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Weatherford Assured Corporate Overlords that Plan was to Change CCSS in Name Only in November of 2013

April, 2014

We now have more stark evidence that the entire Florida effort on the standards has been a lie and a sham since the governor's summit last August.  It is smoking gun evidence that the plan all along was merely an attempt to appease the public and to change the name only.  This is also the reason that the legislative leadership has been so intransigent about even giving HB 25/SB 1316 a hearing.  Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford gave a speech to the Florida Council of 100 on November 24, 2013, during which he talked about education, including about Common Core and the upcoming legislative session. 

Note well that this was after the public comment period when the state pretended to care about what the people thought about the standards, but before the "tweaks," "copy editing," and "minor" changes were made that were supposed to, according to the propaganda put out by the legislative leadership, put "Florida on a different path" and before we were told that "Florida's standards [that are 99.1% Common Core] and assessments are tailored to our state."  As indicated by the statements from Commissioner Stewart and other Department of Education officials, this is more proof that there never was any real plan to change the standards, listen to the concerns of Florida parents and citizens, or get out from under federal control.
 
The Council of 100 is the group of corporate elites in Florida.  Members include immediate past president Marshall Criser, now the chancellor of the Florida university system, who believes that Common Core is a good thing even though the major architect of the math standards, Jason Zimba, said that the standards were inadequate to prepare students for careers in science and engineering or for a selective four year university.
 
These corporate overlords, like Rex Tillerson , the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, who is blackmailing Florida and  Pennsylvania to implement Common Core or they will not hire from those states.  In conjunction with the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Partnership they are doing an all-out ad blitz and are bullying legislators to impose Common Core in Florida and across the nation. They think they have a right to impose the untested, academically inferior, developmentally inappropriate, and psychologically manipulative standards testing and data collection on the children of the entire state and the nation. To them, education is all about workforce training.  As Billy Canary, president of the Business Council of Alabama said in explaining why legislators should embrace the Common Core, "The business community is by far the biggest consumer of the product created by our education system." (Hat tip to Emmett McGroarty & Jane Robbins).

Our children are not products or human capital or serfs to be used at the whim of or exploited by the corporate elites. They are not guinea pigs to be programmed by an inferior, manipulative, one-size fits all nationalized education system, monitored womb to tomb by a federal data collection system that gives that data without consent to corporations, researchers and government agencies to track children into jobs for the needs of business.  The purpose of education is not workforce development, but to pass on the principles of liberty to the next generation, so that we may maintain our constitutional republic.

Please contact Governor Scott and the legislative leadership and tell them that they owe their allegiance to the constituents that voted them into office and to the Florida and US Constitutions, not the corporate cronies and lobbyists that have padded their campaign coffers.  And if they continue to disdainfully deceive the public and destroy the future of our children, things will not go well in November for them.


Governor Scott

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