heimarck, executive director of Reaching Higher NH, and Micaela Demeter, a member of the Dover School Board, discuss these upcoming changes.
Click here to watch the full conversation on The State We're In.
This article has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
Melanie Plenda:
Can you give us an overview of what the 306's are and how they affect education in New Hampshire?
Kelly Burch:
The 306’s are our legislative rulemaking document, and I believe Fred has said in the past, they're the nuts and bolts of the education system. So within this document, which is quite long and quite dense, we have everything that we feel a Granite State public school should have. That dictates everything from the course content that our teachers are delivering to the graduation requirements that our high schoolers need to meet, right down to things like the lightbulbs and classroom sizes and the nitty-gritty detail. So the 306 has really defined what it means to be a public school in New Hampshire.
Because of that, they also influence what the state is obligated constitutionally to pay for. So the 306’s really define what it means to be a public school in New Hampshire, and because of that they are very closely tied to ongoing discussions about adequate education funding in the state. Because if it's not in this document, then we've said it's not a critical part of public education, and therefore something not something that the state needs to fund.
Melanie Plenda:
Can you tell us about the task force and your role, and where do things stand with it?
Fred Bramate:
Before COVID hit, we put together a team of what I consider to be public education all-stars, and we met for the better part of a year and to put together our first draft. As soon as we delivered it to the state board it became a public document, and then opened up conversations all over the state with different education groups, public listening sessions – we had over a dozen listening sessions face-to-face in districts all around the state. Whoever invited us got a listening session. We took input from all of those folks. We went back to the drawing board and put together a second 306 team at UNH.
The state board took our draft. They accepted the vast majority of recommendations we made, and they made some substantial changes in their document when it was brought forward on Feb. 22. There were a number of things that we had concerns about. We asked the state board and the commissioner if they would meet with our team to go over the concerns that we had. They said yes — we met with (Board of Education Chairman) Drew Cline and (Education Commissioner) Frank Edelblut — and came to agreement on pretty much everything. But there were a couple of big things still left open, but we kind of know where those are going. The issues are class size and the back end of the document, where it's more about curriculum. What a lot of people refer to as the “may” and “shall” section.
Melanie Plenda:
Nicole, what’s your impression of some of these changes under discussion? And how will those proposals affect things in New Hampshire?
Nicole Heimarck:
I think it's a really important one, as Reaching Higher NH has completed years of analysis on the different versions of this document that have been brought forward, and we are focused specifically on impact. How what is in the language impacts our schools, impacts our communities, and impacts our families.
For the benefit of your audience, we really want to highlight three themes or three impacts and support them by evidence in the document. The first one are the school-funding implications, and absolutely the changes to class size are an enormous element and an enormous implication to school funding. I would argue — and I know many superintendents, many school leaders, many policy advisors agree with this analysis and have shared and reiterated the same concerns — is that it's not just at the district level in the budgeting process, when local school districts are thinking about class sizes and the number of teachers they need.
More importantly, the class size maximums in the minimum standards for public school approval are part of our adequacy funding formula, meaning that maximum has been worked into the calculation for how the state funds schools. So there's both a state implication and a local implication to this change, and removing those maximum class sizes — well, you're placing that funding formula at great risk, and you’re you're also creating the conditions where you could have class sizes in some school districts where you have 30, 35 or 40 students in a classroom. That rule has altogether been eliminated. Now, we've heard some assurances, but those are conversations.
Melanie Plenda:
What kind of feedback has the public been giving the state on these proposals? What have you found out through your reporting?
Kelly Burch:
Rhi is really well-equipped to speak to the more recent developments, because she's been able to take a lot of that reporting. One thing that is interesting to me is that throughout this process there have been a lot of concerns raised. We started following this process back in August of last year, when there were real concerns about distrust and transparency. And in part because of those concerns coming up, the process has evolved. There has, it seems been more collaboration, which Fred alluded to. But there's still really serious concerns about transparency — about who's at the table, and about what the public knows about this process that is impacting our children.
Rhi Watkins:
I have spoken with a lot of different educators, and they have all kind of voiced the same concerns that are quite immense. They have many concerns with the document.
I would like to provide a specific example. This particular one was one that many educators have voiced concern over, and that is on page 46 of the document, concerning requirements for an arts education program. It lists all of the components in the original document that educators, Fred Bramante and his team put forward. It said, ”shall require” these specific components. In the second document that was amended by the department, it changed “shall require” to “may provide,” followed by the list of components. So right there, that made all of those components of the arts education program optional, and what that does is it removes state responsibility to fund those components of an arts education program. That burden falls on taxpayers, which again creates big inequities between different districts.
