Gathering Support for “Assessments and Accountability” Bills
By FLCA on March 9, 2015

Sen. Greg Evers and Rep. John Tobia have filed the “Florida Education Stakeholders Empowerment Act” as bills in the Florida Senate and House! This is a major victory in the effort to reverse course on the implementation of Common Core (AKA “The Florida Sunshine State Standards”) and return control and responsibility of education to local school boards!
In the House & Senate, the bills are titled “Assessments and Accountability”.

Here are links to bill information:

• Senate: SB 1496  

  http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2015/1496

• House: HB 1121   

http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillI...

Now the hard work begins. We will be asking you to send a new email to your legislators every few days and we will also start targeting education committee members in both the house and senate as our companion bills get assigned to committees. It is also important that you call your house rep. and senator to insist that they co-sponsor these companion bills.

Florida leadership has indicated a strong desire to table our bills and just fiddle with high-stakes testing. We know that this will not solve the root problems of Common Core standards, a warped one-size-fits-all corporate-driven curriculum, the huge costs of electronic testing and individual student profiling via data mining.

We’re asking you to send an email to Florida state officials to:

• Strongly Encourage your House & Senate leaders to co-sponsor and support these bills

• Let Governor Scott, Education Commissioner Stewart and your local school board members know that you’re paying attention, and are supportive of getting these bills passed

Leadership STILL needs to hear loud and clear that we’re fully behind this effort. Getting bills filed is an EXTREMELY important step and a great accomplishment, but many bills die on the House and Senate floors. Our next task is to do everything possible to make sure that doesn’t happen with these bills.

ACTION ITEM:

Send your email using the form in the link below:
Please take a moment to send it today. They need hear from the grassroots now!
We also need you to get this link to everyone in your database. With one click they can email their Legislators to support our companion bills http://floridacitizensalliance.com/website/gathering-support-assess...

We have a very aggressive bill to stop Common core this year and replace it with best state pre-common core standards, non-common core curriculum really controlled by local school districts (Not Pearson PLC) and eliminate all state mandated testing except a one nationally normed test chosen from a pre-approved list, like the Iowa Basic or Stanford Achievements. It also stops data mining it its tracks and saves huge dollars with pencil testing.

There are several add’l bills worth supporting as this session shapes up, but SB 1496 and HB 1121 will act this legislative cycle to replace the entire “packaged evil” called Common Core. Some naysayers will tell you– “It is too aggressive, Can’t be done” Our Answer : HOGWASH- our children deserve nothing less! Many lives and children’s desire to learn are being destroyed right now, each and every year and we cannot “un-ring those bells”
Other states like Oklahoma have done it, we just need legislators who say enough! … and only you can convince them.

ADDITIONALLY
We Really, REALLY need your help. We need volunteers to join us next week . We are still in this fight through shear will power!
We are going to Tallahassee again. Chris and I will be there Mar 16-19 and will be forming teams of 3 to 4 people each to meet with legislators. 4 teams would be fantastic. Our bills have been assigned to 3 committees in each house. This means we have over 40 legislators to meet with.
. Our bills have been assigned to 3 committees in each house. This means we have over 40 legislators to meet with.

Please call Chris (Quackenbush) At 239-823-2980 or me (Keith Flaugh) at 239-250-3320 today to volunteer to help in Tallahassee. It is NOW or we lose this for the 2015 Legislative cycle.

Keith , Chris and the entire FLCA team. (Florida Citizens Alliance)

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win” Mahatma Gandhi

Credit for all information goes to Florida Liberty Alliance, Chris Quackenbush and Keith Flaugh

Thank you for your attention to this matter

God Bless You and God Bless Our America.

Additional Information -Optional Reading

This is an update from the March For The Children in Tallahassee on the 5th.

March for the Children report and SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS going to Tallahassee- Tell them to support SB1496 and HB 1121

Thank you for supporting or attending our great event yesterday, the MARCH FOR THE CHILDREN!  It was a great success!  There were at least 140 or so who attended the press conference and many more walking the halls of our State Legislature to carry the message of support for HB1121 and SB1496.  We got 4 immediate co-sponsors, Senator Bullard, Rep Rehwinkle-Vasolinda, Rep. Beshears and Rep. VanZant, and promises of dozens more as soon as they read the bill (imagine that!).  Senator Evers and Senator Bullard spoke at our event along with a host of others. 

What we found was that leadership has a shocking disregard for empirical evidence that their maniacal obsession with testing has led us to disaster evidenced by the crash of the FSA exams this week.  Even in the face of the daily failures, they were getting reports from Pam Stewart that it was blown way out of proportion and only 2% were affected.   REALLY?  I witnessed Joy Frank report to the Education Committee yesterday, that all was well and they solved pretty much all the problems.  That was completely untrue.  They seem to live in a bubble and ignore reports on the ground from their constituents.  They are told the Florida is #1 and has made dramatic gains in learning.  Anyone looking at nationally normed tests like the ACT or SAT willnot see that corroborated.  Go to the ACT web site and look up your district.  Lee County scored 20.1 in 1995 and has not been close to that ever since.  Their data manipulation bends the mind and it has been going on for years. 

They have created a test, the FSA, (that corporate cronies like Bill Gates, Jeb Bush, Pearson Education benefit directly from) that compares us to no one!  How will we know if our kids are learning more than other systems if it is only a state test?  Our bills allow local districts to choose a nationally normed test from a list approved by the Commissioner.  These tests have been around for decades and will give us a true picture of performance and comparison across the country.  They will be administered ONE time at the end of the year from grade 3-8 and once in high school and will NOT be high stakes tests.  We included an opt-out for parents with no exclusions.

The BIG kicker is that they will be administered on PAPER, so kids can take this at their own desks.  No more musical chairs causing a huge loss of class time for learning.  No more unfunded mandates from the state causing HUGE sums of money spent on computers for testing and technology for greater bandwidth.   This could save our taxpayers and school districts over $2 Billion by some estimates just for starters.  And what does a 3^rd grader know about keyboarding skills?  We don’t need to test keyboarding skills, we want to know their knowledge level.  The only ones who gain are the testing and computer companies. 

HB1121 was written by experts who examined other state efforts to restore education.  This bill is the BEST I have seen in the entire country.  It restores local control and brings decision making back to the school districts so parents can have a role and don’t have to travel to Tallahassee or Washington DC to discuss what their kids are learning (or not learning) and how they are learning it.

This next week, the School Board Members from around the state will be headed to Tallahassee.  Please call yours and urge them to give us a statement of their support for the attached letter.  Their voices should matter as our elected representatives for education.  They need to know that leadership has told us they don’t trust school boards to make the right decisions, and they want to take control.  This is appalling!  We must insist on Local Control and trust our certified teachers, and accredited schools.  The state officials have no such credentials.