Governor Rick Scott announced an education summit this week, calling on education, business, and political leaders to discuss Florida school’s grading systems and the implementation of the national Common Core State Standards. The summit will last from Monday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon and will take place at the EpiCenter Collaborative Labs at St. Petersburg College in Clearwater, Florida. This may be the final chance to speak up regarding your opposition to the nationally developed Common Core curriculum as it will be a public meeting. Parents, teachers, and administrators on both sides of the political spectrum have expressed their serious concerns regarding the methods and curricula planned for our public schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Attending the Pinellas County Republican Executive Committee meeting earlier this month, Florida Senator Jeff Brandes addressed our concerns about Common Core. He questioned whether it was the data mining, the gathering of personal and private information from our children without parental knowledge, that was most concerning to the group. People agreed that was a concern, but they were also concerned about the loss of local control, the cost, the fact it has not been tested anywhere, and the odd methods of teaching they had been seeing in reports from many sources. It was apparent Senator Brandes had no knowledge or understanding of the curricula or the history of the development of the standards. He was sent from Tallahassee on a reconnaissance mission to elicit our concerns so the state could develop a strategy and campaign to get people to buy into the program.
For those of you who are hearing about Common Core but do not understand what all of the opposition is about, the primary objection is that it is taking the control of our children’s education away from the parents, teachers, and local, even state, departments of education.
But it also involves questioning the methods being used to teach students, such as assignments like the one pictured here, which I found on the Parents and Educators Against Common Core Standards Facebook page. In this second grade math assignment, you will notice it says Week 2, Day 2. On a nationwide scale, every teacher in every second grade class will be doing this same assignment on the same day of the same week. Teachers are no longer responsible for lesson plans. They are given the specific assignments and are teaching them to their students. If they do not understand they will be out of luck, because tomorrow it is on to the next assignment. There is no opportunity to help the students who do not “get it.” They will become frustrated and begin to have behavior problems and hate school.
What is the correct answer? All I know is it is not “B.” Parents will not understand the assignment sufficiently to help their child and the child will begin to believe their teacher knows more than their parents. One of the drafts from the U. S. Department of Education appears to have the intent of pushing our children to the point of absolute frustration and then monitoring their body responses and signals.
This is very important for everyone to understand and share with your friends and family. Ask them if they are seeing these assignments. There are anti-Common Core Facebook pages for every state, and there are also links to other education websites on my blog Right-Reason.com under the education tab here. This is extremely important. Look at this assignment and realize this is a 2nd grade assignment. This is for a 7 year old child! Shouldn’t they just be learning to add and subtract and get these basics down to be used as building blocks for higher learning in mathematics? We must get involved and take back our education. Our children are not “common”. We as parents and teachers know this. We must convince our states to pull out of Common Core altogether. We want our children to enjoy learning. Their futures and the future of our country are at stake.
Right Reason 
August 25, 2013
Education