Opponents of the Common Core standards protested the appearance of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in Tampa Friday at the Hillsborough County Republican Lincoln Day dinner.
The newly declared 2016 presidential contender was in his home state to address hundreds of people at the fundraising event, reports SaintPetersBlog.
Protesters’s concerns about Common Core ranged from the amount of testing, to federal intrusion in education, to “Common Core math.”
“I’m against anything that nationalizes education,” said Emma Jane Miller, a member of the Hillsborough County Republican Executive Committee who was unhappy with Bush as the choice of keynote at the dinner. “When Jeb Bush left Florida in 2006, he helped create the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and they have done nothing but push Common Core in 45 states.”
Miller said she hopes Common Core opponents will be able to prevent Bush from getting the Republican nomination.
Similarly, Jim McGlothlin from Riverview is also an opponent of Common Core.
“I’m not an education person, but I’ve talked to a few teachers and they seem to think there’s too much testing,” he said. “Instead of teaching to kids they’re teaching to pass a test and that’s not a good thing.”
Betty James from Sun City Center also joined the protest.
“You have to look at the curriculum to really see what’s going on there – how they’re trying to make the children learn math,” James asserted. “It takes them more than 20 minutes to solve a simple problem, and something you could do if you could memorize addition and subtraction, you would do within three seconds, and it takes them all this time to fill out these little boxes.”
“Since the 1800’s, we’ve been using the system that we’ve been using, and there’s no need to change it,” she added. “Really there isn’t. Because look at the technology that’s been developed.”
According to the Tampa Tribune, Bush touted his accomplishments as Florida’s governor during his address, including his education reforms such as his school choice agenda, voucher programs, and charter schools.
“I know we can fix the problems in Washington, D.C. because we did it together here,” Bush told the dinner’s attendees. “The fact is, too many people, especially now, think that America can’t change. That somehow we’re doomed to decline. I reject that. I hope you do as well.”
Regarding the development of the Common Core standards, Emmett McGroarty, education director at American Principles Project (APP) tells Breitbart News, “The fact is that the Common Core owners and developers prevailed upon the federal government to push the standards into the states.”
“Sadly, the standards are of poor quality, and they crowd out high quality curricula,” McGroarty added. “Governor Bush should address that issue as well as his views on the proper role of the federal government in education.”
During his address on Friday evening, Bush criticized President Obama as a “left-wing ideologue” and also slammed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for joining Obama in ineffective foreign policy.
In September of 2013, however, Bush honored former Secretary of State Clinton with the Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center—of which he was chairman of the board of trustees—on the eve of the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on the United States mission in Benghazi that killed four Americans.
“Former Secretary Clinton has dedicated her life to serving and engaging people across the world in democracy,” Bush said in a statement. “These efforts as a citizen, an activist, and a leader have earned Secretary Clinton this year’s Liberty Medal.”
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