I also wanted to talk about a conversation I had with Andru Volinsky, who was one of the lead lawyers on the Claremont case, which found that New Hampshire education funding from the state was so low that it was actually unconstitutional. He provided a legal perspective on all of this. He went as far as to say that the Department of Education is, in his words, going beyond its authority and trying to adopt regulations, and it violates the constitutional requirements set out in the 2002 Claremont decision.
He even expressed concern that, because of this, it could lead the state into another court battle. I think that legal perspective is really important as well. When we're talking about all of this, I have attempted to reach out to the Department of Education, but I've not been extremely successful in reaching them. I've had multiple attempts at reaching every single board member. I was able to get in touch with one board member who, at the time I was reaching out to him, had not had the chance to look over the document, so he was not able to provide as much clarity on it. So unfortunately, I have not heard as much from the department side as I would have liked to. But from educators across the board, it's pretty much that they're really worried about the state's responsibility to fund and what this document means, that if it does go forward, as if it could really set the haves and have nots apart even further.
Melanie Plenda:
Micaela recently testified before the state board about these standards. What did you want to tell them and what are your concerns?
Micaela Demeter:
The way I approached my testimony was from the perspective of considering the primary responsibilities of the school board are — policy and budget. So when I reflect on my role as a school board member in creating and implementing policy and then also setting the budget for the city of Dover. I looked at the document, and these were the concerns that I had.
Overall, the overarching message of the testimony I gave, which was on behalf of the entire school board, is that the current draft really waters down educational standards. This was a theme of the concerns I shared throughout the testimony. The draft, as written currently, really walks back the state's responsibility to define an adequate education, and as Nicole mentioned earlier, that then absolves the state of the future responsibility to pay for that adequate education, and that’s where my role as one of the members who is creating and deciding on the budget for our district — that's where this raises that red flag for me, from that budgetary standpoint.
And if the responsibility to define an adequate education is largely left to local school boards, instead of being defined statewide in this document, education may look different in each district. That really gets that in the equity piece because it exacerbates these deep inequities that we know exist in our state at this time already between the haves and the have-nots.
Much of my testimony reflects the concerns that Reaching Higher has expressed. The language shift from teaching students to facilitating learning really sends the wrong message to our education community by removing the expectation that teachers are the orchestrators of these learning experiences, and certified teachers specifically. So when the door swings wide open to accommodate a larger array of academic experiences, not necessarily implemented by these certified teachers who are used to being in front of a classroom, students lose that opportunity for a robust, guaranteed minimum academic experience at the hands of those certified teachers.
I had spoken during our testimony about how our board is opposed to the proposed removal of all maximum class size limitations. We know through significant academic research that smaller class sizes are linked to better educational outcomes. The concern about removing those maximum class sizes that districts that can't afford to maintain the lower class sizes, would struggle even more to hire and retain those qualified educators, which of course trickles down to the academic experience students are afforded, And then also that it would augment these learning inequities in districts that are already struggling to educate their students with these limited resources. The watering-down continues, — the mastery being watered down to proficiency when we're considering whether a student has achieved that learning sufficient to earn the course credit. Proficiency, as defined in the document right now, says the minimum student performance required to satisfy the achievement of a competency. But this definition isn't clear enough to ensure that proficiency means the same thing from district to district.
This was really evident during a recent board meeting when I was explaining this testimony and asking my fellow board members for permission to speak on their behalf. We had a pretty long and involved conversation about what proficiency means and how that relates to Dover's definition of a competency-based education. The seven of us really struggled to figure that out and how that translates to how we define proficiency within our district. That really speaks to the greater question: How are various districts with this really, ill defined term going to define proficiency? How will that result in the differing academic experiences for students across the whole state of New Hampshire? The goal is equity for all students in Dover, and I would hope across all of New Hampshire districts, and I'm just not convinced that this draft provides that statewide right now.
Melanie Plenda:
Granite State News Collaborative reporters Kelly Burch and Rhianwen Watkins, 306 Task Force leader, Fred Bramante, Nicole Heimarck, executive director of Reaching Higher NH, and member of the Dover School Board, Micaela Demeter — thank you so much to all of you for joining us today and for your thoughtful discussion.
These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative as part of our Race and Equity Initiative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.
“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members.
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