Critical Race Theory - Parents fight back

Cuddles · Jun 11, 2023

Timestamped to statement. DePussy is obviously lying so must watch commentary to understand background context.

gwb-trading · Jun 29, 2023

Cuddles · Jun 29, 2023

gwb-trading said:

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lol doubling down on your hero clown Rufo? Keep at it:

Cuddles said:
Christopher Rufo lolz. Keep clowning GWB:

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gwb-trading said:

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Cuddles said:
gwb's hero everyone:

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gwb-trading said:

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Cuddles said:
and there it is:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...hool-boards-help-conservative-groups-n1270794

Critical race theory battle invades school boards — with help from conservative groups
In towns nationwide, well-connected conservative activists, and Fox News, have ramped up the tension in fights over race and equity in schools.

A booby-trapped billboard. A list of demands. A conservative media frenzy.

Jeff Porter, superintendent of a wealthy suburban school district in Maine, had no idea that his community was about to become part of a national battle when in the summer of 2020 a father began accusing the district of trying to “indoctrinate” his children by teaching critical race theory.

To Porter, the issue was straightforward: The district had denounced white supremacy in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, but did not teach critical race theory, the academic study of racism’s pervasive impact.

But the parent, Shawn McBreairty, grew increasingly disgruntled and soon connected with No Left Turn in Education, a rapidly growing national group that supports parents as they fight against lessons on systemic racism. That action turned a heated conflict with the school board into one that soon drew national attention, mobilized by a new, increasingly coordinated movement with the backing of major conservative organizations and media outlets.

It’s a movement that has amped up grassroots parental organizing around the country, bringing the lens and stakes of national politics — along with the playbook of seasoned GOP activists — to school boards.

Jeff Porter, a school superintendent in suburban Maine, said his district has been "almost held hostage" by a national battle over critical race theory.

“I was very naïve at the beginning of the year,” Porter said. “I thought it was a concerned parent who had taken it a little too far. I didn't understand this until recently, but these were tactics from national organizations to discredit the entire district.”

McBreairty became Maine’s chapter leader for No Left Turn last summer. He has since put up a billboard-size sign of a school board member’s face on his lawn and said it was surrounded by rat traps to prevent theft. “This is a war with the left,” McBreairty said in an email to NBC News, “and in war, tactics and strategy can become blurry.” The fight has only escalated, and it shows no sign of slowing.

Conflicts like this are playing out in cities and towns across the country, amid the rise of at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender, according to an NBC News analysis of media reports and organizations’ promotional materials. Reinforced by conservative think tanks, law firms and activist parents, these groups have found allies in families frustrated over Covid-19 restrictions in schools and have weaponized the right’s opposition to critical race theory, turning it into a political rallying point.

While the efforts vary, they share strategies of disruption, publicity and mobilization. The groups swarm school board meetings, inundate districts with time-consuming public records requests and file lawsuits and federal complaints alleging discrimination against white students. They have become media darlings in conservative circles and made the debate over critical race theory a national issue.

Virtually all school districts insist they are not teaching critical race theory, but many activists and parents have begun using it as a catch-all term to refer to what schools often call equity programs, teaching about racism or LGBTQ-inclusive policies.

"I didn't understand this until recently, but these were tactics from national organizations to discredit the entire district."

Now, conservative activists are setting their sights on ousting as many school board members as they can, and local Republican Parties have vowed to help, viewing the revolt against critical race theory as akin to the tea party wave from a decade ago.

Activists and parents have launched 50 recall efforts this year aimed at unseating 126 school board members, according to a new report from Ballotpedia, a website that tracks U.S. politics and elections. Most of those recalls — which already surpass the record for a single year — started as objections to Covid-19 restrictions, but five of the most recently launched campaigns, including a particularly contentious fight in Loudoun County, Virginia, include concerns about critical race theory.

And, in a new development this year, rather than targeting a single member, these efforts often target multiple members or entire school boards, according to Abbey Smith, a researcher at Ballotpedia.

In a diversifying Virginia suburb, a fight over equity in schools spirals out of control
This data, which is limited to the 39 states that allow for recall of local elected officials, suggests that political discord at the local school level is at an all-time high. At least 50 other school districts from Washington to Florida have been the scenes of local unrest over the idea of critical race theory, according to an NBC News analysis of media reports.

