There are many times that parents receive a document from their child's school containing test results, or other information that is difficult if not impossible to understand. It's not that the information is not there, but the acronyms, terminology, and the numbers make it hard to understand what it means.

The Sunshine State Standards
The Sunshine State Standards describe the body of knowledge that your child is expected to be taught in his/her 12 years of school.

The Grade Level Expectations take this body of knowledge and break it down into specific skills that students must master at each grade level. The FCAT tests to see if those skills have been mastered. If the 4th grade, 8th grade or 10th grade skills have not been mastered at a passing level of proficiency, your child may be retained, or risk not graduating (in the 10th grade case)

Understanding the Expectations
The Grade Level Expectations are the expectations of the state of what your child should know. Whether they are being taught those skills at an appropriate level of understanding is something that You have to know.

Our Parent Friendly Standards Iniative aims to make those standards easy to understand for parents. To us, ease of understanding includes more than just using smaller words, it includes:

• Creating a glossary of terms to define the terminology used in the standards
  
• Integrating a set of exercises that give parents ideas on how they can assess and build skill for each grade level expectation
  
• Providing ways for teachers to help refine the the "translated" standards online