News

FSCCC Statement on Standards Hearing Announcement

October, 2013

Today the Florida Department of Education announced the times and locations of the three public hearings on the Common Core standards as outlined in Governor Rick Scott's executive order issued last week (see details below). Sadly, despite repeated assurances from the governor's office that these hearings would be open and transparent and a good faith effort to really change the standards, Florida's leadership, including the governor, has gravely disappointed its citizens as indicated by the following:

Commissioner Pam Stewart has made statements to the press that "while the Department of Education plans to hold community town hall meetings to hear from the public about the pros and cons of the new Common Core State Standards, she [Stewart] expects little changes in the curriculum as a result." (Emphasis added).
Statements made by the commissioner to opponent groups indicate that parents will have a mere three minutes per specific standard to make their concerns known, forcing them to wade through hundreds of pages of standards documents and become pedagogical experts in order to advocate for their children, mirroring the same intimidating process put forth by Senator John Legg in his call for input.
The planned format will not allow for parents and experts to discuss what is missing from the standards, poor organization, and other problems.
Each hearing is scheduled to be only three hours long, which will be inadequate for both the public and experts to testify about the many flaws with the standards themselves, much less the very important related concerns regarding data mining, psychological manipulation and testing, etc.

"All of this evidence that these hearings are meant to be manipulated to the pre-determined outcome of continuing to ram Common Core down the throats of Florida families and citizens, as was done during the education summit, is a major betrayal of the trust of Floridians," said Dr. Karen Effrem, president of Education Liberty Watch and a co-founder of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition. Our coalition, representing dozens of groups and hundreds of thousands of Florida citizens, calls upon Governor Scott and the legislature to stop protecting the wealthy and powerful special corporate and foundation interests at the expense of our children. We demand open and transparent public hearings now and support of Representative Mayfield's HB 25 to completely stop funding and implementation of Common Core until much more information is available regarding academic quality, cost and data privacy. HB 25 is the true implementation of concepts in Governor Scott's order and letters."

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Tuesday, October 15, 2013 TAMPA
5:00 p.m. 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Hillsborough Community College Dale Mabry Campus
Student Services Building Auditorium Room 111
4001 West Tampa Bay Boulevard, Tampa, FL

Wednesday, October 16, 2013 DAVIE
5:00 p.m. 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Broward College Davie Campus
Bailey Concert Hall Building 4
3501 SW Davie Road, Davie, FL

Thursday, October 17, 2013 TALLAHASSEE
5:00 p.m. 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Tallahassee Community College
Ghazvini Center for Healthcare Education Auditorium
1528 Surgeons Drive, Tallahassee, FL