Florida: The Final (Public) Word

There was a meeting held in Orlando, Florida today to allow public comment on the proposed new Florida science standards. The new standards incorporate evolution, both word and concept, into the benchmarks. That sort of thing might cause a Bill Buckingham to exclaim, “It’s laced… with Darwinism!” And it pretty much did.

I spent a fair amount of time between 10 AM and 2:30 PM today listening to the webcast of the event, when it was working. (The remainder I used tending Diane, who has the flu.) The event ran from 10 to 3:30, so I heard most of it.

I have a retrospective overview at my weblog:

Barring any media bombshells, the public commentary phase of responses to the proposed Florida science standards is now over and done with. I have not yet seen every minute of the meeting today in Orlando, but I did sample several hours of it.

There are several things to be said. The first is that I am very proud of the leadership role that the Florida Citizens for Science group played in bringing things to this point. While the pro-science side was numerically under-represented among the commenters, I recognized many of them as members of Florida Citizens for Science. Among those, FL CfS President Joe Wolf presented the petition supporting the standards that so many of you have signed, noting the total number collected in less than two weeks as over 1,500 signatures, and that somewhat more than 1,000 of those were Florida citizens. FL CfS Treasurer Pete Dunkelberg made excellent use of his three minutes at the podium, reminding the Florida Board of Education that they have the opportunity to change Florida’s standards score from “F” to “A” – if only they don’t mess up at the last minute by capitulating to the anti-science crowd.

Read here for more.

I also have a series of posts from summarizing various speakers while the webcast ran:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

Comment either here, there, or at After the Bar Closes.