Please, don’t make make America Florida! Fascism starts with book censorship. In this case, a world history must remove his personal books because they are not on the state’s approved list. A book without an ISBN number can’t be in the list. We may assume that The Constitution, the Bible, and The Federalist Papers do not have ISBN numbers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This dedicated teacher’s HIGH ALERT 🚨 is beyond sad and frightening.
Cooperate or being fired & a career damaged and lost.
#TeachingInFlorida
Today Florida, tomorrow the Nation!
Hearing knee-high black boots marching and goose-stepping
along cobblestone streets
and BOE knocking at our classroom doors.
Where to go?
“Fascism rests on four pillars of charismatic leadership, Single party rule under dictator, terror and economic control,” according to some scholars.
DeSantis lacks charisma, thank God, but he does have an unyielding, iron fist. He is hyper-partisan. He vilifies Democrats and would not meet with Biden even though he was offering support for Florida residents suffering from the impact of Hurricane Idalia. We have all witnessed the terror and economic control he has foisted on public education. He has stripped school boards of most powers. Instead of using librarians to help students, DeSantis is tying them up in an unreasonable, gargantuan task so he can censor reading material in public schools. It is all part of his plan to control that which he despises.
DeSantis is never the bigger man. That would be Joe Biden who knows how to conduct himself like a statesman. DeSantis is always the smaller, self-serving, mean-spirited tyrant. DeSantis is unfit to lead this nation. He is simply another con man.
It’s easy to see that DeSantis has the makings of a dictator. He doesn’t believe in democracy. I once saw a comment where he boasted that the Democratic Party in Florida was “road kill.” His goal is a one-party state with no dissent.
Time for some collective disobedience. Find the list of banned books. Organize “shelve-in’s” where teachers deliberately place banned books on their shelves. Invite the news. Get arrested.
Most of my English teaching compatriots had extensive libraries. Asking for this type of oversight is both silly and unnecessary. Any student wanting to know about almost any perversion can access it on the net before FeSantis can say “liberal.”
GREAT idea.
Also you can do silent disobedience. Will anyone notice if you do not scan all the book? Really? Librarians have done this in the past when certain books were considered scandalous.
One good thing is that DeSantis has let everyone outside Florida know who he is.
And as a result,he will never be elected President.
He’s just another loser relegated to a long list of loser governors of Florida.
Florida’s professional real public-school teachers have a choice to make.
There’s a shortage of teachers across the country.
The oceans are rising.
The Atlantic is becoming hotter and that will cause more hurricanes, worse hurricanes than we may have ever experienced historically.
If voters do not vote out the MAGA fascists ruling Florida in 2024, that state may be lost for generations.
What are you waiting for, find a teaching job in a blue state and move.
Exit The Lone Neuron State and Terrorzona too
Quitting and breaking a contract is difficult – there are penalties and teaching license consequences. These punitive systems have all their bases covered and teachers often lose. This dedicated teacher, one who has bought and brought her private library to her classroom, should research quickly what her options are and school system consequences if she fights the system and FL BoE. I’ve seen teachers lose their license or get their license suspended for insubordination. Systems care if there are vacancies ONLY if teachers are compliant. Our great profession has suffered for decades and those who stand up to the oppressors, unless we’re highly UNIONIZED, will be hung at the town square.
Given this is FL, I would not encourage teachers to fight it. Plan your exit carefully and wisely. Educate yourself and protect your career. FL is too far gone and DeSantis would love to get his teeth into a dedicated public school teacher.
Wishing her a better future……when you love teaching,
love kids, we can bloom where ever we are planted. Choose your schools wisely! All our Best!
“I’ve seen teachers lose their license or get their license suspended for insubordination.”
Ah, the adminimals’ weapon of choice. . . insubordination. Anyone can be predetermined to be insubordinate by an adminimal. Seen it happen too many times. Didn’t stop me from challenging the adminimal horse manure though.
You suggest “I would not encourage teachers to fight it.” The definition of a GAGA Good German response. Candy-assed suggestion if I’ve ever seen one.
I pose these questions with hope for answers and brainstorming. (I really like the “shelve-in” idea!).
I cannot believe that majority of the adults (not just the school board election voting adults but all the adults) are ok with what is happening in Florida, Texas, and the wannabee states.
