Newly elected Florida legislators attended a briefing intended to give them an overview of what their role is in matters of education. The session was filmed and is available for viewing: 12/6/16 House “Legislator University†Training: An Overview of School Accountability.
Quite of bit of time was spent discussing the process of adopting instructional materials (textbooks and such). The lawmakers had interesting reactions and questions that provide some insight into their thinking. We get an idea of where they’re coming from and what combination of information and misinformation they came in with.
If you’re not familiar with Florida’s instructional materials review/adoption process, I encourage you to watch the video. It’s explained fairly well. I think a couple of points get muddled a bit but it’s overall useful information. We’re going to be adopting new science textbooks in the near future, so the better informed you are the better watchdogs we all can be.
The video is 44 minutes long but worth the time. The sound in the first few minutes is poor but it improves later. I’m guessing that some microphones hadn’t been switched on in the beginning.
Brandon,
What is the status of our science standards? Is there anything going on about moving to the newer national standards, or are we going to be sticking with the 2008 standards? That is certainly relevant to textbook adoption.
I’m not aware of any efforts to change or update our 2008 standards at this time.
Ah, thanks. I had thought there were plans to move to the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards, finalized in 2013, not to be confused with our 2008 Next Generation Sunshine State Standards) at one time. I don’t know enough about the NGSS to judge them in comparison to ours our otherwise. I just never heard more about it after a while and was wondering. I was especially wondering if politics had been holding them up or led adoption of them to be canceled, or what.
Anyways, we definitely need to textbooks. The existing ones are pretty out of date here in Lake, at least.