Greg Sergeant of the Washington Post reviews the decision in Florida to ban Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural poem, keeping it out of the reach of elementary age children. Librarians are just following orders, as DeSantis knew they would. He doesn’t need to name the books. Hyper-vigilant parents do his dirty work for him.
At this point, it should be obvious that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s culture-war directives are designed to encourage parents to indulge in book purges for sport. Precisely because removals have become so easy, lone right-wing actors are feverishly hunting for offending titles, getting them pulled from school libraries on absurdly flimsy grounds, sometimes by the dozens.
A new turn in the explosive saga involving the poem that Amanda Gorman read at President Biden’s inauguration underscores the point. DeSantis is now defending a Florida school’s decision to restrict access to “The Hill We Climb” — a move that has become a national controversy.
“It was a book of poems that was in an elementary school library,” DeSantis told a convention on Friday, though it was in fact one poem. DeSantis insisted the school district in question merely “moved it from the elementary school library to the middle school library,” and ripped “legacy media” for calling this a “ban,” complaining of a “poem hoax.”
That’s a shameless but revealing characterization of what happened. It’s true that Gorman’s poem was removed from the elementary school section of the library at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes and that access was preserved for middle school students. But this came in response to an objection from one parent.
The woman who complained about Amanda Gorman’s poem filled out a card. She thought the poem was written by Oprah Winfrey. She admitted that she had not read Gorman’s poem.
It turns out that Amanda Gorman’s poem is not freely available to students in middle school. As the Washington Post reported, a student must request it from a media specialist, then prove that they can read at a fifth-grade level. Otherwise it is restricted.
Imagine having to take a test to check out a book with one poem in it!
The reality of what DeSantis and Moms for Liberty are doing is now clear to everyone: With a combination of lies, misinformation and intimidation, they want to create an America where it’s easier for a white supremacist to ban a book than it is for a Black child to read a poem.
When Ron DeSantis launched his candidacy on Twitter, he scoffed at the notion that schools were banning books in Florida. That alone should disqualify him, based on what we have seen, heard and read about the state’s encouragement of banning books that refer to gays or racism. A complaint by a single parent is sufficient to get a book removed from the school library. Most recently, a parent at an elementary school complained about Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at President Biden’s inauguration. The poem is now available to middle school children, but not to those in the elementary school.
The Miami Herald published this editorial about the phenomenon that DeSantis says is non-existent, a hoax.
Perhaps it’s because of how Amanda Gorman alluded to the Jan. 6 attack in her famous poem, finished the night after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.”
Or maybe she wrote too bluntly about race and the legacy of slavery:
“We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.”
Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, read “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, watched by about 40 million people. She wrote the poem so “that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment,” she posted on Twitter Tuesday.
But Gorman’s poem is now deemed not age appropriate, one of four library titles Bob Graham Education Center banned, following a parent’s complaint, for elementary school students, the Herald reported. The books are now available only for middle-schoolers at the public school in Miami Lakes, even though some of them were written for younger children.
The school committee that reviewed the material didn’t offer an explanation for its decision. We’re left to wonder: What in the children’s illustrated book “The ABCs of Black History,” written for children ages 5 and up, made it so inappropriate?
Perhaps it was the mention of iconic author James Baldwin’s sexual orientation: “And he was a gay man who believed that when it comes to love, you should ‘go the way your blood beats.” Or the mention of the Little Rock Nine, the “first Black children in all-white schools,” or the Black Panther movement. Or were the colorful drawings of Black female icons like Michelle Obama and Toni Morrison — described as “ queens”— too much?
One thing is clear: Books by Black authors — and about the Black American experience — make up three of the four titles deemed inappropriate for young children at Bob Graham Education Center. The other one, “Cuban Kids,” uses photos to describe the lives of children in Cuba in the early 2000s and how different or similar they are to Americans, according to the author’s homepage. Learning about the lives of their counterparts in a socialist country — including how they got around paper shortages — is sure to turn our kids into communists.
We knew that the movement to “sanitize” school libraries that Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature unleashed would eventually catch up with Miami-Dade. Our melting pot, after all, might not be so different from Escambia County in the Panhandle, whose school board has been sued for removing books about race and LGBTQ topics.
