In what appears to be a transparent effort to protect Confederate monuments, the Florida legislature is considering a bill that would prevent localities from removing monuments that have been in place for at least 25 years.
A proposal that would prevent the removal of historic state monuments, like Confederate statues, has been making its way through the Florida House and Senate.
Senate Bill 1122 would punish local governments that try to take down historic monuments located on public property and would give someone the right to sue if one is removed. A similar bill, House Bill 395, is moving through Tallahassee as well.
On Tuesday, the Senate Community Affairs Committee voted favorably on SB 1122, but not without contention.
Many of those who spoke in opposition of the legislation at Tuesday’s meeting viewed the bill as a tactic to prevent the removal of Confederate monuments and also opposed the fact that the bill would take power away from local governments. Those who spoke in favor of the bill said they viewed it as a way to protect history — one commentator specifically said he was in favor of the bill as he saw it as a way to protect “white society.”
Count on the Florida legislature to protect the monuments to white history.
I received a fundraising letter for a teacher who is running for the Legislature. It was forwarded to me by a friend who lives in the district. I read his letter and immediately sent Derek Reich a donation to his campaign.
Dear Friend,
I’m Derek Reich, a local high school government teacher here in Sarasota. I’m now the Democrat running to be your state representative in District 73 so I can fully fund our children’s public schools, lower homeowner’s insurance, and restore a woman’s freedom to control her body.
I was born and raised in Sarasota County, and never envisioned myself running for office. But when Fiona McFarLand, our current representative, voted to cut $12 million in funding from our public schools, I was outraged. What representative would go to Tallahassee to cut funding from their own community’s children? She also voted for no exceptions for rape or incest in Florida’s new abortion law. Enough is enough. I will fight for my hometown and for all of my neighbors in Sarasota County who are being ignored by Tallahassee politicians.
This is the most competitive state house race in Florida. In 2020, Biden and Trump practically tied it at 49% each. I am going to flip this seat, and I hope to earn your support to do it. If you want to learn more about my campaign and the issues I’m fighting for, you can visit my website: https://derekforflorida.com/.
We’re working to build the campaign needed to get our message out by the voters, and any support you can give would help us knock doors and let voters know what our opponent is doing in Tallahassee. If you’re able to help, you can donate securely online at this link.
Let’s send this #TeacherToTallahassee
Sincerely, Derek Reich Teacher, Candidate for State Representative
Florida blogger Billy Townsend was delighted to see Ron DeSantis get booted from the Republican primaries after the Iowa caucuses. DeSantis had large ambitions, thinking that the nation wanted his harsh rightwing policies. But he made the mistake of thinking he could run to the right of Trump. There’s no space there.
Billy hopes that voters saw through the hype about “the Florida Blueprint” and DeSantis’s promise to “Make America Florida.”
Before the primaries, in March 2023, he predicted that DeSantis would flounder, and he was right:
We don’t know who will command Florida’s invasion yet — tiny Emperor Ron DeSantis (with his pseudo VP Jeb Bush) or Florida-ism’s Pope Donald Trump. But it makes no difference. Whoever wins their gross song of ice and fire will then lead Florida’s army of the dead right toward Colorado and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Florida’s political and cultural invasion of the country should be laughable. The Florida “blueprint”has made us a hollowed out shell of a state — pleasantly livable for people with capital (like me) because a few big private interests team up to “govern” our warm spaces enjoyably for customers who can pay. And a few cities, like mine (Lakeland), which is blessed with a money-belching socialist power utility, create a nice and warm urban experience.
If America fully grasps that Florida Blueprint by 2024, I feel quite certain that we will repulse this absurd invasion-by-mafia. The referendum on Florida should not be a close run affair.
But our worst American billionaires and mouthiest showboating sheriffs like hollowed out states; and they far prefer mafias to unions or citizens mobilized politically around public good.
Florida is their model state for decadent capital cut free from any public oversight, public good, or sense of shared citizenship. And they will try to impose that Florida on everybody else by pretending that Florida is not Florida. Anti-civic capital is often dumb. But it’s heavily armed; and it has great sway — although not total away — over what the public is told.