This is not rhetorical. Please. Thoughts?
The question is not why don’t they show up, it’s HOW.
HOW do we get everyday parents to speak up and show up by the thousands (and vote)?
Where are the parents of marginalized kids, gifted kids, queer kids, homophobic adults, staunch Republicans, flaming liberals, professors and physicians, pipefitters and plumbers… who have tolerated the things they don’t like about their schools – – maybe even complained – – and moved on for another day and year?
Where are the everyday, regular, normal, common sense parents?
Where are the, “Yeh, my kids’ school is far from perfect, stuff happens, but they work on it” parents.
Where are the helicopter parents?! Seriously!
Where are the parents who sued school districts for their kids’ rights (IDEA, Tinker, right to have religious clubs… and won) and they system worked.
Where are the parents who have complained and gotten a satisfactory or not satisfactory answer and moved on as did others who knew about (parent facebook pages)?
Schools and districts have been in the news forever from a stupid thing an adult does to embezzled funds – they are the “breaking news” sensationalized story and they get through and move on.
Stuff has been happening in schools for decades… the pendulum of satisfaction has swung all over the place. There were no hostile takeovers.
We know WHY they don’t show up. It’s NOT complacency or apathy. It’s they accept schools are not perfect, they sort of trust their schools, and they’ve said for decades “Oh that thing, they’ll figure it out.”
HOW do we get them to show up… and give Boards the confidence to shut down the Moms for Cleansing Schools.
Only a minority of folks have read any of the banned books. And they are young, hence powerless.
This upcoming week, I’m starting my Banned Books unit. I cannot wait!
awesome
Do not live there then!!!! Why do you care so much about Florida, why do you not care for the shithole states lilke new york which is now a third world country, california which is a disaster, chicago which is so murderous and wretched it is not even worth moving there . How about seattle these states are horrrendous.
Do you all think the black crackhead prostitute would have been better than Desantis? No chance!!!
Off your meds, again?
“Do not live there”
No need to worry about me living in— or even visiting or buying orange juice or produce from — Florida as long as The Great Loser (DeSantis) is Dicktator.
Gov. DeSkankis called. He needs you back on his team to prop up his single-digit poll numbers.
Single digit poll number
..and continuing to drop.
But DeSantis can take some consolation in knowing that his poll number can never go below a single digit, since 0 is also a single digit
In which case he would not just be a “loser” but a “l0ser” (loser spelled with a zero)
AKA, a “zer0ser”
Beggars Can’t be Choosers
DeSantis is a loser
As polling goes to zero
But beggar can’t be chooser
And surely not a hero
“ZeRon”
Ron is a zero
“ZeRon” for short
Ron is like Nero
Fiddler of sort
I totally agree if you do not like Florida and it’s policies and don’t live there it’s so simple some of us like living here and some of us like the rules please leave us alone you have 49 other states to choose from
I am just stunned.
While I certainly do not agree with — and am appalled by — the Florida dictate, I hate to see the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program in the bannerhead of this issue because it makes it appear that the AP program is somehow being victimized, and it helps to propagate the AP brand.
It’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff here. The Florida requirement – state law – is part of a larger effort by conservatives (Republicans) across the country to, as USA Today put it, “restrict learning and materials about controversial topics.” Or, in other words, topics that conservatives hate to talk about: racism, misogyny, equality, sedition, tolerance, democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, sex…..
The original law required a cataloging of all books in “a school library media center.” The DeSantis-controlled Florida DOE interpreted that broadly to include classrooms. The Republican legislature amended the law to say that a school library media center is
“any collection of books, ebooks, periodicals, or videos maintained and accessible on the site of a school, including in classrooms.”
As The Sarasota Herald Tribune reported in April of this year,
“The law, governing instructional materials for classes from kindergarten to 12th grade, passed last year and holds school districts responsible for the content of all materials used in a classroom, made available in a school library or included on a reading list. It requires each book in a school library to be certified by a media specialist and for a list of these materials to be available on school websites. The law took effect in January.”
This is incredibly cumbersome, especially for elementary school teachers who have large troves of books for their students. And if it reeks of conservative religious state-imposed censorship, that’s probably because it is. As ABC News (and other media) reported, “Books targeted by conservative groups were overwhelmingly written by or about people of color and LGBTQ people, according to anti-censorship researchers.”
