Kansas' education commissioner works for student success in high-stakes, political realm

Yahoo

21-04-2025

Randy Watson, commissioner of the Kansas State Department of Education, speaks on the Kansas Reflector podcast about vouchers, curriculum, compensation, school meals and the legacy of No Child Left Behind. (Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — Kansas State Department of Education commissioner Randy Watson has an unobstructed view of financial, political and social battles about how best to educate nearly 500,000 school children in Kansas.
In addition to regular collaboration with members of the Kansas State Board of Education, he routinely visits classrooms to absorb perspectives on everything from the basics of reading and math to human sexuality, special education, summer school and the training of current and future teachers. He wades into issues of access to computer technology and cellphones in schools. He's there for debates on appropriation of state and federal tax dollars to public education, as well as how that funding was deployed in more than 280 local school districts across Kansas.
'What makes me want to get up in the morning is trying to help young people and the people that serve those young people do their job well. There's rarely a week that I'm not in schools,' Watson said on the Kansas Reflector podcast. 'I not a politician, but I deal in a political environment all the time. At the end of the day, again, what gets me up is: How can we help people that educate kids have a great environment to do so?'
The state Board of Education has a constitutional responsibility for public education in Kansas and the duty to hire a state education commissioner to assist with crafting policy, rules and regulations aimed at fulfilling the promise of education in preschool to high school classrooms.
Watson, a former teacher and superintendent, recently recommended the state Board of Education and local school boards consider working together on a special summer school program to help the students in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and grades 1 and 2 gain some academic ground in the subjects of reading and math. The COVID-19 pandemic set children back at all levels, he said, but recovery has been influenced by separate decisions to reduce the number of school days while maintaining the required total of annual hours of instruction.
'A lot of research says if you're not at that grade level by the time you hit third grade, it's really hard to catch up, and most do not,' he said. 'In fact, more fall further behind.'
He said a summer program would be voluntary for students and could involve 90 minutes of instruction daily. Students could come together for four-day weeks and gain about 50 hours of instruction time, he said.
'If that was with one of our many great teachers in Kansas, what could we do? We could stop the summer slide for sure,' he said.
Of course, the Kansas Legislature and the state's governor have large roles in terms of funding and policy of public education. That involves politics and, at times, controversy.
Members of the 2025 Legislature attempted, but failed, to gain traction with a bill providing as much as $125 million in annual state funding in the form of state income tax breaks to families of students in private schools. Similar proposals to ease the financial burden of enrolling 26,000 students to accredited and unaccredited private schools have surfaced in Kansas, but those also met the fate of Senate Bill 75. The bill introduced by Republican Sen. Renee Erickson, a former middle school principal in Wichita, didn't advance in the House or Senate.
'Some states have gone full force into that,' Watson said. 'Other states have pulled back. Some states have put that up to a vote. I can tell you currently where the state board is on that. They believe that public funds should go to public education.'
Watson, too, observed as the Legislature placed in state law, despite Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's veto, contents of a bill that dealt on two objectives. Part of the bill granted the state Board of Education authority to set compensation of elected board members, while the balance mandated public schools that teach anything about human development to also present students with a computer-generated animation or high-definition ultrasound video of fetal development. The law says the presentation must last at least 3 minutes.
A battle between Kansans for Life and Planned Parenthood illustrated the core of the bill was about influencing opinions of school children on abortion rights, which were affirmed by the Kansas Supreme Court and by Kansas voters. Statehouse debate on the fetal development curriculum bill touched on the state Board of Education's constitutional role in establishing educational standards and the responsibility of local school boards to determine precise curriculum.
'The state board was opposed to that bill. It had nothing to do with the content,' Watson said. 'What is shown in a video is a local board decision, and the state board said, while we may or may not like the contents, that is a local decision, and we don't think the Kansas Legislature should weigh in on it.'
In terms of compensation, the Legislature maneuvered to nearly double their own salaries on Jan. 1. The decision was made to decouple the state Board of Education from the Legislature in terms of daily compensation for travel costs and expenses tied to work for the state. Toward the end of the 2025 session, a bill surfaced with the human development curriculum mandate and a provision directing the state Board of Education to set its own compensation rate. It didn't include funding to the state Board of Education to address any costs. The state Board of Education plans to take up the issue during a meeting in May.
'They'll certainly have to do something with it, because the new law says you shall set your rate. So even if they set it where it is now, they're going to have to take some action to do that,' Watson said.
In January, the governor proposed the Legislature pay the cost of meals for children enrolled in the state's reduced-price school meal program. She suggested lawmakers allocate $5.5 million to provide free rather than subsidized meals to about 36,000 students statewide. With federal assistance, Kansas currently provides free meals to about 40% of students in public schools or approximately 200,000 youths.
Kelly's idea was for the state to cover the reduced-meal cost for each child at 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch.
'We can reduce childhood hunger, we can reduce the stigma our low-income students face in our school cafeterias, and we can increase academic success,' Kelly said.
Watson said the Republican-led Legislature didn't buy into the governor's idea for supplementing the cost of school meals for children in lower-income families.
'What Governor Kelly was proposing is putting some state money into that, but that was not adopted in this legislative session,' he said.
Watson also reflected on lessons learned through former President George W. Bush's ambitious No Child Left Behind program from 2002 to 2015. It was designed to hold schools accountable for learning among all students, including subgroups of low-income students, students with disabilities and students of color. The objective was to have every student reach proficient levels in math and reading.
NCLB became controversial because it penalized schools that didn't show annual improvement on standardized student tests. State assessments should be viewed as a measure of how students were doing academically instead of the lone metric of success or failure, Watson said.
'President Bush was thinking, we want kids to learn how to read and do math. It's a great goal. It's a noble goal. And I would applaud that,' Watson said. 'When we put that into law, I don't think he could have foreseen what the consequences were going to be if you were going to require that. What happened is that, at least in Kansas, I won't speak to other states, but I think it's pretty typical teachers said, 'Well, then we won't teach science. We won't teach social studies. Oh, we'll cut recess out. We teach to that test because it became so high stakes.' '
He said NCLB affirmed chasing student test scores just to obtain a mark acceptable to politicians shouldn't be the primary focus of a classroom teacher, school principal, district superintendent or school board member.