Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida, who has been cutting Florida’s educational system’s budget by a great deal for a long time has decided upon a new system to make his state-based testing more successful. His initial plan was to change the questions asked in their tests to easier questions in order to attempt to make it seem as though Florida’s educational system is doing better than it is. This of course would not work and is not the answer. Instead of looking into doing something to fix the problem he has decided to change the values of constants in order to make concepts easier to learn. This plan is to take effect early 2006 and shall be implemented from elementary school through high school.
As a basic example of these concepts we will look at mathematics, Jeb Bush has modified the concept of :
- Division into a new form of subtraction
- Multiplication into writing out the same number X amount of times and then adding them up
- Fractions into simple division
- Algebra is mandatorily going to be shown with bean bags and a puppet narrator.
- Pi is now going to equal just 3 in order to help students in remembering it’s value
- Every student is going to require to purchase a brand new “Texas Instruments TI-89 Titanium Graphing Calculator” without financial assistance.
This is an incomplete list comprised of only some of the mathematical-based changes. I was unable to get any information about the other proposed changes but if they are as terrible as this one I am sure there will be a lot of people protesting this newly planned bill. These are just a small list of the absolutely unintelligent choices, attempting to fix the educational system due to a lack of budget. This will not help our students at all. This will just teach our students wrong information which will have no purpose but to allow our children to fail once they are out in the real world. Yes, the state of Florida’s educational system is poor at the moment but I think that the answer here, is to instead increase the educational budget and make sure that our teachers get well paid for their services. As a parent I, personally, am appalled by this choice of action and will do everything in my power to see this bill vetoed if it passes.
-Kevin Carson