Prominent Republican political figures are rushing in to support the parent activists, hoping that these local battles will mobilize conservative voters in next year’s midterms and beyond. The push comes as President Joe Biden and Democrats have benefited from popular economic legislation but show some vulnerability on culturally divisive issues. As former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it on his podcast in May: “The path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said this month that he will get the “political apparatus involved so we can make sure there’s not a single school board member who supports critical race theory.” Political action committees have been set up dedicated to the cause.

The clashes at school board meetings and online are partly anchored in “real differences” in parents’ opinions on Covid-19, race and America’s future, said Jeffrey Henig, director of the politics and education program at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

“But it's being exploited by actors at the national level,” he said, “who see it as an opportunity to reshuffle the politics of the standard educational reform debate.”

A movement is launched
The origin of one of the largest groups targeting school boards can be traced back to last June, when many educators began looking for ways to teach students about the protests following George Floyd’s murder, and reposition how American history is taught.

When the Gladwyne Elementary School in the suburbs of Philadelphia decided to teach students about the concepts of racism, privilege and justice during the last week of classes, Elana Yaron Fishbein, a mother of two students in the school, sprang into action.

Fishbein, a former social worker, sent a letter to the superintendent calling the lessons a “plan to indoctrinate the children into the 'woke’ culture.” She said the superintendent never responded, though the district later said that the lesson plans were age-appropriate and did not shame students and that parents were allowed to opt out. Fishbein said other white parents in the district attacked her on Facebook when she shared her letter.

So Fishbein moved her children to private school and started a group to advocate against anti-racist teaching. She called it No Left Turn in Education.

“The schools have been hijacked,” she said in an interview. “Our kids are captive audiences. And they think they can do whatever they want with our kids.”

Fishbein’s endeavor received a significant boost in September, when she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show. By the next day, No Left Turn’s Facebook page had shot up from fewer than 200 followers to over 30,000. The group now has 30 chapters in 23 states, a rapid expansion Fishbein credits to Carlson’s show.

“He launched our movements — he doesn't know it, but he did,” Fishbein said.

She said her nonprofit group, which is volunteer-driven and relies on small donations to cover promotional materials and legal fees, now fields requests from groups of parents, ranging from 50 people to more than 1,000, asking to get involved under No Left Turn’s umbrella. These local chapters are the “boots on the ground,” she said, confronting school administrators at board meetings and through records requests.

“We want to know, what are you teaching? What are you doing?” Fishbein said. “And it's exactly what I got: a lack of transparency. They don't want to answer.”

Elana Yaron Fishbein, founder of No Left Turn in Education.
Among the many people who reached out to Fishbein after her Tucker Carlson appearance were Jonathan O’Brien, a personal injury lawyer in New York who wanted to help, and Gabrielle Clark, a mother in Las Vegas who was upset that her biracial son had received a D-minus after refusing to participate in a mandatory sociology class where the teacher labeled certain identities as “oppressive.”

Fishbein connected them, and with O’Brien’s representation, Clark sued her son’s charter school in December, arguing it was a violation of her son’s privacy and free speech rights that the sociology teacher had asked students to disclose any disabilities, as well as their religious and sexual identities.

The charter school conceded in court filings that it did not let Clark’s son drop the class, but said no one had to disclose their identities and that his poor grade was due to his refusal to complete assignments. After the suit was filed, administrators agreed to expunge his grade for the class. The charter school’s CEO called the suit an “ill-intentioned” attack by activists on “any conversation about racism or slavery that paints aspects of our country’s past in a negative light.” The litigation is ongoing, and the district has asked that it be dismissed.

"Some people are treating it like a gold rush."

ATTORNEY JONATHAN O'BRIEN

The case garnered media attention on the right, and slowly, O’Brien said, more conservative advocacy groups became interested in these cases. He started SchoolhouseRights.org as a project of the International Organization for the Family, a conservative nonprofit group, to raise funds to take on more cases like Clark’s.

“Some people are treating it like a gold rush,” O’Brien said. “This is a new area where people think they can either become famous or make money on the issue, and they’re probably right.”

O’Brien later joined a coalition of attorneys focused on this cause, organized by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Rufo, who said he was in touch with then-President Donald Trump’s staff before he issued an executive order last September banning critical race theory’s use by federal agencies, promised in a March tweet to make critical race theory “toxic” in the public imagination. Rufo declined an interview request.

“The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Shared connections, shared strategies
The growth of school board-focused groups has coincided with a broader conservative effort to make critical race theory a national referendum on the discussion of race in America.