Crushing Florida’s invasion — explicitly rejecting the failed “Florida Blueprint” at the national level — is crucial to any effort to reform Florida at home. The Florida Blueprint must culminate, in the military sense, as an expansive political force. That’s the sine qua non of Florida’s future…
The MAGA Pope thrashed the Tiny Emperor
Well, MAGA Pope Trump’s GOP smashed the tiny emperor’s irrationally cocky army of Pushaws and private jet jockeys as easily as Trump gropes unwilling women. (Sorry Trumpers, he is who he is. I can’t make your citizenship choices for you. But you will own them. Expect no moral mercy or understanding from me this time around.)
Trump’s formally adjudicated sexual abuse and Capitol Lynch Mob leadership aside, his defenestration of DeSantis is a useful first step. It’s good for Florida and America.
Even better, when America as a whole saw the “Florida Blueprint” personified by Gov. High Heels, America as a whole rejected Gov. Pudding Fingers thoroughly and humiliatingly, with the national contempt growing almost by the moment. Watching DeSantis in the polls has been like watching the Enron stock price circa October 2001 (go Google it, youngs).
Yes, in large part, that’s because he’s personally very weird and off-putting and cruel in the way that people who torture cats are weird and off-putting and cruel.
But it was also because Florida, as a model for America, got a thorough thrashing — including by Trump himself. Of all people, Florida Man Bonesaw Jesus himself attacked the Florida Model of “governing” a week or two after I published my piece.
The GOP primary campaign ended that day, with the Trump campaign’s unanswered dismantling of Florida as an expansive idea. A loooooonnnnnng, slow humiliation ensued, tempered only by extensive luxury travel.
In some ways Trump is now running as the ultimate Florida man — full of gross indulgence and utterly devoid of any concern for the state where he lives. Only a Florida Man would have the chutzpah to run against Florida from Florida when the party he owns has been in power here for a generation…
Anyway, ya’ll will generally share my mirth for now in laughing at DeSanctimonious. We can do that together. Trump gives you permission.
But then you’re all gonna try to convince yourselves it’s fine to line up behind a more senile version of the Zieglers writ large — the Capitol Lynch Mob leader with a terrible economic record, a jury-adjudicated sexual abuser, a criminal openly running on “retribution” and “dictatorship on Day 1,” who you all know would rape your wife and daughter and force them to have an abortion after getting rid of Roe v. Wade.
Christian Ziegler was recently ousted as chair of the Florida Republican Party after a woman told the police that he had raped her. They had previously had sexual relations, and Christian contended that the encounter was consensual. Also revealed in the investigation was that Christian and Bridget had had a threesome with the accuser, and the accuser expected to do it again, but not without Bridget.
Bridget Ziegler is a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, an organization that lectures everyone about family values, encourages book bans, and accuses public schools of harboring pedophiles. M4L is especially indignant about any recognition of students who are LGBT or about books that include LGBT characters.
Bridget Ziegler is a member of the Sarasota school board and was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to the board created by the legislature to take control of Disney World after the Governor engaged in a public dispute with Disney’s management. Disney spoke out against DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, and DeSantis retaliated by dissolving the Disney board that managed Disney World in Orlando.
Bridget has pushed many DeSantis-backed measures in Sarasota schools that have been widely criticized as discriminatory to the LGBTQ community and also helped formulate Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Why would a woman who has engaged in lesbian sex devote her energies to demonizing LGBT students and teachers? It’s a puzzlement.
Michael Barfield of the Florida Center on Government Accountability began his commentary:
While Republican power couple Christian and Bridget Ziegler publicly pushed for “family values” and backed an agenda widely viewed as anti-LGBTQ, they were secretly on the “hunt” for threesome lovers and had prior concerns the woman who alleged Christian sexually assaulted her was too “broken” to properly consent to their advances, newly released police reports from the now-closed rape investigation reveal.
Among the startling evidence recovered from Christian’s cell phone, according to the report, was a list of women, including the alleged sexual assault victim’s name, with a one-word subheading: “Fuck…”
The report indicates that the couple first engaged in a three-way sexual encounter with the woman roughly three years ago, and it was on Feb. 19, 2021 that Christian texted his wife to “come home, stop, and pick up [the woman] to play again and be crazy,” according to the police report.
That would be Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, chief medical advisor to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor selected Dr. Ladapo because of his strident opposition to COVID vaccines.
Hiltzik writes:
It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.
That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.
This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”
For several reasons, this advisory ranks as the single most dangerous statement by a government health agency since the start of the pandemic, if not for all time.
