Florida Education Department Puts Daily Common Core Tweets On Hold

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The famed Twitter fail whale, made with Legos.

The Florida Department of Education has put it’s daily tweeting of Common Core State Standards on hold while the agency prepares for a series of public meetings on the math, English and literacy standards.

The agency started sending out a standard of the day to its more than 6,000 followers last month. But DoE communications director Joe Follick said he put the practice on hold after Gov. Rick Scott requested three public meetings to discuss the standards.

Tweeting out a standard a day, Follick said, might give the impression the agency was favoring certain standards over others. Scott has asked the public to come to the meetings prepared with criticisms of specific standards.

“For us to tweet out one a day could create the appearance we’re favoring some,” he said. “We’re asking everybody to review [Common Core]. I just want people to look at it with a clean slate.”

Follick said the practice could resume after the public meetings, which are expected later this month.

Florida is one of 45 states to fully adopt the Common Core State Standards, which outline what students should know at the end of each grade. But opposition to the standards is rising, as some question the quality of standards, the amount of testing accompanying Common Core, the cost and whether Common Core will increase the collection of student data.

Follick said the decision to suspend the daily standard was his and no one asked him to stop the tweets. The department sent out its last standard of the day on Sept. 25, two days after Scott announced his executive order.

#CommonCore State Standard of the Day: Grade 6 – Write an inequality of the form x > c or x < c to represent a… http://t.co/RKbpG7siIs

— FL Dept of Education (@EducationFL) September 25, 2013