Throughout the winter, organizations like the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which produces model bills on Republican causes, held webinars that warned about the threat of teaching critical race theory.

Fishbein said she took part in a private briefing hosted by the Heritage Foundation in May that featured lawmakers from Idaho, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Texas and other states to discuss model legislation to block critical race theory. Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee have already advanced some form of a restriction, and 15 states have legislation pending. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment.

"Maybe they don’t know how to get it in the right hands, but we do."

NICOLE NEILY, FOUNDER OF PARENTS DEFENDING EDUCATION

As lawmakers proposed legislation targeting critical race theory this spring, more activist organizations similar to No Left Turn sprouted up, their memberships ballooning with exposure on conservative TV and streaming programs. Each group followed a similar pattern of providing toolkits for activism, teaching people how to file open-records requests and offering to help parents publicize what’s happening in their school districts.

“Maybe they don’t know how to get it in the right hands, but we do,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, said in March. “We know a lot of reporters, and we’re happy to share those things.”

Neily, who lives in the Washington metro area, started Parents Defending Education as a nonprofit group at the beginning of the year. She also runs Speech First, a nonprofit group that has sued universities over systems to combat racism that the group believes violate free speech rights, and she had previously worked at conservative groups such as the Cato Institute and FreedomWorks.

Parents Defending Education aims to teach parents how to become activists, Neily has said, but the group is also playing an active role. It has filed civil rights complaints against schools in Massachusetts for creating an affinity space for students of color after a string of attacks on Asians, and against districts in Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio where administrators pledged to dismantle racism in their schools. She said during a webinar last month that she wants school administrators who take these steps to “know there will be consequences.”

Neily did not answer emailed requests for comment and hung up when reached by phone.

Though the political action committees and nonprofit groups will eventually disclose financial information, in most cases this hasn’t happened yet, so it’s unclear how much money this fight has drawn. Southlake Families PAC, organized around a school board battle in a wealthy Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, raised more than $215,000 as of April 21, according to finance reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission. That doesn't include more than $100,000 raised by two PAC-backed school board candidates who successfully ran on a platform of stopping the district's Cultural Competence Action Plan.

There’s no shortage of free publicity for the cause. The conservative focus on critical race theory is pervading right-wing news publications, like Fox News and Breitbart, which covered the issue in as many as 750 articles per week in May, according to Dominik Stecuła, a political science professor at Colorado State University.

The topic is also the focus of “consistent discussion” in local GOP Facebook groups, where 2 percent of all Facebook posts from local parties mentioned critical race theory in May, climbing to 3.6 percent so far in June, according to Kevin Reuning, an assistant professor of political science at Miami University, who tracks political Facebook posts. That’s about the same as the share of posts mentioning antifa in the groups following the U.S. Capitol riot, when conservative groups were falsely blaming the far-left collection of orchestrating the Jan. 6 attack.

Activists swarm school board meetings
As a result of this movement, school boards are now facing an influx of lawsuits and records requests that can cost money and time that are in short supply, as well as public meetings that have become a sounding board for a variety of far-right causes.

“The thing that disturbs me the most about politicizing school boards is there is no mention of kids. It’s not community centered, it’s centered on political thought and theory and things that don't connect to education,” said Sonja McKenzie, a member of the board of directors of the National School Boards Action Center, which advocates for public education. “The things that have been politicized — reopening schools, mask wearing, critical race theory — a lot of these are above and beyond the purview of what you do as school boards.”

In Nevada, Washoe County’s school board halted in-person meetings in April, after residents filled a large auditorium and lobbed insults and threats of violence during the public comment portion. Meetings opened to the public again in May, in a small office where only a few speakers can be present at a time.

Undeterred, hundreds of conservative activists and local residents, many without children in the district, according to their public testimony, waited in the Reno sun until their names were called to speak out against critical race theory and the board’s recent adoption of a student-led anti-discrimination resolution.

“This is an opportunity for what I feel like I've been screaming from the rooftops about,” said Karen England, executive director for Nevada Family Alliance, a conservative nonprofit group known for its efforts to end Drag Queen Story Hour at local libraries. The group recently proposed placing body cameras on teachers to ensure they aren’t teaching critical race theory.

During the most recent meeting, which lasted 11 hours, speakers railed at school board members, calling them Marxists, racists, Nazis and child abusers, among other epithets.

