Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Mark Burke have opposite views of the controversial Common Core standards for schools. Credit: Campaign photos

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Madison — Gov. Scott Walker and challenger Mary Burke have staked out opposing positions on the set of academic standards known as Common Core.

Now the only problem for voters is figuring out what the standards are and what they do.

The fight over the academic guidelines has produced bitter debates in Wisconsin's Capitol over the past year, even if they have led to little in the way of legislative action.

But recent polling shows that two out of five people in Wisconsin have no idea what Common Core is, and only one in four can say they've heard a lot about the national standards, which were developed to provide a shared set of expectations about what students should be learning in class.

So it's tricky to say what voters will take away from Walker's pledge to repeal the Common Core early next year if he's re-elected and Burke's contention that if implemented correctly the standards will make Wisconsin schools more effective. The candidates elaborated on their views in statements to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as part of the newspaper's coverage of issues in the governor's race.

In July, Walker made his promise to scrap the Common Core and replace it with a new set of state standards as soon as the Legislature returns to session this January.

"Listening to parents, teachers, school boards and taxpayers across the state, I responded by calling for a repeal of the Common Core standards that were set by people outside of Wisconsin. We want to put together a group of stakeholders from across our state to provide an alternative to these national standards. We believe that education policy should be set by people in our state and overwhelmingly at the local level," the Republican governor said in his statement.

Earlier this year, a proposal in the Legislature to undo the Common Core failed with little comment from Walker. So far, he has not provided many specifics on what the new guidelines or board to create them should look like.

Walker campaign spokeswoman Alleigh Marré said that the governor wants to involve "parents, teachers, school boards and taxpayers." Marré said the unsuccessful legislation could be a "starting point for the creation of a board that includes the DPI superintendent to design new, Wisconsin-based standards."

The legislation idea drew praise from some GOP lawmakers who argued Wisconsin could do better than the Common Core. It drew criticism this spring from superintendents who said they did not trust the intentions of lawmakers who want to create a 15-member state standards board that would have eight members appointed by the governor and Legislature.

Burke, a Democrat and member of the Madison School Board, argued that the standards can help the state's economy over the long run by better preparing students for jobs or higher education. She pointed to a study by the website EducationNext that gave Wisconsin's math and reading standards for fourth- and eighth-grade students a C- as of 2011.

"We absolutely need higher standards in Wisconsin — we are currently 38th in the country in terms of proficiency standards — and implementing Common Core correctly will do just that. Schools should have flexibility in implementation because every school is different. Let's put the politics aside and put our young people's futures first so Wisconsin becomes a thriving, top ten economy," Burke said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the most recent Marquette University Law School poll underlined how little the average voter knows about the standards.

Of those polled, 40% said they had never heard of Common Core or had only heard the name, while 32% said they had at least heard "some." Twenty-eight percent said they had heard quite a bit about the guidelines.

Among those who had at least heard of the standards, 50% had a favorable opinion and 34% had an unfavorable one, with Republicans evenly split on the standards and independents and Democrats favoring them.

Seeking similar standards

Common Core aims to make the nation's K-12 schools more rigorous by laying out what children at the end of each grade should know in key subjects such as reading and language arts. They are designed to keep students in New Berlin, N.Y., and New Berlin, Wis., on more or less the same track.

The charge to develop the guidelines was led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers; they were written by an education reform group and then revised by states, with input from local teachers, university professors and curriculum experts.

But political controversy, especially in the past year, has threatened to derail the implementation of the standards, which were initially voluntarily adopted by 44 states, including Wisconsin.

The opposition includes conservatives who think the movement represents federal intrusion into local schools, as well as some liberals concerned about the standards being used to evaluate teachers unfairly.

Recently, Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina dropped the Common Core. When Indiana rewrote its standards, however, the new expectations were almost identical to Common Core.

New York has also seen a backlash after moving to administer state achievement tests aligned to the standards sooner than many other states; students struggled and test scores fell.

According to an August article in Time, at least nine Republican governors — including 2016 potential presidential candidates Chris Christie from New Jersey and Bobby Jindal from Louisiana — have withdrawn or tempered their support for the standards.

New achievement tests in Wisconsin aligned to the standards are scheduled to be administered for the first time in the spring of 2015.

"It would be very difficult to start over with a whole new process that aligns curriculum, assessments and standards," said Patricia Neudecker, a respected former superintendent of the Oconomowoc School District, who is now overseeing the launch of a new school administrator MBA program at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

"I think the power and authority is there," Neudecker said of the Legislature. "But anyone making that decision (to remove the new standards in Wisconsin) would have to understand what has been invested already, both in human and financial resources. Everything in our state right now is coming into closer alignment. And that alignment is aimed at high performance."