Hiltzik pointed out that Ladapo’s advisory comes at a time when COVID cases are on the rise and also when hesitancy about vaccines threatens to encourage refusal to take other vaccines. He points to a measles outbreak in Philadelphia,
Finally, he writes:
One must consider the source. Despite his state post and a tenured position as a professor of medicine at the University of Florida — courtesy of his patron Ron DeSantis, the extremist anti-vaccine Republican governor — Ladapo has zero credibility within the medical establishment. Taking medical advice from Ladapo makes about as much sense as taking investment advice from Sam Bankman-Fried or your view of academic integrity from Christopher Rufo.
Ladapo has become a card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia. Just before Christmas, he appeared on a podcast hosted by anti-vax agitator Del Bigtree, who stirs up his audiences with hysterical rants against vaccines and who was recently appointed communications director for the presidential campaign of notorious anti-vax figure Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He also was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
His colleagues at the University of Florida Medical School denounced Ladao’s claim that men between 18 and 39 should avoid the COVID vaccines because they posed a risk of cardiac failure.
Hiltzik noted:
In fact, the research indicated no such thing; rather, it showed that the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, in any case, was lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from catching COVID-19.
Dr. Ladapo then went full throttle, as you would expect, and insisted that no one should get the COVID vaccines. He maintained that they contained ingredients that damages one’s DNA.
In a Dec. 6 letter to the FDA and in the Florida Department of Health advisory, Ladapo raised “concerns regarding nucleic acid contaminants in the approved … vaccines, particularly in the presence of lipid nanoparticle complexes, and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA. … The presence of SV40 promoter/enhancer DNA may also pose a unique and heightened risk of DNA integration into human cells.”
Followers of anti-vaccine propaganda will find familiar features in this statement. For one thing, it sounds science-y as hell, filled to bursting with abstruse terms and jargon. One would have to be an expert in the field to identify it as total balderdash. The statement also bristles with scary references to DNA contamination and cancer and to “billions of fragments [of DNA] per dose….”
The research paper on which Ladapo based his intimation that the vaccines breach the FDA’s DNA contamination standard is self-refuting. The paper, which was based on an analysis of 24 vials of the mRNA vaccines, actually found that in all cases the fragments were well below the concentration limits set by the FDA.
The FDA, in responding to Ladapo’s Dec. 6 letter, told him that studies of the vaccines showed “no evidence” that the shots damaged recipients’ DNA and that the experience of “hundreds of millions of individuals” who received the vaccines “indicate no evidence indicative of genotoxicity….”
Florida’s death rate from COVID of 375 per 100,000 people is among the worst in the country. (California: 283.) You can ignore the defense that the difference is due to Florida’s relatively older population; states with even older median ages have done much better: Vermont (170), New Hampshire (245) and Maine (252). The difference is the indifference of Ladapo and DeSantis to their own residents’ health.
A federal judge in Florida ruled against Disney in its battle with Governor DeSantis. The Disney Corporation sued Florida Governor DeSantis for violating its right to free speech. Disney spoke out against the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. DeSantis urged the legislature to dissolve Disney’s governing board and replace it with a board appointed by DeSantis.
Disney sued, claiming it was punished for exercising free speech. Disney says it will appeal.
Now that DeSantis is out of the presidential race, America’s businesses will breathe a sigh of relief. Only in Florida will businesses be punished for disagreeing with the governor.
The federal judge in the case—Alan Winsor– was appointed by Donald Trump.
Well, here is another “hostage” or “patriot” for Trump to pardon if he is re-elected. A 58-year-old man from Florida who was a member of the “Proud Boys, not even a man. He beat up several police officers during an event on January 6, 2021, that Trumpers insist was “a normal tourist visit” or (as the president of the Republican National Committee put it) “legitimate political discourse.” Clearly, this is not the party of law and order.
A South Florida member of the far-right Proud Boys was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday after federal prosecutors described him as “one of the most violent January 6 rioters” who assaulted at least six police officers while attacking the U.S. Capitol three years ago.
Kenneth Bonawitz, 58, of Pompano Beach, grabbed one of the officers in a choke hold and lifted her up and injured another so badly that he was forced to retire, according to federal prosecutors.
Bonawitz, a member of the Miami chapter of the Proud Boys, was carrying an 8-inch knife in a sheath on his hip when he stormed the Capitol with a mob of Donald Trump supporters after gathering for the president’s “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse before the attack.