Florida’s laws have emboldened parents and activists like Moms for Liberty to challenge materials dealing with these topics. Most recently, DeSantis signed a bill that empowers one person to file a complaint and ban a book, at least temporarily, while a district reviews it. Parents not satisfied with how a district ruled on the challenge can appeal to the state. That is bound to make schools acquiesce to offended parents.
The result, as Gorman wrote on Twitter after her poem was restricted, is that “most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves.”
Elementary students were not required to read Gorman’s work or any of the challenged titles. These were options at Bob Graham Education Center’s library. Those options also should be available for the children of all parents, not only those offended by certain content or groups skimming books to find any remote reference to race or LGBTQ issues.
“Love to Langston” was written at a second-grade reading level but no longer is accessible to second-graders at Bob Graham. The illustrated biography of Harlem Renaissancewriter Langston Hughes describes his own elementary school experience, tainted by racism, in the early 1900s:
“In Topeka, Kansas the teacher makes me sit in the corner; in the last row; far away; from the other kids.”
The parent who filed the complaint said “Love to Langston” contained critical race theory, “indirect hate messages,” gender ideology and indoctrination, the Herald reported. It’s unclear how.
It is curious, however, that “indoctrination” and “hate messages” seem to be flagged mostly when when Black authors write about being Black, or when LGBTQ authors write about being queer. The adults must ask themselves why that’s the case before making them inaccessible to children.
Memorial Day is a day to remember and pay tribute to the men and women who gave their lives to defend our democracy. Because of their sacrifice, we enjoy our freedoms. We are called upon not only to respect them and their sacrifices, but to be alert to today’s threats to the freedoms and rights we treasure. Voting rights are under attack. Censorship and book banning are on the rise. Red state legislatures are trying to control the blue cities in their midst. Red state legislatures are passing cookie-cutter laws to fund private and religious schools despite the opposition of the public. A woman’s right to control her body has been eliminated by red states. In a sad irony, the U.S. Supreme Court—which has long been the ultimate defender of our rights—is eroding democracy, under the control of rightwing ideologues, three of whom were appointed by Trump after being chosen by the extremist Federalist Society.
In that spirit, I post a comment by the polymath Bob Shepherd, who contributes his wisdom to us as a reader of the blog..
Pardon me, but this is so important that I want to make sure that I say the whole properly. So, some repetition here:
The Extreme Court decisions that just wiped out much of the power of the EPA to regulate air pollution (West Virginia v. EPA) and water pollution (Sackett v. EPA) in the United States are PART of an overall effort, begun in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, to ERASE much of the authority of the United States federal government on the basis of a NOVEL reinterpretation of the Constitution that ELIMINATES THE ABILITY OF THE EXECUTIVE TO EXERCISE UNENUMERATED POWERS–powers not SPECIFICALLY given it by the Constitution. This would reduce the federal government to a SHADOW of its former reach. Ron DeSantis just gave a speech in which he discussed precisely this, which he described as the necessity of “Reconstitutionalizing” our government:
“There’s a lot that the executive branch can do, and all I will say when it comes to these agencies… [is] buckle up when I get in there because the status quo is not acceptable, and we are going to make sure that we reconstitutionalize this government, and these agencies are totally out of control. There’s no accountability, and we are going to bring that in a very big way.”
In connection with this envisioned vast overhaul of U.S. governance, DeSantis made this chilling promise:
“Even my worst critics in Florida will acknowledge when I tell people I’m going to do something, I don’t make promises or say I’m going to do something lightly.”
Here’s what I think is happening: Repugnican leaders have recognized that if Jabba the Trump wins the nomination, they will lose again. So, the current plan is to remove Trump by standing aside and letting the judicial process do that for them via the various cases now pending against the Orange Idiot. That way, they can take him out of the picture while not alienating the Trumpanzees from themselves–they can blame the fall of the Glorious Leader on some Deep State conspiracy led by Biden. Then, DeSantis will assume the Orange mantle and carry forward, in the Executive branch, the agenda that the Reich-wing cabal at the head of the Judicial branch has set for itself. (NB: the Orange Idiot Trump was extremely useful to The Federalist Society because he, knowing nothing himself, simply rubber stamped putting those people in place–the ones now reenvisioning U.S. government entirely).
