ME:
Hi, everyone, welcome to The FloridaProgressives.Com Podcast, Episode Six, for May 28, 2014. I'm Mike Eidson.
Hi, everyone, welcome to The FloridaProgressives.Com Podcast, Episode Six, for May 28, 2014. I'm Mike Eidson.
This show delivers news and updates via interviews with activists around the state on the issues that you, the people of Florida, care about. This time, it’s Common Core and a review of Legislative Session.
As usual, stick around for the end of the podcast; hear a list of actions, groups, and resources discussed on the show that can help you effect positive change.
There’s a link featured prominently on FloridaProgressives.Com regarding this year’s legislative session. Look for the words Legislative Review on the website. My guest will be offering a rundown of this document, so you can follow along there when we get to that topic, if you like. It offers details on major bills, whether they passed or died, and whether they were supported or opposed by progressive Democrats.
Susan Smith is my first returning guest. She is a former teacher and a full-time activist since 2003. She now serves as the president of The Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida, which just had a big meeting and training session in Tampa.
Beyond that, some of her responsibilities include roles on the Progress Florida advisory board, Tiger Bay Club of Tampa board, being the training resource director for the Democratic Women's Club of Florida, and volunteering for many, many grassroots organizations.
Susan Smith, it’s great to talk to you again.
SS:
Thank you. Thanks for having me, Mike. Glad to be here.
ME:
Okay, so last time you were on the show, we didn’t discuss the work that you do in The Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida. Now, full disclosure to the listeners: I’m also a member. I’m very happy with the type of work that’s being done with The Progressive Caucus.
You recently had a big meeting in Tampa, like I mentioned. Can you tell me a little bit about how the caucus was formed and, also, what its goals and principles are?
SS:
We were formed following the 2010 election. It was very frustrating, for some of us, to have that loss. We felt like our party was directionless and that we had nothing people could identify with. The tent is so big that nobody knows what we stand for.
You can’t be pro-choice and anti-choice, and pro-public education and pro-education “reform,” which, y’know the purpose is to privatize public education. You can’t be pro-immigration and anti-immigration, and expect not to confuse the voters.
So, our mission in starting the caucus was to, kind of, bring The Democratic Party back to its core beliefs and values. And we’re doing that by educating people about what Democrats stand for, and we’ve taken the path of more in a policy direction, at this point.
We did approve by-law changes last weekend so that we can have local chapters and start to expand our numbers. And then we can get into some campaign work and starting to support Democratic candidates, progressive candidates. But at this point, y’know, we’ve been more policy-oriented.
So that’s pretty much what we’re about. We’d love for people to join us. Can I give our website?
ME:
Of course.
SS:
It’s http://www.progressivedemcaucusfl.org . We picked that name because we thought search engines would find it easier that way, but it’s been very confusing, because it doesn’t go in the order of our name. But we also made changes to the by-laws so that in the future, we’re not going to do it in 2014, but starting in 2015, after we put in place an endorsement process, we will be able to endorse the following qualifying period, in an election year.
ME:
Great. One of the most exciting events I went to that was related to The Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida was last October at The Florida Democratic Party State Conference, where you hosted an hour-long meeting, and four of the speakers were: gubernatorial candidate Nan Rich, Congressman Alan Grayson, State Senator Dwight Bullard, and State House Representative Mark Pafford. All four of them gave inspirational speeches. The buzz in the room, I thought, was great. It was just a lot of fun to be there.
SS:
It really was. We had that last weekend, too [note: this was recorded May 22, so she is referring to May 17]. And we’re looking forward to the Leadership Blue weekend in Hollywood, FL, on June 28th, the weekend of the 28th. I was just on the phone earlier trying to plan a panel discussion that we’re going to have at that event.
For those that don’t know, to go to the dinner costs money, and, of course, if you have a hotel stay, it costs money, but you can attend all the meetings of The Democratic Party without paying. So, if anybody’s interested in coming to our caucus meeting, it will be held that weekend, down in Hollywood, FL, at The Diplomat Hotel.
ME:
Like I said before, it’s great to hear that there are people active in trying to reform the party, because, to be frank with you, I get a little discouraged, when it comes to The Florida Democratic Party. The prime example would be the candidacy of Nan Rich. I know you have spoken on other radio shows about this already, but, just to kind of give a summary for the listeners that may not know, Nan Rich, she is a former state senator. The president, right?
