The Legislature took its first steps Feb. 20 toward gutting Common Core, three years after the learning standards were adopted and a year before students are to begin testing on them.

The Senate Education Committee passed on a 6-3 partisan vote three bills that give school districts the authority to create their own learning standards and another that keeps the state Board of Education from implementing Common Core.

The bills, if passed by the full Senate and House, would conflict with each other, but the committee’s chair, Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, said those conflicts can be worked out through the legislative process. The sponsors of two other anti-Common Core bills held them as time ran out, but they intend to also incorporate them into other bills. The standards, which cover English and math, are now known in the state as Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards.

It is unclear whether Gov. Jan Brewer would sign the bills, but she has been a supporter of Common Core.

The Board of Education is in the process of choosing a test to measure students’ progress on the standards, which students are scheduled to begin taking in the spring of 2015. Students won’t be required to pass the test to graduate, but it will be used in ranking schools and determining the reading level of third graders, who must read at grade level before moving onto the fourth grade.

About 200 business leaders and advocates of the standards filled the Senate hearing room, urging the panel to kill the lot of bills and keep the status quo. Key members of the business community are behind the standards because they have been billed as better preparing students for college and the workforce.

The state Board of Education adopted the standards in 2010 and schools have been incrementally implementing them since then. Arizona is among 45 states that have adopted them, either by the board of education or chief school officer, but legislatures in many of the states are working to either repeal them or get out of associations that developed the standards or tests associated with them.

The committee heard three of the bills, SB1388, SB1395, and SB 1396 as a group since all three deal in one way or another with turning over the authority to develop learning standards to local school boards.

Sen. Kelli Ward, R-Lake Havasu City, said her bill, SB1388, doesn’t get rid of Common Core, but allows school boards to decide what is best for the community. The bill requires each district to adopt its own standards, which must meet or exceed state standards adopted after 1999, and they must be approved by the state superintendent of public instruction. The school boards are also required to adopt their own achievement tests.

“I think of it as the true local control bill,” Ward said.

Under SB1395, sponsored by Sen. Judy Burges, R-Sun City West, school boards can opt out of any achievement test adopted by the State Board of Education, but in doing that the local board must adopt standards and tests the state has used since 1999.

And SB1396 gives school boards the option to adopt standards in use by the Board of Education or come up with their own. The superintendent of public instruction must approve the ones districts develop themselves.

Sen. Leah Landrum Taylor, D-Phoenix, wondered whether the Arizona Department of Education has the staff to approve the standards of all the districts around the state and whether districts have the expertise to develop their own standards and tests.

Stacy Morley, director of policy development for the department, said the development of standards cost lots of money and time, and the department currently doesn’t have the staff to take on the job of approving the standards.

The committee also passed SB1310, sponsored by Sen. Al Melvin, R-Saddle Brooke. The bill forbids the Board of Education from implementing Common Core, and requires the use of the SAT as the new test to measure student achievement.

Melvin said he’s seeing a nearly universal push back against Common Core in his travels around the state, and he thinks the federal government, which offered states incentives to adopt higher standards, will only cause Common Core to become a behemoth.