It is worth remembering in this regard that the revolution in Germany that scuttled democratic government there and put the Fascists under Hitler in power took place BY LEGAL MEANS. And so the history we haven’t learned from repeats itself. Couple this legal implementation of the no unenumerated powers theory with the independent state legislature theory also being endorsed by the Extreme Court (a theory that holds that state legislatures, which are predominately Repugnican, can hold do-overs if they don’t like election results) and you get the recipe for the end of democracy and the onset of Fascist governance in the United States.
This is how these traitors overthrow democratic government. In the background, not via some sort of January 6th event.
Carol Burris is the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education. She watched Secretary Cardona testify before various committees and was chagrined to see how ill-informed he was. She called to tell me what he said, and I was appalled by how poorly informed he was.
Why does he know so little about the defects of vouchers? Why has no one in the Department told him that most students who take vouchers are already enrolled in private and religious schools? Why has no one told him about the dismal academic performance of students who leave public schools to use a voucher? I suggest that his chief of staff invite Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University to brief the Secretary; clearly, no one in the Department has.
Why is he so ill-informed about the meaning of NAEP scores? How can he not know that “proficient” on NAEP is not grade level? Why does he not know that NAEP proficient represents solid academic performance? Why has no one told him that he is using fake data?
Why is he not speaking out loud and clear against vouchers, armed with facts and data? Why is he not speaking out against privatization of public schools? Why is he not speaking out against censorship? Why is he not speaking out against the Dark Money-funded astroturf groups like “Moms for Liberty,” whose main goal is smearing public schools? Why is the Federal Charter Schools Program still funding charter chains that are subsidized by billionaires?
He is a mild-mannered man, to be sure, but now is not the time to play nice when the enemies of public schools are using scorched earth tactics and lies. Now is the time for a well-informed, fearless voice to speak up for students, teachers, principals, and public schools. Now is the time to defend the nation’s public schools against the nefarious conspiracy to defame and defund them. Not with timidity, but with facts, accuracy, bold words, and actions.
Carol Burris writes:
Secretary of Education Cardona is a sincere and good man who cares about children and public education. However, his appearances before Congress to defend the Biden education budget have been serious disappointments. The Republican Party is now clearly on a mission to destroy public education. He must recognize the threat and lead with courage and facts. Unfortunately, he seems more interested in deflecting arguments and placating voucher proponents than facing the assault on public education head-on.
During the April 18 budget hearing, the Republicans, who now control the committee, had four objectives: to slash education funding, to score political points at the expense of transgender students, to support vouchers, and to complain that student loan forgiveness was unfair.
Although the Secretary pushed back on all four, his arguments were at times disappointingly uninformed. Whenever asked about proposed policies regarding including transgender students in sports, his responses were evasive and robotic. He objected to vouchers because they reduced funding for public schools but never mentioned that vouchers result in publicly funded discrimination. Overall, he missed valuable opportunities to seize the opportunity to lead with moral courage in defense of children, democracy, and public education.
Shortly into the discussion, the Secretary argued the case against budget cuts by disparaging the performance of our public schools and their students. He called NAEP reading levels “appalling” and “unacceptable,” falsely claiming that only 33% of students are reading at “grade level.”
As Diane explained in her blog on April 19, Secretary Cardona is flat-out wrong. As described on the website of the National Center for Education Statistics:
“It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).”
He could have made far better (and more honest) arguments for why the budget should not be cut. A wealth of research shows the connection between funding and student performance. He could have explained how Title I funds help close the gap between resource-rich and resource-poor districts. He could have argued how important a well-educated citizenry is in preserving our democracy. Instead, he kept repeating that a “tsunami of jobs” was coming as though the only purpose of schooling was job training.
Later on, Secretary Cardona defended the budget by citing the teacher shortage. However, he pivoted and argued that we did not have a teacher shortage problem but rather a “teacher respect problem,” with no explanation regarding how his budget would address that.