SS:
No, she wasn’t the President of the Senate. She was the Democratic Leader. The Minority Leader in the Senate.
Well, she started her political career in the State House. But she’s always been an advocate for children, primarily, and women’s issues. And it’s just sad to see that people buy into the rhetoric about money being the only thing that matters in a campaign.
Because, first of all, we as Democrats have not done a good enough job educating our own voters about our State Legislature. And about who our representatives are.
Y’know, everybody complains that we don’t have a Democratic bench. We really do have a Democratic bench, we’re just not good at promoting it, and getting people the name recognition, and helping them build their visibility the way we could as a party. So, that’s another goal of the Progressive Caucus, is to start a Speakers Bureau. So we’re starting now to collect information on speakers, and collect information from different clubs and caucuses, about their meetings, and what topics that might be interested in having one of our Speakers come to them to, y’know, speak about, so we can start getting our Democrats out and about, around the state.
If Nan Rich had been invited to speak at Democratic Club meetings, over the past 10 to 12 years, around the state, she would have name recognition now.
ME:
Mm-hmm.
SS:
If our local clubs had her in as a speaker, and then built press around it, locally, and gotten reporters there, she would have the name recognition that she doesn’t have right now. And she might have been able to raise more money.
But, as it is, her ability to fundraise has been depressed, I think, by the inevitability of that other person that’s running in The Democratic Party, under the Democratic name. Because even before he got into the race, everybody said that he could raise money, and he could win, and she couldn’t win, and that was it!
ME:
Right.
SS:
So I think it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that’s really a shame, what we’ve done.
ME:
And feel free to comment on this, or not; I don’t know if you would feel like it, but for me, personally, just as an average Democratic voter, I see what’s happening: Crist supporters will acknowledge that Rich has better positions, would be a better governor, but, they’re afraid… Well, I think it’s two different things. One is that they’re afraid that Scott would beat Rich, and then, they want Crist to try to beat Scott because he has more money. However, I also wonder if there are people, kind of, undermining and sabotaging the party’s principles also, in addition to that.
Because, like you said at the top of the show, there are people inside the party that have fundamentally different principles than you and I do. So I get a little curious if they are being honest when we debate who would make the best candidate for governor, y’know?
SS:
Mm-hmm. Well, I always like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t necessarily think they don’t have the same values that we have. I think a lot of times people are unwilling to call themselves “progressive,” because the label has been demonized, just like “liberal” was demonized, so that nobody wants to claim the title, even though, y’know, almost to a person, when I go to State Party meetings, when I go visit different counties around the state, the people in the room are all progressive. We all agree on the issues. So I think it’s more the label that people are afraid of. And they’re afraid to loudly proclaim that they’re pro-choice, or that they don’t like “school choice,” which has been, y’know, we can talk about that more.
ME:
Let’s go ahead and begin that, because I have a few questions about, well, Common Core in general, and your stance on Common Core.
On the first episode of this podcast, we mainly talked about education. You mentioned that you are opposed to Common Core. What is Common Core -- a lot of parents and citizens don’t quite know what it is yet -- and why are you opposed to it?
SS:
Well, you kind of have to understand some of the back-story on the education wars. Maybe three decades back, this report came out: A Nation At Risk.
And they talked about how our schools are failing, y’know, the sky is falling, our country is going to fail, and we’re a horrible education country, all these terrible things.
And I don’t think it’s true. I think what everything bears out is that poverty is the main issue that kids are dealing with, the kids that struggle and can’t succeed in school.
So, we’ve been fed this bunch of lies, that we’re failing and we don’t know what we’re doing, while we continue to win Nobel Prizes, in every field. We still have one of the world’s leading economies. So we must be doing something right in this country. When we have these international tests, our children don’t do as well. We also have 23% of our children living in poverty in this country, and we don’t pick and choose who takes the test and whose scores get reported, like other countries who have scores better than we have.
We also know that standardized tests are just a snapshot in time of what children can do. We think standardized tests are misused, and mischaracterized. So that’s, kind of, the back-story on some of these things.
So, a few years back, we think, a group of people came together and said, “Y’know, we should really privatize all this. We could make money. The government doesn’t need to be doing education. So we need to get the government out of the business of education children.”