“Police seized the knife from him in between his barrage of attacks on officers,“ Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McCauley wrote in a sentencing memo recommending the high end of the guidelines, or nearly six years in prison. “His violent, and repeated, assaults on multiple officers are among the worst attacks that occurred that day.”
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington DC gave Bonawitz a five-year sentence, followed by three years of supervised release. Arrested a year ago, he pleaded guilty in August to three felonies — one count of civil disorder and two counts of assaulting police.
Bonawitz arrived in DC via a chartered bus for Trump supporters.
After police confiscated his knife and released him, Bonawitz assaulted four more officers in the span of seven seconds, according to court records. He placed one of the officers in a headlock and lifted her off the ground, choking her.
“Bonawitz’s attacks did not stop until (police) officers pushed him back into the crowd for a second time and deployed chemical agent to his face,” the prosecutor wrote in the sentencing memo. More than 100 police officers were injured during the siege.
And yet the Trump people say the event was organized by the FBI or Antifa.
Bob Shepherd is a brilliant polymath who has worked in almost every aspect of education, as editor, author, test development and classroom teacher. I invited him to review recent changes in Florida’s testing program.
He writes:
Among the many claims that Ron DeSantis made when running for Governor of Florida was that he would do away with the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] and their associated high-stakes testing.
Both were, for good reason, in deep disrepute. In fact, the puerile, vague, almost entirely content-free Common Core standards, which Gates and Coleman and Duncan foisted on the United States with no vetting whatsoever, were so hated that at the annual ghouls’ convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, the oh-so-reverend Mike Huckabee told the assembled Repugnicans to go back home and change their name because “Common Core” had become a “tarnished brand.”
Not change the “standards,” mind you, but change their name. In other words, the good Reverend’s magisterial ministerial advice was TO LIE TO or, most charitably, TO CONFUSE people by implying falsely that the standards had been replaced with local ones like, say, the Florida Higher-than-the-Skyway-Bridge-When-We-Wrote-These Standards. And that’s just what most states did. They barely tweaked the godawful Common Core standards, or didn’t change them at all, renamed them, and then announced their “new” standards.
Hey, check out our new and improved Big Butt Burger!
This looks just like your old Ton o’ Tushy Burger.
It is. Same great burger you know and love!
So, what’s so new about it?
The name! It has a new and improved name!
Enter Ron DeSantis, stage right. Shortly after being elected, he promised to “eliminate all vestiges of the Common Core” and “to streamline the testing.” Then, when DeSantis signed an executive order replacing the Common Core State Standards (C.C.S.S.) with the new Florida B.E.S.T. standards and creating new F.A.S.T. tests to replace the Common-Core-based F.C.A.T., his Department of Education (the FDOE) posted this headline:
GOVERNOR DESANTIS ANNOUNCES END OF THE HIGH-STAKES FSA TESTING TO BECOME THE FIRST STATE IN THE NATION TO FULLY TRANSITION TO PROGRESS MONITORING
Under the Governor’s new plan, instead of the Common-Core-based F.C.A.T., given in grades 3-8 and 10 in keeping with federal requirements, Florida would now give not one end-of-year test but THREE TESTS at each grade, in each subject area, Math and English, one at the beginning of the year, one at the middle of the year, and one at the end. And far from being the low-stakes progress monitoring that the FDOE headline and the Governor’s PR campaign suggested, these tests would be high stakes as well. Students would have to pass the ELA test in 2nd grade to move on to 3rd grade, and they would have to pass the 10th-grade ELA test, in addition to other state high-stakes assessments, to graduate from high school.
So, there would be MORE, not fewer, assessments. There would be no end to the attached high stakes. And there would be no end to PRETENDING (see below) that these tests measure proficiency or mastery of the state “standards.” And then, as the cherry on top of this dish of dissembling BS served warm, Florida hired AIR, a maker of Common Core standardized state tests given across the country, to write its new F.A.S.T. tests. Same old vinegar in wine bottles with fancy new labels.
