by Jan Goehring
The Florida Law Related Education Association reports, in a guest commentary on the Campaign to Promote Civic Education blog, that statewide efforts are promoting civic education. The work began several years ago when a delegation of policymakers and education officials began attending the Congressional Conferences on Civic Education. These four annual conferences, sponsored by the Alliance for Representative Democracy, a partnership of the Center for Civic Education, the Center on Congress at Indiana University and the National Conference of State Legislatures, brought high-level delegations from every state together in Washington, D.C., to learn about the civic mission of schools.
“The conferences provided the impetus for groups to collaborate and determine the best strategies to advance civic education in our own states,” commented Annette Boyd Pitts, campaign facilitator for Florida and executive director of the Florida Law Related Education Association, Inc. “They created alliances and revitalized interest in a subject that was losing its visibility in an era of high stakes testing and a focus on testing core subjects,” Pitts continued.
This collaboration lead to a number of initiatives in Florida including a new mandate for a semester of civic education in middle school, curriculum development, teacher training and a look at standards.
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