Kristen De Haan, the mother of a senior in a district high school, said she attends the meetings in support of an expanded social justice curriculum and LGBTQ-inclusive sex education.

“I don’t always agree with the board by any stretch of the imagination,” De Haan, who is white, said. “But listening to the anger, and what truly feels like hatred, and Martin Luther King being taken out of context over and over again, it’s really hard. I definitely get glares when I go up and speak. It's uncomfortable, but I feel it's important to be out there.”

Other school boards face less explosive — but in some ways just as disruptive — pushback by parents.

In South Kingstown, Rhode Island, the parent of an incoming kindergartener submitted over 200 public records requests in two months, seeking copies of middle and high school curricula, lists of all books related to gender available in the library and 10 years worth of harassment complaints and emails. The district said it would take 300 hours to compile all of the records requested.

Timothy Ryan, executive director of the Rhode Island School Superintendents' Association, called the onslaught of records requests an effort “to shut the system down.”

“I believe their intent is really to have the public lose confidence in public education,” he said. “There was the ‘war on Christmas,’ and now everybody is teaching critical race theory. I think you'd be hard pressed to find five people in the state who could even define that.”

'Just the tip of the iceberg’
Back in Cumberland, Maine, the situation has escalated. After McBreairty became even more certain the school was pushing critical race theory, he filed a public records request that revealed the school had paid over $12,000 to a nonprofit called Community Change Inc. for diversity and equity training for the school’s staff.

McBreairty then filed at least 53 more records requests, according to the school district’s superintendent, and said on a GoFundMe page that Maine’s freedom of information law is “your most powerful weapon.” Fishbein said No Left Turn paid for some of McBreairty's court costs and records requests.

On May 26, McBreairty sent an email to Porter, the superintendent, and the school board with links to coverage of his crusade, plus a list of demands, including that Porter publicly apologize for a letter denouncing white supremacy sent by the equity committee a year ago. McBreairty copied a producer for Fox News and two Daily Wire reporters.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg on media coming your way and national support aligned with our cause to fight CRT,” he wrote. The next day, McBreairty appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

But McBreairty’s efforts have run into problems with authorities. Last week, McBreairty was charged by the local police department with “improper influence,” after he allegedly threatened to release a recording between himself and the deceased father of school board chair Tyler McGinley if McGinley didn’t resign.

“My hope is that this summons is a reality check on his behavior,” said McGinley, who is unclear if the recording truly exists. “I wanted to make sure that if the harassment was going to continue to happen, it wouldn’t happen to other people.”

When asked about the recording that led to the charge, McBreairty didn’t deny that he’d threatened to release it. He said in a text message that he had “more info on Tyler [McGinley] that would provide a lot of context as to why MSAD51 is teaching Critical Race Theory doctrines.” The charge is pending with the district attorney.

Ann Maksymowicz, the school board member whose face appeared on McBreairty's booby-trapped billboard, said the media attention has been overwhelming. The critical race theory debate became a central issue of last week’s school board race, with Maksymowicz facing calls to resign. Instead, she won re-election.

Porter said he was “surprised by how much hate can be generated by a small group of people in the community” who he says have equated equity initiatives with critical race theory.

“For people who are not in agreement, they're using the word ‘equity’ and saying, ‘There you are, you're teaching CRT!’ And then equity becomes a horrible thing that we're doing,” Porter said.

“I feel like the district in some ways has gotten used — almost held hostage — by this national ideology or national movement, that says we're all teaching CRT, and we're all trying to indoctrinate kids.”

Porter said the battle is far from over. It “is kind of a black cloud hanging over the district,” he said.
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Cuddles said:
Rufo described his strategy to oppose critical race theory as intentionally using the term to conflate various left-wing race-related ideas in order to create a negative association.[9] Rufo said that "[w]e will eventually turn [critical race theory] toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.'"[10] Rufo has described intersectionality as "a hard left academic theory that reduces people to a network of racial, gender and sexual orientation identities and intersect in complex ways and determine whether you are an oppressor or oppressed."[9] According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, an influential figure in critical race theory, what Rufo and Republicans "are calling critical race theory is a whole range of things, most of which no one would sign on to, and many of the things in it are simply about racism."[8]

