The Florida Board of Education set different proficiency goals for different racial groups. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
By Leslie Postal | The Orlando Sentinel. February 14, 2014

Florida’s race-based academic goals prompted controversy when they were adopted in 2012 — and now have sparked an online petition urging Gov. Rick Scott to halt their implementation.

The petition, on change.org, asks Scott to “halt Florida’s racist education policy.” It had more than 1,500 signatures as of late Thursday.

Florida adopted the race-based goals at the behest of the federal government, which required them if Florida wanted a waiver from the No Child Left Behind law.

The race-based targets were meant, advocates said, to highlight current performance and then show the rate of improvement needed to get all children to master the basics of reading and math. The idea was to highlight problems, so schools could work to fix them, they said.

But many viewed the targets as setting lower expectations for certain groups of youngsters, particularly black and Hispanics.

Florida’s goals said that by 2018, for example, it wanted 90 percent of its Asian students, 88 percent of its white students, 81 percent of its Hispanic students and 74 percent of its black students reading well.

The petition was started by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which last year filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Justice Department, arguing Florida’s plan was a violation of civil rights law.

The petition argues that “lowered expectations will lead to lowered results.”

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