I cringed when he said, “Research shows that the most influential factor in a child’s success is the teacher in front of the classroom.” No, Mr. Secretary, that is not what research shows. Research consistently shows that out-of-school factors like poverty far more influence variations in children’s academic outcomes than in-school factors. This is not to say that teacher quality does not matter—it is the most important in-school factor, but outside factors are more influential.
Sadly, Secretary Cardona’s incorrect assertion harkens back to Race to the Top thinking, resulting in ineffective and unpopular policies such as evaluating teachers by student test scores. Much like his inaccurate remarks about NAEP scores, he used an argument from the Republican playbook–public schools and teachers are failing America’s students.
When he was recently grilled by the Education and Workforce committee on whether he favors vouchers, he still would not confront the issue head-on, repeating that he used school choice to go to a vocational high school. When pressed, he responded, “What I’m not in favor of, sir, is using dollars intended to elevate or raise the bar, as we call it, public school programming, so that the money goes to private school vouchers. What happens is, we’re already having a teacher shortage; if you start taking dollars away from the local public school, those schools are going to be worse.”
Vouchers indeed drain funding from public schools, but there are far more compelling reasons to oppose them, beginning with their ability to discriminate in admissions. A 2010 study published by his own department showed that 22% of students who got a SOAR voucher never used it. The top reasons included: no room in the private school, the school could not accommodate the child’s special needs, and the child did not pass the admissions test or did not want to be “left back.” Schools choose—an aspect of school choice that voucher proponents ignore.
And he allowed Aaron Bean of Florida to cite 2011 SOAR graduation statistics from the American Heritage Foundation about the DC voucher program without challenging him with the findings of a 2019 Department of Education study of SOAR that showed voucher student declines in math scores and no improvement in reading when they move to a private school. The overwhelming majority of voucher students use them in the early years, making graduation rate comparisons a less meaningful statistic. Interestingly, the 2010 study found that students often left the SOAR system because there was no room for them in high schools. More than half of all voucher students who take a voucher do not continue in the SOAR voucher system.
Was the Secretary poorly briefed? Or did he believe he would win over Republican committee members by using their arguments when defending the President’s budget?
Either way, one can only hope that when he meets with the Senate, he is better prepared and dares to say that public money belongs in public schools that educate every child. We need a Secretary of Education that is willing to stand up, push back and use facts to dispute the Republican narrative that American education is broken, not a Secretary who reinforces it.
Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles reviewed the debut of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign on Twitter, accompanied by Elon Musk. DeSantis boasted about the glory of debate and free speech, which he has done his best to stifle in Florida. And he adamantly denied that there was any book banning in his state, despite the fact that PEN America says that Florida is number two in the most books banned, behind Texas. The guy rules Florida with an iron hand, suppressing the teaching of history he doesn’t like, demonizing drag queens and anything LGBT, and encouraging vigilante censorship.
Column: Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk give us a preview of the chaos of a DeSantis presidency
Elon Musk hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Twitter for DeSantis’ announcement of his presidential candidacy. It went about as well as the April 20 launch of a rocket by Musk’s SpaceX, which ended in an explosion that destroyed the spacecraft.
I was taking my customary siesta Wednesday afternoon when I was jolted awake by the sound of a truck straining to go uphill. Come to discover that I had my computer tuned to Elon Musk’s Twitter, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was struggling to get out the official announcement of his candidacy for president.
The noise turned out to be Musk trying to get the thing to work in real time, amid feedback, weird musical interludes and long stretches of silence. Scheduled to start at 3 p.m. Pacific time, it finally got going on Twitter Spaces, an audio-only application on the platform, about 18 minutes late. I listened, so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.
As he struggled to resolve repeated glitches in Twitter Spaces, Musk and the moderator, a Musk acolyte named David Sacks, kept trying to assert that the technical screw-up was, in fact, a triumph brought about by the large audience. (Sacks claimed that more than 300,000 users had logged in.) “We are melting the servers, which is a good sign,” Sacks said early on.
This reminded many listeners of the claim by SpaceX, another Musk venture, that its April 20 launch of a prototype rocket, which ended with the vehicle exploding in flight four minutes after lift-off, was a success. Never mind that the launch destroyed the launchpad, showered a neighboring community with debris and prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to mount a major investigation.
