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Sunday, January 12, 2014

Florida’s uncommon core

Supporters of Common Core like Trey Czar of the Jacksonville Public Education Fund have said Florida needs Common Core so kids that move form Oklahoma to Florida can be on the same page and so we can compare how all the states are doing. I however am not completely convinced those are good enough reasons to completely dismantle our education system and replace it with an untested idea.

It gets a little more muddled when you realize Florida’s standards will be everything but common with the rest of the nations.

From the News Service of Florida: Education Commissioner Pam Stewart said earlier this week that her department would propose about 40 changes to the voluminous education benchmarks.

Okay, forty changes out of volumes might not see like a lot but people also have to realize common core only out lines standards where it is up to localities to generate curriculums and who wants to bet if there are 3000 different localities then there will be a similar number of curriculums. Furthermore Florida has already pulled out of the PARCC, the test for the common core, which means any comparison that we would want to do would go from apples to oranges to apples to rocks.

Then a representative did something almost unheard of, she asked a good question, also from the News Service:  

Rep. Debbie Mayfield, a Vero Beach Republican who has sponsored anti-Common Core legislation, said after Scott's remarks Saturday that she was "perfectly happy with the direction the governor's going in." But she suggested that simply adding more material to the Common Core standards might not satisfy critics.
Mayfield has filed legislation (HB 25) intended to stop the standards from fully taking effect in Florida.
"If we have our own standards and if we have our own assessment, then what is the purpose of being in Common Core?" she asked Saturday.
 
Where is the common again? The only thing common in common core is that money will be siphoned out of classrooms and we’ll continue our high stakes testing blame the teacher way of doing things.

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