So they started with all these charter and voucher schemes, and tying the testing to high stakes. Y’know, we’ll fail children, we’ll give schools bad grades, and what I don’t think they realized is the impact that would have, overall, on our education system. Again, I don’t want to necessarily question the motives of all these people, because, I think, a lot of our good Democrats buy into this rhetoric…
ME:
But, like with many things, the motives are sometimes irrelevant when all you’re doing is analyzing the actions, and this is what we’re dealing with, the way the system is now, right?
SS:
Exactly. And all of these things have been corrupted. A lot of them started out as good ideas; they’ve been corrupted. So about five or six years ago, the governors decided, with some prodding from testing company officials, and the school chiefs, that we needed to do something. And that “something” they decided was that we would have national standards.
So, low and behold, 46 states jumped on these standards before they were even written. Now, keep that in mind, that hadn’t even been written. Then, they decided to pick the people the would write them, and the committees, you can go online and see the names, and they’re mostly people in academia -- not classroom teachers -- and testing company officials.
So they wrote the standards, they never field-tested the standards, and they have said, in the Race to the Top, y’know, this is one of the carrots they stuck out for Race to the Top money, when all the schools, at a time when they were all cutting their budgets… So they got them to sign on to these standards, y’know, it was sort of extortion, when you think about it...
ME:
Yeah, Race to the Top is the Obama Administration initiative that he started when he became president, right? Or, I would say, the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan [started].
SS:
Right. So all these states have adopted these standards and then they get tied to these tests, and the same people who are making money on the standardized tests now, that everybody hates, the FCAT, and all these other, y’know, whatever the other state tests are called, the big, giant company Pearson stands to make money on almost all of it. So Pearson was tied in with this testing, also.
Bill Gates is another moving force behind Common Core. And Bill Gates has put money into the PTA and The American Federation of Teachers and into The National Education Association. He’s kind of handed out money everywhere, trying to get people to buy into the standards. And the business community bought into this.
And then, once the testing started, in New York last year, they gave the tests without teaching the standards. Now, there’s no curriculum written for these yet, either. It’s being written now. But they already gave the tests in New York, and 70% of the children failed.
Now, something tells me that 70% of the children in the upscale suburbs of New York City, where 100% of the student body goes to college, and a lot of them to Ivy League schools, that all of a sudden, overnight, that these kids didn’t turn stupid.
So, it tells you that the tests are not really testing what kids are capable of.
ME:
Sometimes, on the internet, you’ll see photos of the testing material itself, that parents put there, and it would be laughable if it wasn’t so important, because some of the questions, like you said, are written by people that have no clue. They’re from academia, they’re from big-business profiteers and whatnot.
And the type of questions that are supposed to be geared towards elementary-school students, they don’t make any sense to adults, let alone children.
SS:
Well, not only that, but children develop at different rates. Some children reach a stage at age 5 and other children don’t reach that stage until they’re 7. So these tests don’t take any of that into consideration. They’re all supposed to be at exactly the same place at exactly the same time.
So we think that they are not developmentally appropriate, especially in the lower grades. For that reason alone, I would say “no” to the standards. The fact that classroom teachers were not involved in writing the standards… they did have a review process where teachers looked over the questions and gave feedback, but I’ve talked to a couple of people who were on those committees, and they said that really, [the people in charge] didn’t listen, and they didn’t take the suggestions.
So then there’s no process for going back and looking at the standards to change them, if they find out they’re not appropriate. So that’s another serious problem that we have with them. They were never field-tested, yet we’re pouring billions of dollars into implementing these standards, and the testing, and the equipment.
This is another problem that we see with it. In the rush to approve the standards and put them into place, and tie the high stakes to them, like teachers’ pay, they didn’t even take into account that all the schools aren’t computerized to the degree they need to be, so that children have the ability to take the tests, because they’re online tests, for the most part.
There are so many problems with [Common Core] that it’s hard to even know where to begin. It’s just a bad idea. It’s another boondoggle for corporate America. A way for people to make money, on the backs of the taxpayers, and take away the local control.
And that’s the Tea Party. I know you wanted to talk about the Tea Party, too...
ME:
Yes.
SS:
...Because there are a lot of progressives who actually agree with some parts of The Tea Party on this, because The Tea Party also opposes Common Core. Their big problem with Common Core is that they think it’s a federal takeover.
Our concerns are different, I think, for the most part.
ME:
Exactly. They have legitimate concerns, every now and then. I think one of them is actually going to get signed by Governor Scott. And that was the matter of students’ data being collected and stored. So I think I read they’re going to try to change it, so it’s not tied to children’s Social Security Numbers. So that’s a good thing, right?