Once it got underway, the Twitter event unfolded as a love fest between DeSantis and Musk. The general theme was what my mother used to describe as “I like me, who do you like?”
Musk and DeSantis praised each other for their dedication to free speech, and Sacks brought on several right-wing sophists to add their voices. They included Jay Bhattacharya, one of the drafters of the Great Barrington Declaration, which, as I reported this week, advocated letting the COVID virus run rampant through the population in quest of the elusive goal of “herd immunity” — at the cost (thus far) of more than 1.13 million American lives.
Another was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), whose claim to fame on a national scale was issuing a Christmas tweet in 2021 showing himself, his wife and their five kids brandishing assault weapons. “Santa, pls bring ammo,” the tweet read. (In December 2021, there were 39 mass shootings in the U.S., taking 36 lives and wounding 160.)
DeSantis said Florida was safer than blue-state cities, where “you got kids more likely to get shot than to receive a first-class education.” A reminder: One of the worst school shootings in American history took place in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018, when 17 people were killed and 17 injured. In April, DeSantis signed a law allowing Floridians to carry guns without a permit.
It would be wrong to say there weren’t some lighthearted moments during the Twitter event. Unfortunately for DeSantis, the best joke came from President Biden: While Musk was struggling to get the event launched, Biden posted a tweet that read, “This link works,” pointing to a fund-raising site for the Biden-Harris campaign.
If you were looking for policy prescriptions from the freshly minted candidate, you didn’t hear anything new. Put it this way: If you were at a party where you had to down a shot of whiskey every time DeSantis uttered the word “woke,” you were reduced to insensibility within ten or twenty minutes. If the drinking game included a shot when DeSantis took a shot at “the legacy media,” you may have needed to get your stomach pumped.
Other than that, it was a festival of cynical lies and rank hypocrisies uttered by DeSantis.
He spoke up for free speech and open debate, for instance. “People should be exposed to different viewpoints,” he said. “You can’t have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that are affecting our civilization.”
This is the guy who has waged a ferocious battle with Walt Disney Co. because Disney had spoken out against his “Don’t Say Gay” law, which stifles the teaching of gender issues in the schools.
When Sacks primed him with a question about the fight with Disney, DeSantis replied, “We believe jamming gender ideology in elementary school is wrong; Disney obviously supported injecting gender ideology in elementary school.” He added that Disney’s “corporate culture had really been outed as trying to inject matters of sex into the programming for the youth.” One doesn’t have to be a fan of Disney to see that as fatuous claptrap.
DeSantis also dismissed accusations that Florida is a hotbed of book-banning as “a hoax.” All his administration has done, he said, has been “to empower parents with the ability to review the curriculum, to know what books are being used in school.” That’s one way of looking at it.
The right way is to observe that he’s empowered a tiny cadre of reactionary activists to force books they don’t like off the shelves of Florida schools. As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, a majority of the complaints about schoolbooks nationwide have come from just 11 complainants. Florida ranks second among the states in the number of schoolbook challenges, after Texas.
By the way, one of the Republican toadies DeSantis appointed to the board created to oversee Disney’s development district (as part of his retaliation against the company) is Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the right-wing censorship-happy organization Moms for Liberty.
When Bhattacharya came online, DeSantis took the opportunity to boast about his success against the COVID pandemic. The truth is that Florida’s record is one of abject, lethal failure. Florida’s COVID death rate of 411 per 100,000 population is the 10th worst in the nation. DeSantis has appointed Bhattacharya to a state panel investigating federal COVID policy.
DeSantis claimed to have based his COVID policies on his determination to “look at the data…. There was a concerted effort to try to stifle dissent.” This can only be interpreted as some kind of gag. DeSantis installed a COVID crackpot, Joseph Ladapo, as Florida’s surgeon general.
Ladapo has promoted useless anti-COVID nostrums such as ivermectin, and counseled against the COVID vaccines. “Looking at the data”? As the Tampa Bay Times has reported, based on official state documents, Ladapo deliberately removed data from an official state report on the vaccines that contradicted his claim that the vaccines were unsafe for young men; in fact, studies show that the vaccines are far safer for them than being infected by the virus.
The event ended with a paean by Musk and DeSantis to cryptocurrency, which is tantamount to enticing innocent small investors into immolating their nest eggs in a scam.
