Education issues have slipped quietly through the 60th legislature, because most of the heavy lifting of recent years – on issues like raising teacher salaries, building new schools, and the Hathaway higher education scholarships – is completed and underway. But there is some fine tuning going on, and anyone interested in education might want to attend those early morning committee meetings where decisions are made. You are bound to encounter a bill or two by Rep. Steve Harshman (R-Casper), who has his hands in almost anything having to do with public schools.

For instance, ‘instructional facilitators’. When I was on a school board a few years ago, I was skeptical about these new state-funded positions when they appeared in my district’s budget. It was a fashionable new idea in education circles – ‘master teachers’ who would show struggling under-performers how to improve, without a penalizing evaluation. But it might also be seen as a way to pad school budgets with new positions, rather than just putting more and better teachers in the classrooms. (Journalists are trained to be skeptical – you might want to keep them off school boards…)

Among Harshman’s many bills this year is one to ‘fine tune’ the facilitator program, upping the qualifications for the position (more teaching experience, masters degrees, national certification) and evaluating results. “The days when I started, teaches were sole practitioners,” Harshman told the senators. Now, if testing shows students in a class aren’t “gaining”, in will come the facilitators to coach. “Where kids aren’t growing, we’re going to help those teachers grow.”

Chairman Hank Coe (R-Cody) called the facilitators “very successful. We all like it.”

But when we asked Mary Kay Hill, Director of Administration for the Wyoming Department of Education, whether the program was “very successful”, she said there was as yet no quantified evidence of that in a program only two years old. Districts like it – not surprisingly – but the evidence of success is purely anecdotal. Education officials, she said, are still working on tools for evaluating.

Nevertheless, even a skeptical former school trustee/journalist can tolerate Harshman’s bill, which passed the committee 5-1 this morning, since it costs nothing, ups the qualifications for facilitators, makes sure they are not used by districts for other purposes, and attempts to measure results.

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A recurring theme in legislative debates is about keeping the evil federal government off the backs of Wyoming citizens. Whether it’s clean water, or wolf management, or energy industry practices, it comes up again and again.

Now they’re even trying to get their hands on our drivers licenses. Bad federal government.

Wyoming is wrestling with whether to modify its drivers licenses to comply with standards issued by the Department of Homeland Security establishing what’s called the REAL ID so they can be accepted as identification for boarding airline flights, visiting federal buildings, or stopping in at nuclear power plants (one of our favorite vacation destinations). Though DHS set a deadline of 2008 for compliance, all 50 states have been granted extensions.

When a Senate-passed bill to move Wyoming into compliance came before the House yesterday, there were the usual complaints. “It’s the federal government once again coming in and telling us what to do,” growled Rep. Matt Teeters (R-Lingle).

But Rep. Roy Cohee (R-Casper) said Wyomingites might prefer complying to the alternative when they board a commercial flight. “If you think it’s onerous to have to take half your clothes off now,” said Cohee, “wait until you don’t have a REAL ID card – they will be examining places you don’t want them to.”

With imaginations running wild, the House passed the REAL ID bill on first reading.