Through interviews with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Rufo reportedly influenced the Donald Trump administration to issue an executive order to prohibit federal agencies from having diversity training that addressed topics such as systemic racism, white privilege and critical race theory.[8][2][18] The administration described it as "divisive, anti-American propaganda."[18] The ban was revoked by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.[2][18] The fight then continued at the state level, with Republican legislators putting forward bans on Critical Race Theory.[19] He has appeared multiple times on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle.[20][21][22] According to New Yorker writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Rufo's story on racially divided bias-training sessions in Seattle was a “phenomenon” that “helped to generate more leaks from across the country” about the contents of courses and diversity training programs.[8]

According to the Washington Post and Snopes, Rufo has misrepresented the contents of diversity training programs and course curricula.[9][23] For example, Rufo claimed that a 33-page document posted on the Treasury Department website “told employees essentially that America was a fundamentally white supremacist country,” though the document referred only to a writer who “asserts virtually all White people, regardless of how 'woke’ they are, contribute to racism.”.[9] Rufo has also claimed that a course curriculum in California called on students to honor the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and to commit “countergenocide” against white Christians, which the curriculum did not do.[23]
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Cuddles said:
If you had "policy by FOX surrogates" in you Bingo card, collect your prize.

ttps://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/910053496/trump-tells-agencies-to-end-trainings-on-white-privilege-and-critical-race-theor

In a letter to federal agencies Friday, the director of the Office of Management and Budget said the president recently became aware of the racial sensitivity programs, which encourage frank conversations about race in the workplace and discuss potential actions to combat systemic racism.

Citing "press reports" of training sessions at which employees were allegedly told "virtually all white people contribute to racism," Vought wrote that these sorts of trainings perpetuate misguided views and contribute to racial division. It was not clear which specific agencies or training sessions he was referring to.

Racial sensitivity training has long been conducted on college campuses and across much of corporate America. It's unclear how long they've been going on at federal agencies. But their existence has gotten more attention in conservative circles in recent months.

One of the more prominent critics, Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the conservative Discovery Institute,argued on Fox News this week that Trump should end the programs immediately.

"It's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government," Rufo told host Tucker Carlson. "What I have discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people."

On Saturday, Trump retweeted Rufo's appearance on Fox, arguing that diversity training is a threat to American unity. In response to a person who wrote that "critical race theory is the greatest threat to western civilization and it's made its way into the US federal government," Trump responded: "Not any more!" In another tweet, Trump called critical race theory "a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue."
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Cuddles · Aug 1, 2023

Cuddles said:
on the road to privatization....

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https://prospect.org/education/02-22-2023-desantis-education-teacher-vacancies/
Who Wants to Teach in Florida?
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s culture warmongering has helped produce the highest teacher vacancy rates in the country.

BY LUCA GOLDMANSOUR FEBRUARY 23, 2023
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desantis 02222023.png
KYLE MAZZA/NURPHOTO VIA AP

Gov. Ron DeSantis wants Florida’s K-12 educators to do as they’re told. On top of low pay, difficulties in securing long-term contracts, the stress of high-stakes testing, and increases in student mental health issues, public school teachers must stick to the governor’s conservative script or risk being fired. That script includes the Parental Rights in Education Act, colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, the Stop WOKE Act, and the recent statewide ban on College Board’s Advanced Placement African American studies curriculum.

These developments have contributed to the highest teacher vacancy rate in the country by creating a climate of paranoia that has exasperated many teachers, chased others out of the profession entirely, and deterred aspiring educators. Culture-war turmoil combined with the pandemic era’s tight labor market means that Florida and most Deep South states have struggled to recruit teachers. When the far-right Republican became governor in 2019, there were 2,217 vacant teacher positions in Florida. As of early January, there were about 5,300 openings statewide, with an additional 4,631 support staff openings (excluding Miami-Dade County), the Florida Education Association told the Prospect.

In 2022, Florida allocated an additional $250 million over the previous fiscal year to increase teacher salaries. While the funding boosted the base salary for new teachers to $47,500, the pay increase for experienced teachers did not even cover cost-of-living increases. Overall, the pay raise bumped the state up from 49th to 48th in average teacher pay nationwide, according to the National Education Association. DeSantis has proposed $200 million in more funding for teacher pay in his fiscal 2023-2024 budget, which according to the FEA, will hardly move the needle. “Pay in the third-largest state can and should rank in the top 10 nationally,” FEA President Andrew Spar said in a statement.