“We should do it again,” DeSantis said in closing the feed. “We’ll make sure that we come back and do it again. This is a great platform.”
We shall see. The next DeSantis appearance on Twitter could be just as buggy, or worse. All that we can be sure of is that whatever happens, Elon Musk will deem it a great success.
NPR reported on a warning issued by the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the NAACP. Travelers should avoid Florida, where there is a pervasive air of bigotry and easy access to guns. The warning nearly coincided with Ron DeSantis’ declaration of his campaign, on a media platform with billionaire Elon Musk. DeSantis will tout his record of stern opposition to migrants, gays, drag queens, transgender people, Black history, and his unwavering support for censorship and guns.
ORLANDO, Fla. — The NAACP over the weekend issued a travel advisory for Florida, joining two other civil rights groups in warning potential tourists that recent laws and policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”
The NAACP, long an advocate for Black Americans, joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization, and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group, in issuing travel advisories for the Sunshine State, where tourism is one of the state’s largest job sectors.
The warning approved Saturday by the NAACP’s board of directors tells tourists that, before traveling to Florida, they should understand the state of Florida “devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”
Florida is one of the most popular states in the U.S. for tourists, and tourism is one of its biggest industries. More than 137.5 million tourists visited Florida last year, marking a return to pre-pandemic levels, according to Visit Florida, the state’s tourism promotion agency. Tourism supports 1.6 million full-time and part-time jobs, and visitors spent $98.8 billion in Florida in 2019, the last year figures are available.
DeSantis’s efforts to exclude migrants may hurt Florida more than the boycott. Will the tourism industry have the staff it needs for hotels and restaurants? Will the agricultural industry have enough laborers to pick crops?
DeSantis’s war on teaching accurate, factual history about American history, his demands for book banning, and his support for vouchers for every student in the state, even those already in private schools, degrades education and intelligence in Florida.
DeSantis is running on a platform of hate, bigotry, and disunity. Let’s see how that plays.
I served on the governing board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for seven years. I was appointed by President Clinton. I learned quite a lot about standardized testing during that time. I enjoyed reading test questions and finding a few that had two right answers. Two subjects where I felt confident as a reviewer, in addition to reading, were history and civics.
I was momentarily dismayed, but not surprised, to learn that the NAEP scores in history and civics had declined, as they had in reading and math, after the disruptions and closings caused by the pandemic. This is not surprising, because fewer days of instruction translates into less learning.
So we know for sure that instructional time matters. You can’t learn what you weren’t taught.
But on second thought, I realized that in these days it is almost impossible to test history and civics and get a meaningful result.
Many states, all Republican-dominated, have censored history teaching. The legislatures don’t want students to learn “divisive concepts.” They don’t want anything taught that will make students “uncomfortable.” They don’t want “critical race theory” to be taught. These ideas have been spun out at length with other vague descriptions of what teachers are NOT allowed to teach.
The people who write test questions for NAEP history are not bound by these restrictions. They are most likely writing questions about “divisive concepts” and “uncomfortable” topics. They might even ask questions that legislators might think are tinged or saturated by critical race theory.
Given the number of states that ban the teaching of accurate, factual history, it’s seems to me impossible to expect students to be prepared to take an American history test.
Even more complicated is civics. A good civics exam might ask questions about the importance of the right to vote. It might ask questions written on the assumption that vote suppression and gerrymandering are undemocratic practices that were long ago banned by the courts. Yet courts are now allowing these baleful practices to stand. How can a student understand that a discredited practice is now openly endorsed in various state laws and have not been discredited by the courts?
Civics classes typically teach that one of the great strengths of American democracy is the peaceful transition of power from one President to another. How can they teach that idea when Trump partisans insist that he won the last election and was ousted in a coup? How can teachers explain the election process when Trump says it’s rigged (he said it before the 2016 election as well)? How can students answer questions about elections and the Electoral College when Trumpers believe they were corrupted in 2020?
How can teachers teach civics when almost every GOP leader asserts that the election was stolen?