All of this is worrisome. It’s dangerous territory.
But that does not mean that AP is the victim. Nor should it imply that AP is actually educationally beneficial for most students. As I’ve noted here previously, more colleges and universities are either refusing to accept AP test scores for credit, or they are limiting credit awarded only for a score of 5 on an AP test. The reason is that they find most students awarded credit for AP courses are just generally not well-prepared.
Dartmouth no longer gives credit for AP test scores. It found that 90 percent of those who scored a 5 on the AP psychology test failed a Dartmouth Intro to Psych exam. A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard.”
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006) Clifford Adelman scolded those who had misrepresented his original ToolBox research by citing the importance of AP “in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. Adelman said, “To put it gently, this is a misreading.” Moreover, in statistically analyzing the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”
College Board executives often say that if high schools implement AP courses and encourage more students to take them, then (1) more students will be motivated to go to college and (2) high school graduation rates will increase. There are educators who parrot the College Board line. Researchers Kristin Klopfenstein and Kathleen Thomas “conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims.”
Why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s a depraved stupid circle that has swept up parents, guidance counselors, administrators and school boards, teachers, and the general public – not to mention public education reporters – into the misbelief that “AP is better.” It isn’t.
One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school.”
What do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP courses and tests? For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see ‘DBQ’ ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.”
And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.”
Another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests:
And an AP reader (grader), related this about the types of essays he saw:
“I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”
The Florida law is clearly not in the interests of kids and learning. But AP ain’t necessarily all that either.
“is part of a larger effort by conservatives (Republicans)”
Those to whom you refer are not conservatives and probably are Republicans. They are reactionary xtian theofascists, of which I wouldn’t include old school conservative Republicans. Two separate beasts.
“And if it reeks of conservative religious state-imposed censorship, that’s probably because it is.”
You can leave out the “conservative”.
The definition of conservative is “the holding of political views that favor free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas.”
You can read here about the Republican coalitions and what they believe, but overall, they are conservative.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/the-republican-coalition/
Yes, Fascism is running ramped in Florida but Texas is right up there with Florida to see which is the most Fascist. Check out one the latest bills passed by Texas legislators and will be signed by the governor to rein in Judges that do not support their Fascism. Read at: https://kvia.com/news/texas/2023/08/31/774-new-texas-laws-go-into-effect-friday-here-are-some-that-will-affect-you/.
This means at least one gun-toting person in every Texan school. Failure to do so could result in a state takeover.
They’re literally using guns to destroy a school district’s autonomy.
Oh, and they’re only offering up $15K per school, plus $10 per student to “cover” the cost.
Outrageous on so many levels.
Why not just pass sensible gun laws?
To pass sensible gun laws would require a governor and legislators who are “sensible”, caring about the people they are supposed to serve, and have some common sense but common sense ain’t common, no sensibility in Texas leadership, and they don’t care about anyone but themselves.
Of course, this also applies to the leadership in Florida.
I totally agree if you do not like Florida and it’s policies and don’t live there it’s so simple some of us like living here and some of us like the rules please leave us alone you have 49 other states to choose from
No worry!!! No way in hell would like live in Florida. We, in other states, do to want a fascist person, like DeSantis, running for President of the United States. Nor, for the most part as noted during the last Presidential election, want some like Dictator Donald Trump, running for President. That is way we will not leave Florida alone.
Tell your goddamned* loser of a governor to leave LGBTQ’s, African Americans and migrants alone and maybe we will leave him alone.
and I mean that quite literally, cuz most of what he does goes against the teachings of Jesus Christ.
If I were supporting this fellow, I’d actually be concerned that I might be joining him in Hell for all eternity.
I see you have the same disorder that I had growing up. I did overcome it. . . generally speaking. . . but sometimes lapse back.
Run-on Sentence Disorder Syndrome! It can be overcome.
I believe that RoSDS will be included in the DSM-X.
The Constitution
– ISBN-10 : 1774260131
– ISBN-13 : 978-1774260135
The Bible
9781642728750
9781642725735
9781642728767
9781642728774
(among just a few)
The Federalist Papers
– ISBN-10 : 0486496368
– ISBN-13 : 978-0486496368