SS:
Yeah. Y’know, this bill almost passed last year. Well, not this bill, but a bill to make it easier to share student data almost passed last year. And, at the eleventh hour, partially in response to the Tea Party complaints, because they listen to the Tea Party, they don’t listen to us, because you know how the Legislature is.
ME:
Right.
SS:
But they found out that the federal laws had been relaxed, around student data. That it can now be shared with researchers, and then the researchers can turn around and sell it to marketers.
And Bill Gates gave $100 million to a company called In Bloom, owned by Rupert Murdoch, to develop this big-data warehouse infrastructure, y’know, a virtual data warehouse, where all this data would be stored. And they found out it has PII, which is Personal Identifiable Information, on the children in it.
So for all we know, if this had been allowed to go through, y’know, if you have a child with some kind of learning disability, or some kind of ADHD condition, or whatever, you could all of a sudden find yourself getting letters in the mail…
ME:
Yeah.
SS:
...About medications, or whatever, because the marketers now know that your child has this condition!
ME:
That is an issue that resonates with every… nearly every American, except for the people that write these bills, because it doesn’t matter how you self-identify, ideologically, you don’t want your children exposed to breaches of privacy like that.
And then, just to go back to the Tea Party real quick, that was an example of what I consider a legitimate concern, but then there are also concerns you hear, y’know, from crackpots.
Charles Van Zant is my state house representative.
SS:
[laughs] Congratulations.
ME:
Yeah, thank you.
And he said Common Core will turn your child gay.
So I think that people that are actually proponents of Common Core, they like to lump progressives in with, y’know, the fringe right, and try to delegitimize all criticisms of Common Core, because there are people that think that, y’know…
SS:
They do. It’s really a shame, because, y’know, a lot of money is going to be wasted before they wake up and realize. I do think Common Core will not succeed, the way it’s being implemented now.
I don’t oppose standards. I am all for national standards. I just think they have to be created with the input of teachers. And they have to be created with the knowledge of how children grow and develop. And not what some testing company pulls out of thin air, and puts into the standards.
ME:
Okay, great.
So the final topic will be about the legislative session overall, because you were gracious enough to allow me to post… On the website, with this episode, will be a fairly comprehensive list of issues that Democrats care about, the Progressive Caucus and other caucuses. And this list will show the issue and whether it was supported or opposed by us, and whether it died in committee, or whether it’s on the way to the governor’s desk. So, thank you for that, to start out with…
SS:
Sure.
ME:
And then, secondly, what are your overall impressions? I know it’s a big list; we don’t have time to go through everything. But if you could name major concerns?
We mentioned some of the things, last time you were on the show, in terms of voucher expansion, in terms of the textbooks, trying to make it more locally controlled, for a variety of reasons.
So when you look at the full list that you were compiling, what really sticks out for you?
SS:
Well, the mandatory minimums bill, which is at the top of the list, I don’t think we talked about that last time, and this wasn’t even on my radar for a while, but we have a serious problem with overcharging people who are caught with drugs.
We have these mandatory-minimum sentences, and I think this bill took care of some of that this time. They tried to do it last year, and it didn’t get through, at the very end of session.
But, in this state, if you have seven oxycodone pills, illegally, you can be sent to prison, mandatory sentence, for five years. That’s just outrageous.
ME:
It is. It’s a nonviolent offense.
SS:
Exactly. And it’s an addiction. In many cases, it’s an addiction issue and not a criminal issue.
So that would be one of the good things that happened. The League of Women Voters likes to call it “the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
ME:
[laughs]
SS:
So another good thing that happened was the immigrant tuition, for the Dreamers. They will get in-state tuition.
ME:
Right.
SS:
There were some particulars about it I’m not quite up-to-speed on, but it’s a vast improvement, and will be very helpful to people who pay in-state taxes, and who should benefit from that, and get in-state tuition. So we’re grateful for that bill.
Y’know, another good thing is that The Florida Retirement System was able to survive another day. Will Weatherford didn’t get one of his priorities, for whatever reason, and it was probably some behind-the-scenes maneuvering, that was killed again this year.
There was an attempt to privatize the pension system in Florida. We have one of the best-run systems in the country, and it always ranks very highly. It’s very well-managed. It does very well and they want to destroy it by putting new hires into this 401k-type situation. So that failed.