How can civics be taught when public officials defy public opinion to allow any individual to buy guns without a background check or a permit. Having bought a gun, they may wear it openly in some states and carry it concealed in some other states. Students have been practicing in case an armed killer walks into their school during the day. They need only google to learn that a majority of the public favors gun control of varying kinds. Why, they might ask their teacher, doesn’t the legislature and Congress act to protect the lives of children?
If you want to travel through time and space, read!
If you want to learn about other people and other cultures, read!
If you want to supercharge your creativity and imagination, read!
If you want to learn how other people see the world, read!
If you want to travel through time and space, read!
If you want to understand history, read!
Some people think these are dangerous activities. They want to control what students think. They censor books. They remove them from school libraries and public libraries. They forget that young people today have access to the Internet, which is not censored.
Greg B. is a regular commenter on the blog. He lives in Ohio. He is deeply knowledgeable about German history and literature. I enjoy his comments.
He wrote:
As much as many Americans crow about being the land of the free, etc., they don’t like to do the work of being citizens, much less engaged. With citizenship comes responsibility. When one is engaged with the history of this nation, one understands that the enslavement of Africans who were transported here and their descendants literally built this country. While we learn about elites, it was enslaving Americans that created capitalism and wealth for whites around the world. The descendants of those whites have benefitted immeasurably from the status quo and keeping status regardless of quo. Even those who weren’t direct descendants, yes even people who immigrated to the US in the 19th through 21st century have benefitted by virtue of not having immediately identifiable physical traits.
Those who continue to complain that they didn’t benefit from racism, who claim merit got them to where they are, conveniently forget that a large portion of the population never ever gets the chance to prove merit. And if they can, they are not promoted, they are paid less, and they are segregated to live in certain areas. Those who claim merit are scared of real competition; they like the game rigged, one that gives them advantages before they even start playing and excludes everyone else. They may claim equal opportunity, but they see in “woke” a threat to their status. Even poor whites in West Virginia and Utah don’t realize they’re being played as pawns.
For Black History Month, I reread a classic on enslavement and found these two nuggets that help explain it all: “The willingness of many white southerners to unite around the idea of hanging on to racial power made the South a swing region, and white southerners a defined interest group, willing to join whichever national party was willing to cater to its demands.” And, “…the unbending anger of former Confederates against Reconstruction morphed into their grandchildren’s suspicion of the New Deal, and the insistence of the part of white southern Democrats that measures against the Depression could do nothing to alleviate black poverty or lessen white supremacy.” That’s what they want to keep up.
Nostalgia for “The Lost Cause” and deep-seated racism keep white southerners tethered to a political party that keeps them poor.
The mainstream media has given ample coverage to the likelihood that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is likely to announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president in the next week. The stories about him treat him as a normal elected officials. They do not reference his multiple efforts to censor ideas and people he doesn’t like; to ban teaching ideas he doesn’t like; to ban textbooks that include ideas he disagrees with; to persecute drag queens and gay people. The American people need to know who he is. DeSantis’ regime of censorship is a pathetic attempt by pasty-faced cowards to dumb down the students of Florida. They can’t succeed because everyone has access to the Internet and television, where they will learn about the lies the state is teaching them.
Scott Maxwell is a regular columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. He is fearless. In this post, he writes about Governor Ron DeSantis’ purge of knowledge he doesn’t like.
The headlines are as abundant as they are dystopian:
“Florida rejects, amends many social studies textbooks”
“An Entire Florida School District Has Banned a Kids’ Book on Segregation”
“Florida bans more than 40% of math books after review”
“350+ Books Banned in Florida School Districts Since Last July”
A knowledge purge is underway in Florida. The targets: History lessons that politicians want hidden. Perspectives that make parents uncomfortable. Truths that ideologues find inconvenient.
Basically, we have people who want to control the narrative. And they think it’s easier to do that if kids don’t know all the facts.
Now, it’s hard to get your hands around both the scope and the specifics of this purge, because education officials are censoring so much and revealing so little.
In the latest salvo, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education department rejected 35 different social studies books — more than a third of all they reviewed. Florida rejects some social studies books, forces ‘Take a Knee’ out of one
But to justify their actions, they released snippets from only six of the books they shunned or ordered altered. So you don’t have much to go on. But let’s look at one of those six examples. It’s from an elementary school textbook that teaches children about patriotism.
