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Interview: Olsen Unbowed By Pressure from Common Core Opponents
By Wisconsin School Administrators Alliance staff | April 21, 2014
The following interview with Senator Luther Olsen was released by WisPolitics last Friday.
When Sen. Luther Olsen hears the word “recall” again, his response is fairly succinct.
“Bring it on,” Olsen said. “I went through Act 10.”
Olsen, the Senate Education Committee chair, tells WisPolitics.com he doesn’t fear opposition from anti-Common Core activists.
“If I’m the guy who is standing between getting rid of the Common Core and keeping it, I can go to sleep fine saying, ‘Yeah, I think it’s the right thing, and that’s not a problem,'” said Olsen, R-Ripon.
But other looming educational debates — such as school accountability and private school choice expansion — are far more complicated, according to Olsen.
The almost 20-year veteran of the Legislature spent most of his energy the past session focused on building a wide-ranging school accountability package, but the recall talk has begun because of his stance on the Common Core academic standards. A vocal minority in the GOP has called for his removal as Education chairman for what they feel was a lack of respect for those who say Common Core is wrong for Wisconsin’s school children.
In particular, they charge Olsen was too dismissive when he held a Senate committee hearing on a bill to institute Wisconsin-specific academic standards. When Olsen told reporters before convening the hearing that he opposed the bill, it angered bill author Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa, and others who had traveled to the Capitol to voice support for the measure.
Olsen said he felt the lengthy hearing was fair, and he heard from enough people afterward who said as much. But he acknowledges what Common Core opponents criticize him for — that he doesn’t take their concerns seriously.
“When the first discussion was there, people were saying, ‘Well, the standards weren’t rigorous enough,'” Olsen said. “Well, they couldn’t decide that. Then they were too rigorous. Then all of a sudden it was where they came from. Well now the last thing I read, if we have these standards it will be the end of civilization as we know it, because this is just taking over, mind control, changing our Judeo-Christian background and throwing out our history of our country and all of this stuff. And it’s like, where does this come from? Because it’s math and language arts. It’s two subjects.”
Olsen said he sees the Common Core standards as an improvement over Wisconsin’s old standards and points to support from the conservative Fordham Foundation and business leaders like Bill Gates, who argue the standards are needed to remain competitive in a global economy. He wants to avoid a situation similar to Indiana, which dropped Common Core only to end up adopting something similar anyway.
While he thinks that some groups are using the issue to “gin up” membership and hopes it will fade away after the 2014 elections, he also says the issue’s staying power will likely depend on how Gov. Scott Walker handles it.
“The governor put the money in the budget for the [Smarter Balanced] test, and I was asking him and his staff all along, ‘Is he going to stand strong on his position supporting this?'” Olsen said. “And all of a sudden, one day, he turned 180 degrees. ‘Well, we can do better.’ Well, I’ve been waiting to find out what ‘better’ is. I’ve been waiting to find out what ‘more rigorous’ is. I’ve been waiting to find out what’s the problem is. It’s easy to say this stuff, but there’s nothing behind it. And when you say things like this, people believe it.”
A comprehensive accountability package for all publicly funded schools was similarly complicated, Olsen says.
After being tasked by Walker to come up with accountability standards along with Rep. Steve Kestell, Olsen unveiled his bill in the fall.
While the original bill featured timelines for sanctions on failing schools, it was roundly opposed by voucher proponents. After some changes, Olsen’s next draft moved up sanctions against MPS schools and closed failing schools or converted them to charter schools. While this turned DPI against the bill, it also wasn’t quite good enough for voucher school proponents.
“What we were trying to do was to say, ‘let’s see what happens,’ and people of good faith sat at the table to try and do this,” Olsen said. “But not everybody in my estimation were sitting there in good faith. I mean, we worked with the school choice people and gave them all the stuff that we could possibly give them in their area. But they kept moving the goal post and things like this. And finally we just got to the point where, ‘I’m sorry guys, we can’t go down there,’ because we would have a sham.”
In the end, Olsen and others working on the bill compromised on a bare-bones measure that set a date for mandatory school data reporting and set the stage for work on a more comprehensive bill in the interim. But while Olsen hopes for a broader bill next session, he’s not entirely optimistic it will truly deliver accountability for choice schools.
“Even if we do have a report card, what I see, and if you look at the test participation in the choice schools, they’re not participating very well,” Olsen said. “It seems like those schools are talking their parents out of having their kids take the test. So even if we have a good report card, the whole nine yards … if they don’t take the test, you can’t measure anything. So there’s a back door to this.”
This election season has seen the retirements of Senate Republican moderates Dale Schultz and Mike Ellis, but that doesn’t appear to be a consideration for Olsen at this point. He said he expects to run again for election in 2016, though he admits two years is a “long, long time in politics.” But if he does run again, he doesn’t have any desire to try and beef up his conservative credentials.
“Republicans or Democrats don’t win elections,” Olsen said. “It’s the people in the middle; it’s the independents. And if you are talking about things the independents are talking about and feel are important, you win elections.”
Listen to the interview here .
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