Before I discuss the many problems with the old and new Florida testing regimes, let me just pause to congratulate the state of Florida and the people on its standards team, which, unlike the group that developed Common Core, included a lot of actual teachers and textbook developers. They did a great job with the B.E.S.T. standards. These are a VAST improvement on the idiotic Common Core. They return to grade-appropriate, developmentally appropriate math standards at the early grades. The ELA standards are also much improved. These use broader language generally, thus covering the entire curriculum, as CCSS did not, while allowing for much more flexibility with regard to curricular design than the CCSS did. A curriculum developer could easily create sound, coherent, comprehensive ELA textbook programs based on these new Florida standards as they certainly could not based on the CCSS, which instead led to vast distortions and devolution of U.S. curricula and pedagogy. The Florida B.E.S.T. standards also do not deemphasize literature and narrative writing, as Coleman so ignorantly and so boorishly did in the CCSS.
Now, here is how curriculum development is SUPPOSED to work: A textbook authorship team (or district-or school-based curriculum team) is supposed to sit down and design a coherent, grade-appropriate curriculum with the goal of imparting essential knowledge while at the same time checking the standards from time to time to make sure that those are all being covered. So, the coherence of the curriculum and the knowledge to be imparted are first, and the standards coverage is second—that is, IT COMES ABOUT INCIDENTALLY. STANDARDS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A CURRICULUM MAP. They are a list of desired educational outcomes based on teaching sequenced according to the curriculum map. So, a group might design a unit for eighth graders on The Short Story and plan to cover first its origins in folk tales and traveler’s tales and then, in turn, such short story elements as setting, character, conflict, plot structure, and theme. Throughout, they might illustrate the main ideas with examples of these elements from orature before moving on to literary examples. They might then conclude with lessons on planning and writing a folk tale and then a full-scale short story. And all along, while writing the unit, the group might examine the curriculum map in light of the standards and tweak the plan to ensure alignment.
That’s not what happened with the Common Core. Instead, because of the high stakes attached to the tests that purported to measure proficiency or mastery of the “standards,” people threw the whole notion of coherent curricula out the window. Instruction devolved into RANDOM EXERCISES BASED ON PARTICULAR STANDARDS—exercises based on the formats of questions on the now all-important tests on the standards. In other words, curricula devolved into test prep. I call this the “Monty Python and Now for Something Completely Different” approach to curriculum development. (BTW, a full monty is full-frontal nudity, so a monty python is a _____. Fill in the blank.) In other words, THE STANDARDS BECAME THE CURRICUM MAP. Every educational publisher in the country started hauling off every textbook development program by making a spreadsheet containing the standards list in the left-most column and the places where these were to be “covered” in the other columns. Having random standards rather than a coherently sequenced body of knowledge drive curricula was a disaster for K-12 education in the United States. Many experienced professionals I knew in educational publishing quit in disgust at this development. They refused to be part of the destruction of U.S. pre-college education. An English Department chairperson told me, “I do test prep until the test is given in April. Then I have a month to teach English.” Her administrators encouraged this approach.
The new Florida standards are broad enough and comprehensive enough to allow for coherent curriculum development in line with, aligned to, them. But will that happen? The high stakes still attached to them incentivize the same sort of disaster that happened with Common Core—the continued replacement of coherent curricula with exercises keyed to particular “standards.” Furthermore, because of the “progress monitoring” aspect of the new Florida program, there will be, under it, EVEN MORE INCENTIVE FOR ADMINISTRATORS TO MICROMANAGE what and how teachers teach—to insist that they do test prep every day based on the standards that students in their classes didn’t score well on.
In Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas Moore, the Chancellor of England, knows that he will lose his head if he doesn’t accede to King Henry’s appointing himself head of a new Church of England, but being a person of conscience, Moore can’t bring himself to do this. There’s an affecting scene in which Moore is taking the ferry across the river Thames and this exchange takes place:
MOORE [to boatman]: How’s your wife?
BOATMAN: She’s losing her shape, Sir.
MOORE: Aren’t we all.
That’s what results from high-stakes testing based on state standards lists. Instead of the curriculum teaching concepts from the standards, the curriculum BECOMES teaching the standards. Instead of giving a lesson on reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” teachers are pressured by administrators, whose school ratings and jobs depend on the test outcomes, to teach a lesson on Standard CCSS.ELA.R.666, the text becomes incidental, and the actual purposes of reading are ignored. Any text will do as long as the student is “working on the standard,” and the text is chosen because it exemplifies it (for example, the standard deals with the multiple meanings of words and a random text is chosen because it contains two examples of words used with multiple meanings). In this way, curricular coherence is lost, teaching becomes mere test prep, and without a coherent curriculum, students fail to learn how concepts are connected, to fit them into a coherent whole, even though one of the most fundamental principles of learning is that new learning sticks in learners’ minds if it is connected to a previously existing body of knowledge in those learners’ heads. In summary, putting the cart before the horse, the standard before the content, undermines learning. People like Gates and Coleman don’t understand this. They haven’t a clue how much damage to curricula and pedagogy their standards-and-testing “reform” has done. It’s done a lot. They are like a couple drunks who have plowed their cars through a crowd of pedestrians but are so plastered as to be completely oblivious to the devastation they’ve left behind them.