DeSantis staffers approved passages that instructed students to learn the Pledge of Allegiance and encouraged parents to stress the significance of the national anthem. But they did not want kids hearing why they might see some Americans, especially athletes on TV, take a knee during the anthem.
Specifically, the Florida Department of Education ordered the textbook to remove a section that suggested parents — not teachers, mind you — use that lesson on patriotic traditions “as an opportunity to talk about why some citizens are choosing to ‘Take a Knee’ to protest police brutality and racism.” DeSantis staffers ordered that suggestion stricken.
A popular talking point for people who dislike athletes taking a knee is to describe them as “anti-American,” “anti-cop” or “unpatriotic.” And it’s easier to peddle that narrative if students don’t hear why the players themselves say they’re doing what they are.
Personally, I think there’s valid debate over taking a knee. I can see why some players would. I can see why many people would dislike them doing so. It’s not really that hard to understand the divide — if you listen to what people on both sides are saying. But the new Florida model of education doesn’t want to share all sides. The censors say kids aren’t ready for these discussions. Really, though, it’s the adults who are scared their kids might hear a different perspective. They’re the snowflakes.
The DeSantis censors also axed a section about Black Lives Matter from a middle school textbook that presented both pro and con perspectives on the social movement. The passage described the killing of George Floyd, explained that social media gave rise to civic activism and then gave a brief explanation of why some people supported Black Lives Matter and an even lengthier description of why others opposed it.DeSantis’ education staffers ordered the entire section removed.
At least one of the passages DeSantis staffers removed looks justifiably flagged. It’s a section from a middle-school book that attempts to teach students what a socialist form of government is. The first part does a fine job explaining that, in a socialist society, the government controls much of the means of production, but then says: “It keeps things nice and even and without unnecessary waste.” Um, what? That seems more like a pom-pom for socialism — and a pretty skewed one at that — than a civics lesson. Yank it out.
But here’s the problem: DeSantis staffers shared a reworked version of the textbook that met their approval. It removed the word “socialism” altogether, replacing it with “planned economies.” I’m no fan of socialism, but I’d sure like students to have a correct understanding of what it is. Why? Because the vast majority of adults who scream about socialism absolutely do not. They somehow believe anything government-funded is “socialism” … and then turn into Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel when you ask them if that means Medicare and highways are socialist as well.
I’d love to see students better informed than these adults. But that seems to be the last thing the grown-ups want.
Last year, before state officials were rejecting social studies textbooks, they were flagging math books for being allegedly too woke. A handful of people apparently believed liberal boogeymen had infiltrated the nation’s algebra-instructional complex. And the handful got their way.
Some of this censorship is silly, political theater. Some is a serious effort to indoctrinate.
One publisher, Penguin Randomhouse, sued the Escambia County school district last week over its book-banning. Other publishers agree to comply with whatever censorship orders they’re given as they’re more interested in selling textbooks than standing on any sort of educational principles.
Then there are all the school library books being banned in historic numbers, thanks to the Republican-led Legislature’s new book-banning bill — books about everything from the civil rights movement to nontraditional families.
School book challenges, already on rise, could escalate in Florida
The Lake County school district pulled a picture book about the true story of two male penguins in Central Park Zoo who raised a chick after the zookeeper gave them an egg. A Panhandle district removed a book about school segregation in the 1950s with the New Republic reporting the district concluded the subject matter was “difficult for elementary students to comprehend.”
I don’t think kids are the problem here. In fact, the local banning crusades are sometimes led by just one or two adults who not only want to shelter their own kids from ideas they find scary but want to keep books away from everyone else’s kids at school as well.
I thought of all this book-banning and history-censoring while attending a recent session on the rise of antisemitism at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida. One panelist said the best way to combat hatred, intolerance and ignorance is to ensure children hear unvarnished truths. He described it as “The criticality of giving truth to our kids.”
The leader of a Holocaust Center in South Florida made a similar point recently stressing: “The Holocaust, it didn’t start with guns and death camps. It started with words.”
Well, words are precisely what Florida is trying to ban, censor and distort. In unprecedented fashion.
Diane Ravitch's blog 