Of course, minimum wage didn’t go anywhere this year. The voucher bill did pass, which is very… y’know, we talked about that on the last show, but that did pass, and it was not in a pretty way: they tacked in on in the last minute, as an amendment. And three Democrats, unfortunately, voted for it, so I don’t understand that. So I want them to attempt to explain it.
The charter expansion, the unified contract, did not pass. We are grateful about that, so that was another good one.
The springs. We didn’t do anything to protect our springs this time around. The environmental bills, I guess the “good” would be that they didn’t do any more harm, or any great harm, but they also didn’t do anything to fix the many problems we’ve got with our environment.
ME:
Right. And when you take the longer view -- just like when you speak about education, environmentalists often speak about the longer view of all the cutbacks that have happened, for the springs, and for other things around here, five years ago. We are nowhere near the funding levels that we used to be at.
SS:
I know. So hopefully nature’s going to get the better of them and it’s going to start flooding the houses of the rich people, and then something will be done.
ME:
[laughs]
SS:
Because that’s what -- we had a call with Representative Pafford the other night, and that’s pretty much what he said. [laughs] I said, “Look into your crystal ball and tell us how you see this playing out,” because he talked about sea-level rise and the recent climate change report, and he said, “Well, it’s going to take flooding of the big mansions, and then, when the rich people start being impacted, then they’ll care about the rest of us.”
ME:
That’s so true.
SS:
So true. So then, we move on to the gun bills. The “threatened use of force,” the “warning shot” bill, did pass. They used Marissa Alexander as the face of that bill. So that’s a bad one and will probably have some bad consequences in the end.
ME:
Which, I mean, not to undermine her story and her plight and everything. I mean, she’s also a victim of the mandatory-minimum sentencing. I mean, it ties into so many things.
SS:
I know. So hopefully she will be okay soon.
ME:
Yeah.
SS:
Hopefully her situation will be helped.
ME:
Right.
SS:
The other bill that was killed the last day that will be back the next time is the mandatory evacuations and the guns. Senator Brandes, from Pinellas County, and Hillsborough, he has some Hillsborough in his district also, had a bill stating you could carry a weapon without a license during a mandatory evacuation. Or, y’know, if there’s a riot of some sort.
In your community, you could have a gun without a license. So that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
ME:
Oh, wow. I could see all kinds of loopholes that could be created, with that.
SS:
Oh, it would horrible! But luckily, law enforcement opposed it and Senator Latvala stopped it, at the last minute, by trying to put some time limits on it, so that the bill was pulled.
ME:
Mm-hmm.
SS:
The domestic-partner…
ME:
That really... just to go back one, that really makes me angry, the more I think about it, because it seems to be promoting lawlessness, as much as you can.
SS:
It does. It does, absolutely. And they use the excuse that New Orleans people couldn’t protect themselves…
ME:
Oh. [scoffs]
SS:
...during Katrina, and that’s bogus. That’s been proven that it wasn’t true. That’s what they like to use as the example.
Then, the domestic-partnership registry failed. Didn’t even get a committee hearing this time. Neither did The Competitive Workforce Act. Even though both bills had bipartisan support. They weren’t even calendered into a committee. So that was unfortunate.
There weren’t any bills that addressed voter issues, again. They’re trying to get an online voter registration bill passed. The Supervisors of Election want it, and I think what they’re going to do is kind of workshop that over the next year and come back again and try to address that.
ME:
Because there’s an election coming up. [laughs]
SS:
Yeah, of course. Of course.
Pregnancy discrimination did die… I think “not calendered,” is what happened to that. But the State Supreme Court had already ruled that you couldn’t discriminate, in the case of pregnant women, so that one is being worked out through the courts. They wanted to go ahead and get that passed, but they weren’t able to.
And then the “really bad” were the two abortion bills that passed. One would change the date, well, the definition of viability, of a fetus, so that it would prevent women from having abortions in later months.
ME:
Right. And the idea of “late-term” seems to be getting larger and larger, because now they’re getting into something like 19 or 20 weeks of pregnancy.
SS:
Right. And they don’t take fetal anomalies or mothers’ mental condition into consideration, so that’s really unfortunate.
And then the last bill, which has already been declared unconstitutional in a couple of other states, is what we call the “fetal homicide” bill, stating that if somebody recklessly causes the miscarriage of a fetus, that the fetus has the same rights as living, breathing, born person.