BTW, when he created the egregious Common Core, Coleman made a list of almost content-free “skills” (the “standards”) and then tacked onto it a call for teachers to have students start reading substantive works of literature and nonfiction, including “foundational documents from American history” and “plays by Shakespeare.” At the time when these standards were introduced, and Coleman doesn’t seem to have known this, almost every school in the United States was using, at each grade level, a hardbound literature anthology made up of stories, poems, essays, dramas, and other “classic” works from the traditional canon—substantive works of literature, including foundational documents of American history and plays by Shakespeare. So, Coleman’s big innovation—wasn’t an innovation at all. It was like calling on Americans to start using cars instead of donkey carts for transportation. Coleman was THAT CLUELESS about what was actually going on in the nation’s classrooms. And far from leading to more teaching of substantive works, the actual standards and testing regime led to incoherent curricula and pedagogy that addressed individual standards using random and often substandard texts and deemphasized the centrality of the works read. And so the processes of reading and teaching, in our schools, lost their shape, became monstrous exercises in dull and seemingly pointless scholasticism. Despite the fact that the new B.E.S.T. standards are broader and more comprehensive and therefore allow for more coherent curricula based on them, the persistence of high stakes in the new Florida standards-and-testing plan will lead to precisely the same sort of curricular incoherence that CCSS did.
That’s a problem, but even worse, if you can imagine that, is and will be the problem of the invalidity of the tests themselves, the old ones and the new ones. The governor and the FDOE promised shorter, low-stakes, progress-monitoring tests. We have already seen that the new tests aren’t low stakes, and we’ve seen that progress monitoring means micromanagement to ensure that teachers are doing test prep. So, what about the length? You guessed it. A typical F.A.S.T. test has 30-40 multiple-choice questions. Same as the F.C.A.T.
Now consider this: There are many standards at each grade level. For example, at Grade 8, there are 24 Grade 8 B.E.S.T. ELA standards. So, each standard is “tested,” supposedly, by one or two questions. But the standards, in the cases of both the Common Core and Florida’s B.E.S.T. are VERY broad, VERY GENERAL. They cover enormous ground. For example, here’s one of the new Florida standards, a variant of which appears at each grade level:
ELA.8.C.3.1: Follow the rules of standard English grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling appropriate to grade level.
Here’s an assignment for you, my reader: Write ONE or TWO short multiple-choice questions that VALIDLY measure whether a student has mastered this standard—that’s right, two short multiple-choice questions to cover the entirety of the 8th-grade curriculum in grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.
That’s impossible, of course. It’s like trying to come up with one question to judge whether a person has the knowledge of French, of French culture, of diplomacy, and of international law and trade to be a good ambassador to France.
Well, OK. Today I am going to ask you to submit to a brief examination to see if you have the knowledge to serve as our ambassador to France. Are you ready?
Ready.
Have you ever eaten gougères?
Oh, yes. Love them.
What is an au pair?
A young person from a foreign country who helps in a house in return for room and board.
Hey, hey! Great. You passed. Congratulations, Madame Ambassador!
This is a problem with the Common Core tests, and the problem ought to be obvious to anyone. In fact, it’s shocking that given the invalidity of the state tests, which I just demonstrated, that so many people—politicians, federal and state education officials, journalists, administrators, and even some teachers actually take the results from these tests seriously, that they report those results as though they were Moses reading aloud from the tablets he carried down the mountain. “This just in: state ELA scores in sharp decline due to pandemic!” Slight problem. The scores from invalid tests don’t tell you anything. They are useless.
The tests clearly, obviously, do not measure validly what they purport to be measuring. They cannot do so, given how broad the standards are and how few questions are asked about any given standard. That you could validly measure proficiency or mastery of the standards in this way is AN IMPOSSIBILITY on the level of building a perpetual motion machine or drawing a round square. And so the tests and their purveyors and supporters should have been laughed off the national stage years ago. It’s darkly (very darkly) humorous that people who claim to care about “data” are taken in by such utter pseudoscience as this state testing is. That emperor has no clothes. It’s long past time to end the occupation of our schools by high-stakes testing.
