By Emily Mahoney
Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the creation of new academic standards on Friday, a year after he directed the state to root out all “vestiges of Common Core” and change the way Florida’s students learn.
“Today we’re announcing that mission has been accomplished,” he said at a news conference in Naples. “It goes beyond Common Core to embrace common sense.”
State standards are benchmarks that dictate what students must know by the end of each grade level, and curriculum is shaped around those goals.
The new standards will be called the BEST Standards, which stands for the Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking. Although the standards themselves were not made publicly available Friday — DeSantis promised they would be online in a week — the Florida Department of Education released summary documents that outline some of the major changes ahead.
One of the documents was the final recommendation by Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran to DeSantis, something the department had previously declined to make public.
Corcoran said the goal of the standards is to produce “excellent thinkers,” and to reduce the differences between curricula across the state.
One of the biggest changes could be the way students learn math. The previous, Common Core-based standards, emphasized an understanding of why math equations resulted in certain answers. Corcoran on Friday said math should go back to the basics of arriving at the answer to form a stronger foundation.
“When you’re trying to remember what’s four times four, and you have to think about it and it’s not automatic, you’re never going to be able to conquer algebra and all those other courses,” he said.
Additionally, American history and civics materials will also be “embedded” into all grade levels in their English language arts lessons, rather than more isolated lessons on civics typically in seventh grade, American history inPost too long. Click here to view the full text.