One of Florida’s parent groups is joining forces with one of the country’s largest grassroots organizations to stop the controversial Common Core State Standards once and for all.
Florida Parents Against Common Core, a parent organization fighting back against Common Core, announced this week it was joining libertarian activist group FreedomWorks to take down the national education standards.
FPACC made headlines in recent months when it asked all Republican presidential primary candidates at the Republican Party of Florida’s Sunshine Summit in Orlando to sign a pledge saying they would support ending Common Core.
Joining with FreedomWorks, says FPACC, is part of the group’s agenda to make 2016 the last year of Common Core. Earlier this month, the parent group vowed to start a national conversation on a flurry of issues including student privacy and academic inferiority of the standards.
FreedomWorks originated from a Koch brothers-founded group and helped to foster the Tea Party movement. Common Core has been one of the group’s primary issues in recent years. In 2014, conservative political commentator Glenn Beck worked with FreedomWorks and hosted a live movie event protesting the standards.
FreedomWorks contends that “one size fits all” education isn’t effective because all students don’t learn the same way. The group also has made comparisons of the standards’ adoption to the adoption of Obamacare, agreed to before legislators even had read the proposals.
FPACC president Luz Gonzalez said the group agreed with FreedomWorks’ stances on the standards, and said the group sees eye-to-eye with comparisons of Common Core and Obamacare.
“FPACC agrees with FreedomWorks’ comments that Obamacare and Common Core have much in similarity,” she said. “They were written not by experts in the field of health or education, but by paid bystanders.”
Gonzalez said the standards were adopted stealthily to discourage dissenters from voicing their opinions opposing them.
“Probably their greatest similarity is an utter inferiority of the programs themselves, not only in cost effectiveness but quality of the product,” she said.
FPACC has jumped in the water with FreedomWorks, pledging it will distribute Common Core Fails around Florida.
The Common Core State Standards were fully implemented in Florida during the 2014-2015 school year, but only after the Florida Department of Education slightly altered the standards and rebranded them under the Florida Standards.
FreedomWorks is one of the country’s largest grassroots organizations, boasting over 247,000 followers on Twitter and amassing nearly 5 million likes on Facebook. This week, the group posted a link to a petition demanding an end to Common Core’s “federal takeover” in 2016. As of this article’s publishing, the petition had gathered nearly 240,000 signatures.
