By Leslie Postal| Originally Published at Orlando Sentinel November 17, 2013

Florida’s Common Core education standards make for dry reading. But they’ve created such a fierce political battle that when the state asked for public comments, more than 19,000 of them poured in.

On Tuesday, the State Board of Education will be briefed on the public’s thoughts.

Here is a sampling of the comments — pro and con — culled from the Florida Department of Education’s website:

“No Common core period … our federal government can no longer be trusted … keep everything having to do with schools at the state level. NO for the ‘common good … commie brainwashing!'” wrote a parent.

“What[‘s] more dangerous to a child than a stranger with candy? How about a government subliminally attacking our children with negative reading material in our schools? It is my feeling that this is an attempt to attack the minds of our young to adapt a liberal passive mindset. Stop Common Core as quickly as you can,” wrote a resident.

“I love Common Core. Please do not bend to political pressure from a small group of non-educators,” wrote one teacher.

“Keep all the Common Core State Standards. Students in Florida need to be held to the same high standards as the rest of the United States. We want our students to be able to compete in the job market now and in the future,” wrote a parent.

Plenty of people wrote about specific standards — but even then views diverged.

“This is exactly what we want our students to do. It is the heart of Mathematics instruction,” wrote a teacher.

“This is so easy! A nine-year-old could do this. You call this a high school math standard?” wrote a teacher.

“Eliminates confusion students often have with fractions,” wrote another teacher.

“This is where the kids will zone out,” wrote a parent.

“‘Students need to be writing EVERYDAY for a variety of purposes, not just for the state test.’ Thank you CCSS for making this abundantly clear!” wrote one resident.

“This is great. My son’s teacher started this last year and the entire class exceeded her expectations,” wrote a parent.

“Write arguments???? Really???? Can we save it for law school? ? My kiddos just want to write stories and use their imaginations,” wrote a teacher about the elementary writing standards.

“The Common Core state standards in high school neglect to teach classic literature. We need to incorporate this back into the standards,” wrote a parent.

“Increased focus on vocabulary is GREAT!” wrote a teacher.

“It requires students to read more difficult text, yet appropriate, preparing them for the type of texts (books) they will face in college and careers. This was a missing link in our old standards,” wrote a teacher.

“Designed by people who never taught this stuff,” wrote a parent.

“I am a teacher 100% opposed to Common Core because it is top-down monopoly of thought and it drowns out other conversations about what math and English ought to look like,” wrote a teacher.

“The entire framework makes sense. There are no valid objections to any of the standards,” another teacher wrote.

Some took aim at the technical language of the standards themselves.

“I’m guessing that an ed dweeb wrote this,” wrote a resident. “What average youngster can understand that? For that matter, what average teacher can understand that?”

But some saw Common Core as necessary to help Florida students compete in the world economy.

“Exactly what our students need to be successful, tax-paying citizens of Florida,” wrote a teacher.

An outside firm will analyze the public comments and present its findings this spring to the state board, which could decide to revise Common Core.

lpostal@tribune.com or 407-420-5273

Copyright © 2013, Orlando Sentinel