The example they like to give is that, if you are driving recklessly, and you have somebody in the car with you who is maybe two weeks pregnant, and doesn’t even know it, if that woman has a miscarriage, you can be charged with…
ME:
Wow.
SS:
Yes. So this has all kinds of unintended consequences. So does this mean that every woman who’s in any kind of accident has to undergo a pregnancy test if she has any kind of health issues? Do you have to report every miscarriage?
This, again, will never be… The only case that you can understand it, and unfortunately it happened in Hillsborough County, this past year, was the young man who gave his girlfriend, who was pregnant, he didn’t want her to have the baby, and his father was a doctor, and he was able to get one of the drugs and give it to her, and she had a miscarriage. So that was the face of this bill.
So they’re still trying to chip away at women’s rights, and they succeeded on a couple of bills this time.
And then the really “super-ugly” of the session was that they didn’t expand Medicaid. So we’ve still got people dying every day, from lack of health insurance. And lack of health care, due to the lack of health insurance.
ME:
Well, you know how earlier [before we started recording], I said I went to Governor Scott’s website, and I was trying to find some information to prepare for this show: according to him, Florida’s just great, y’know? [laughs]
SS:
Oh, yeah.
ME:
So you just provided a litany of many, many problems that the state of Florida is facing, but it’s like an alternate reality sometimes, when you go to see how some of the Republicans are speaking of it, so…
SS:
Absolutely. They don’t seem to live in the same world the rest of us do. [laughs]
ME:
Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Susan, for that summary, and thanks again, for appearing on the show.
SS:
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
ME:
Unless you had anything else to say; I didn’t mean to cut you off.
SS:
No, I don’t think so. We had two great trainings [May 17th]. The DFA [Democracy for America] Training is next weekend in Tallahassee. And Wellstone training in Miami, I think.
ME:
Yes.
SS:
So we’ve got some great political trainings coming up that people need to look into.
ME:
And I’ll be at Camp Wellstone, in my first trip to Miami.
SS:
Oh, good! Enjoy it! I wish I could do both. I’m going to go to DFA because I’ve got friends who are going to be there and I’m going to try to help with it. I’ve done the training myself a few times.
I’ve done Wellstone, one of the very first Wellstone trainings that was done. I attended in Tampa back in 2004. But I’d like to see how it’s changed. I’m sure it’s gotten much better than it was then, although it was great, then.
ME:
Yeah. It will be my second time at Camp Wellstone. I’m doing a different track, because, listeners, they offer three different tracks, one for grassroots organizing, one for how to be a staffer on a campaign, and how to be the candidate yourself, so, it’s very interesting.
Well, Susan, thank you so much, have fun in Tallahassee, and I really look forward to the future plans of the Democratic Progressive Caucus, including that Speakers Bureau that you mentioned.
SS:
Yes! Okay, you’ll have to help us with that.
ME:
Absolutely.
It’s always great to chat with Susan Smith. I hope you found her assessment of the Legislative Session as useful as I did. Once again, that list is linked to on FloridaProgressives.Com
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_Xtse_r2txrODBKcFZWQmtpaEE/ . Follow that link and click the left arrow on the sidebar to get a better view of the PDF. It includes all the good, bad, and ugly bills mentioned on the show, plus more.
You can also find the Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida’s stance on Common Core in that Legislative Review document.
I will revisit this document, once we know all the bills that will be signed into law and what bills will be rejected, and provide an update to this segment on a future podcast.
---
Susan Smith is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/stsmith222 and is also on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/stsmith2222 .
If you want to attend one of the two progressive trainings this weekend, they are:
The Democracy For America Training in Tallahassee . More info at http://www.democracyforamerica.com/trainings/160-campaign-academy-in-tallahassee-fl
and
The next Leadership Blue event will be June 28th at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, FL.
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Susan also provided kind of a hidden history of people undermining public education for profit. Please do your research into who writes these national standards and who benefits. Be a part of the movement for accountable and thoroughly vetted standards.
[ Here’s a link to the closing segment of episode one, which listed many grassroots education groups in Florida you can join.
This music is by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com . It is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Episodes Seven and Eight of this podcast are in the works. Look for when they’ll be out by subscribing at FloridaProgressives.Com or “liking” the Facebook Fan Page by searching for The FloridaProgressives.Com Podcast. You can also find me on Twitter at mike eidson or send me an email at michael.c.eidson@gmail.com . Thanks for listening.
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