Florida’s vacancy issue has its roots in the state’s decades-long role as a laboratory for the right’s assault on public education, with its Republican governors playing key parts. Former Gov. Jeb Bush made school choice and high-stakes standardized testing his signature issues in the 2000s, before his brother President George W. Bush took “reforms” like the No Child Left Behind Act to the White House. DeSantis’s predecessor, Rick Scott, now the state’s junior senator, also expanded charter schools and voucher programs while chipping away at long-term contracts for teachers. But DeSantis has not only built on his predecessors’ devotion to privatization and exploitative salaries, he has also squelched teaching, learning, and productive dialogues on American history, race, and gender.

The teacher shortages exhaust the remaining educators, and buttress DeSantis’ conservative takeover of public-school curriculums by whittling down institutional resistance to his culture-war inspired edicts. Educators are “frustrated to the point where they don't have a sense of hope anymore,” said Steve Frazier, Executive Director of the Florida League of Middle Schools, who worked as a teacher and principal in Broward County for over three decades. “It’s like anything, you keep getting beat down, eventually you just wave the white flag and say I can't do it anymore.”

Tawanda Carter, a literacy coach in Broward County for 23 years, took a classroom position this year because of the shortages. To support her students in the long run, Carter realized that she must pick and choose her battles to avoid burnout, especially when a parent objects to certain topics like learning about the experiences of other racial and ethnic groups. “At the end of the day, I recognize in myself and others that you just do what you can do,” she says.

Teacher vacancies also give DeSantis and Florida state lawmakers an opportunity to seed schools with instructors whom they believe would be more amenable to far-right positions. Under Florida’s Military Veterans Certification Pathway program, which came into effect on July 1 of last year, veterans with at least four years of service, an honorable or medical discharge, 60 college credits, and a minimum 2.5 GPA can apply for a temporary teaching certificate after passing a subject-area exam of their choice.

Florida teachers should have the leeway to design appropriate lesson plans for their students and not be shackled to politically imposed curriculums.

New teachers hired under the program are assigned a mentor teacher for at least two years, and will have five years to fulfill the requirements for permanent certification, including obtaining a bachelor’s degree. Many experienced educators worry that the program will not help fill vacancies but instead lower the standards for people entering the profession. DeSantis has also proposed offering bonuses to veterans and retired first responders who agree to teach full-time for at least two years. Such recruitment drives are a disservice to veterans and first responders seeking second careers, as well as to current students and teachers. The state has processed hundreds of applications, but only twelve veterans have been hired so far, the Florida Department of Education told the Prospect.

Herman Bennett, a historian of the African diaspora at the City University of New York, helped the College Board draft the African American Studies AP curriculum. He says the Florida moves remind him that fifty years ago a teacher’s credentials were irrelevant for some schools. “It's reminiscent of what history teaching once was in my generation, there was the idea that the historian could be the football coach,” he says. “Because it really didn't matter. You could have a knucklehead who was responsible for the civics course.”

For Bennett, DeSantis’s rejection of the College Board’s African American studies course signals the debasing of teaching and learning loud and clear. “If the AP course was simply Black names, dates and facts, DeSantis wouldn’t have a concern about it because that would just produce an inert and passive citizen.” Bennett said. “Afro-American studies demonstrate that there are histories of struggle, and if you don’t have those understandings, then you see the possibility of change as limited.”

With the College Board caving into DeSantis’s demands, the state’s educators can only do so much to get around these obstacles. By removing African American and other racial, ethnic, and gender studies topics from public school curriculums, and diluting discussions of contemporary issues like Black Lives Matter, another Republican governor is once again trying to export new limitations on learning across the country. Florida teachers should have the leeway to design appropriate lesson plans for their students and not be shackled to politically imposed curriculums. Stifling creativity in classroom instruction ultimately means that teachers can only teach exactly what they are told to teach and nothing more—if they decide to stay in the profession at all.
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shocking!!

Cuddles · Aug 9, 2023

Using CRT logic of "making the kids feel bad", FL book ban puts Shakespeare on the chopping block:

Cuddles · Aug 10, 2023

Cuddles said:
shocking!!

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Cuddles · Aug 19, 2023

GWB, having championed African American studies opposition, sees tables turned.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/arkansas-african-american-studies
Critical race theory; teachers fight back:

Cuddles · Aug 31, 2023

gwb-trading said:

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GWB relishes the destruction of institutions of higher learning on made up CRT hysterics:

Cuddles · Sep 23, 2023

By GWB anti-CRT logic, Anne Frank made whiteys feel bad:

Cuddles · Sep 24, 2023

Thanks parents for your "fight":

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/desantis-florida-education/