But Florida isn’t doing that. The new policy has given us the same kinds of invalid high-stakes tests by one of the standards providers of them, but now students in Florida will take EVEN MORE of those tests, thus making them EVEN MORE invasive and EVEN MORE likely to lead to EVEN MORE onerous and counterproductive micromanagement of teachers. No sane person would want to teach under such conditions of micromanagement.
DeSantis has promised to “Make America Florida.” If I were a religious person, I would say, “God help us.” Instead, I’ll just say, “Uh, no thanks.”
Scorecard
Quality of new standards: A
Quality of new tests: D
Plan for implementation of new standards and testing regime: F
Thanks to blogger Billy Townsend, I learned about the Florida Center for Government Accountability and its publication, The Florida Trident. This organization shines a bright light on government corruption. I am sending a donation to encourage their great work.
Just when Florida’s forces of gross grift seem to enjoy total impunity, the Florida Center for Government Accountability takes down the Zieglers, beats DeSantis in court, and becomes a new sheriff.
FCGA uncovered the scandalous Ziegler family threesome, which led to Christian Ziegler being forced out as state chair of the GOP and caused some embarrassing moments for his wife Bridget, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and an outspoken critic of gays.
FCGA recently posted about the state’s deceptive marketing to women who search for abortion providers on the Internet. If they choose an “abortion center” funded by the state, they will fall into the clutches of anti-abortion zealots, likely evangelicals, who will try to persuade them not to have an abortion.
An image from a state-funded anti-abortion center website.
When Abby learned she was pregnant, the first thing she did was look online for support. As a college student in a small town in northwest Florida, she thought the Internet was her best hope to find help for her unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend who had become abusive.
Sifting through Google’s search results, she stumbled on an online-chat providing support for people in need of abortion care. The chat operator stressed the importance of a pregnancy test and referred her to a nearby pregnancy center in Deland called the Grace House.
The center’s website welcomed people like Abby who didn’t have insurance and asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns. She scheduled a visit for the following day – a day she said she’ll never forget.
The horrific visit ended with Abby sobbing as center employees systematically pressured her to continue her pregnancy, prayed over her belly, and promised her free baby care products if she would come back for more “counseling.”
“I deserved legitimate medical care and compassion,” said Abby. “But I know in that room, they didn’t see me or my future. They just saw a positive pregnancy test.”
The staffers at Grace House were not there to help her receive abortion care, but instead to convince her and all others who enter the center for care to complete their pregnancy and be saved by Christianity in the process.
“I was fooled by this facility in a moment of vulnerability and desperation and trusting the wrong people,” Abby said.
The same “wrong people” are funded by the state’s Florida Pregnancy Support Services Program, which provides taxpayers’ money to more than 100 anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)” around the state. The stated goal of the program is to convince clients to carry their pregnancies to term rather than having abortions.
As previously reported in an ongoing Florida Trident investigative series, the centers, including Grace House, are Christian-based organizations and often identify themselves as “ministries” and “missions.” Several legal experts have said the program runs afoul of the U.S. and Florida constitutions, the latter of which expressly forbids the state from aiding religious organizations.
Despite its inherent problems, the program is now bursting at the seams in Florida. Its annual budget has ballooned from $4 million to $25 million a year, an increase written into the controversial six-week abortion ban legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April.
Kurt Filla is leading the state’s anti-abortion ad campaign.
Included in that funding explosion is a quadrupling of the program’s advertising budget to nearly $1 million a year, according to state records, paid out via the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, the non-profit tasked with administering the program for the state.
Kurt Filla, owner of the Michigan-based company, Filla Life Media, snared the state-funded advertising contract. Filla, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, is an outspoken conspiracy theorist who has backed false QAnon and vaccine tropes on the Internet and has written that the 2020 election was stolen, that God sends him angels and he’s heard the devil talk in his head, and that “global elites” are secretly trying to make people “impotent and immobile.”
Jenifer McKenna, an activist with the Reproductive Health Accountability Fund at Hopewell, said the steep funding hike and hiring of ideologically radical companies like Filla Life are part of a trend in “abortion-hostile” states like Florida to divert tax dollars to CPCs and “ramp up targeted digital marketing to track down pregnant people, talk them out of abortion, and collect their sensitive data.”
