North Dakota's governor just signed SB 2196 into law, allowing the state to quietly slip forward in 2021's race to dismantle public education. While other state legislatures have focused on vouchers, North Dakota took its leap forward by focusing on unbundling and competency basxed education.
SB 2196 is short and the changes it enacts even shorter. It amends the rules about instructional time requirements with this sentence:
Establish and certify a North Dakota competency framework to allow students who have demonstrated content mastery of units required under sections 15.1-21-01 and 15.1-21-02 to waive unit instructional time requirements under section 15.1-21-03.
In headline-ready English, that means the bill will "expand learning outside classroom." Or as state K-12 Superintendent Kirsten Baesler puts it, "A student’s ability to learn is not completely dependent upon how much time he or she spends sitting in a classroom." Baesler was a school librarian, a principal, and a school board member. In office since 2013, she was a proponent of Common Core (she also has two arrests--one for domestic violence and another for DUI).
The bill now allows students to accumulate school credit for "community volunteer projects, internships, and other educational options." Baesler has thrown some other language at it, touting "personalization" and "methods of learning." She asserts that it will do these things "while maintaining academic strength and accountability," although nothing in the bill calls for an oversight or accountability. Will Pat be able to earn math credits by working as a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly, or get phys ed credits for helping on Uncle Bob's farm?
The bill is also promoted as giving districts "flexibility," which I suppose is true in the sense that they will have the flexibility to cut classes and fire the teachers who taught them.
The unbundling of education usually comes attached to vouchers. That legislation is kicking around the North Dakota (HB 1369 would create education savings acounts--vouchers), supported by the usual suspects (including the Catholic church, because ka-ching), but North Dakota has been pretty resistant to school choice in the past, and this bill is not doing well, either.
The lack of voucher support for this new bill means that student "flexibility" will be tied to family resources. Can't afford to play private league soccer or go to summer camp? Well, then, you'll just have to take phys ed in public school. Can't afford a special private math tutor? Public school math for you. Of course, since there may not be anybody checking to see just how legit the "flexible" credit earning is, this may be less of a problem than I'm imagining.
The bill passed with large support, and while North Dakota is largely run by the GOP, the news could still find a Democrat to say something uninformed about it:
"It creates great opportunity to continue to move further away from the industrialized 'I lecture, you learn' model of education," Sen. Erin Oban, D-Bismarck, said in support of the bill.
Industrial model. Hasn't changed in years. Yeah, that's definitely not public education, but it's important never to let facts stand in the way of dismantling public education.
The real question isn't so much "will the state of North Dakota accept these 'content mastery' credits, since the law pretty much now makes them accept whatever garbage someone can get past the state Dept. of Ed. The real question is, "will colleges and universities outside of North Dakota accept these as actual high school credits when they see them on a transcript?" My bet is that this will very quickly be a dead letter for a lot of students when parent realize that their little college-bound darlings can't get into any school worth attending because they've sacrificed their children's education on the alter of choice. Of course, this likely won't affect the poorer students who aren't college-bound anyway, but it's also likely that they won't have the resources to do anything but take the basic public education still being offered. So the entire set of prospects for North Dakotans goes down the tubes and some edu-businesses make out like bandits. Sounds like the perfect school "reform" formula.
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