How stupid does the Florida Department of Education think you are? Apparently very!

Common core is gone and make way for the Florida Standards and who cares if they are 99% the same and bring the same liabilities, high stakes testing and siphoning money out of schools and classrooms with them.

Pam Stewart like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain is merrily telling anybody who will listen that common core is a thing of the past and Florida Standards is what all the cool kids are doing.

Sadly I am not even sure if this is hers or the FLDOE’s biggest recent whopper.

Last spring they put out a charter school study written by charter school advocates that said charter schools are the bomb like pretty girls say, unfortunately the truth is they are more like Ishtar, new coke or what we drop on people in the Middle East.      

Then she and the board decided to keep the school one letter grade drop rule or what I like to call the Chartrand rule because it greatly benefitted a charter school he is heavily involved with. It says no school can drop more than a letter grade even if they did really, really bad. You know what if I had an A school, I might take the next year completely off because the lowest my grade would drop would be to a B.

Mrs. Stewart also said common core wouldn’t cost the people of Florida an additional dime. Gosh I bet Maryland wishes they were as lucky as us because it’s going to cost that small state over a hundred million dollars.  By the way conservative estimates here in Florida start at about 300 million dollars.

Then there is the rebranding of common core which is her and the FLDOE”s latest sleight of hand.

Maybe she thinks we won’t notice, or maybe she thinks we are too stupid to.  

To learn more click a link:

The state has renamed the academic benchmarks used to measure student learning gains, teacher performance and school grades the "Florida Standards." Education Commissioner Pam Stewart Tuesday called the decision appropriate.

http://www.thefloridacurrent.com/article.cfm?id=36153153

Common Core is out — the name that is. Instead, the state’s education benchmarks for public schools will be called “Florida Standards.”

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20140121/ARTICLE/140129909/-1/RSS02#gsc.tab=0

The reworked set of standards will feature Common Core heavily, with a few deletions and many additions.

The Florida Standards, as the board is calling it, refers to “all the standards that Florida has adopted,” not just English and math, like Common Core, Stewart said.

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20140121/ARTICLES/140129920#gsc.tab=0