“Researchers are calling the post-Roe landscape an ‘abortion infodemic’ with CPCs playing a leading role,” said McKenna, adding that the centers use “extensive digital strategies to intercept pregnant people seeking care, sow confusion, spread disinformation and obstruct access.”
After an initial visit, which at some clinics includes an ultrasound where individual center staffers pray for the fetus, clients are urged to return for “counseling” and parenting classes. In fact, while the state bills the centers as health care providers, a whopping 87.5% of program reimbursements go for counseling and classes, a Trident analysis of state records found. A significant portion of the new $20 million in annual spending will fund a doubling of the amount the state reimburses the centers for counseling from $75 an hour to $150 an hour, state records show.
To put the $150 hourly rate in perspective, the state reimburses registered nurses – who actually have formalized education and training for the critical work they do – only $32.07 per home health care visit, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. Home health aides, who lack the RN’s credentials, are reimbursed a scant $18.04 per visit by the state.
When told of that increase, Amy Weintraub, who serves as reproductive rights director for the non-profit Progress Florida, called it “atrocious.” She noted that the “counselors” at the centers have no training or education requirements and are often hired based largely on their Christian faith.
“The fact that [state-funded pregnancy centers] are even allowed to use the word ‘counselor’ is such an affront because … they are not trained counselors,” said Weintraub.
That’s something Abby said she found out the hard way.
“Oh, She’s Abortion-Minded”
A random online search for abortion in Fort Lauderdale turns up a website for the Hope Women’s Centers, which received $100,000 in state funding last year. Its website promises “free abortion information” and “consultations on abortion pills, surgical abortion procedures, and emergency contraceptives.”
Yet like all other state-funded pregnancy crisis centers, Hope, which is strongly aligned with the Rio Vista Church, has two goals: to dissuade clients from having an abortion and to try to save their souls. None of that is mentioned in the online material.
It was the same in Abby’s case when she went to Grace House, which recently changed its name to Coastal Choices Women’s Clinic, a moniker that belies the fact that it vehemently opposes choice and isn’t a bona fide health clinic. The Trident left a detailed message for comment with a receptionist at Coastal; a promised return call was not received prior to publication.
“There is no Planned Parenthood in my county, so I thought it was a smaller version of it,” said Abby. “And they said if you were considering abortion to come on in, so I felt that was an invitation.”
Once inside, she was given a form to fill out with questions about her faith, her intimate relationships, even what her college grades looked like. It was the first clue she was inside a Christian ministry instead of a bona fide health clinic.
“That gave me a little bit of a pause,” Abby said. “But it wasn’t until the actual counseling session that I deeply regretted walking in the doors.”
She’d written in the form that she wanted an abortion.
“I watched a group of maybe three staff or volunteers crowd around my paper,” she said. “And I hear them say something to the effect of, ‘Oh, she’s abortion-minded, I’ll take her.’”
In the counseling session that followed, which she attended with her partner, Abby took a pregnancy test that was kept hidden while staff pressed her for 40 minutes about her personal life. She said the staffers told her she was in no position to make the decision about an abortion for herself.
When her partner was out of the room, Abby confided that she was in an abusive relationship. She said the counselor advised her to stay with her partner because the baby would give her purpose and help him step up as a man, and urged him, when Abby was outside the room, to stop her from getting an abortion because the procedure could kill her.
After the test came back positive, Abby was handed her due date and a small replica of a fetus. A staffer asked her what she might name the baby. Distraught, Abby began sobbing.
“There was so much talking over me when I was clearly having a breakdown,” Abby recalled. “[One staffer] starts praying over my stomach, she’s touching my stomach the whole time, and saying that I can start right away taking their parenting classes to earn baby bucks for their boutique to get baby clothes. And all the while I’m just so terrified.”
The experience was a far cry from the online promises, a contrast Weintraub said is common. The most fundamental deception in the advertising is the centers’ posing as health clinics when they don’t actually offer comprehensive reproductive health care services, she said.
“They strip their web sites of anti-abortion lingo so that the intended victims will not realize that the place they are visiting is an anti-abortion center,” said Weintraub. “All kinds of tricky language is used to cloak their true intention.”
Now Filla Life Media, under the leadership of its extremist owner, is set to receive $1 million a year from Florida taxpayers for its marketing prowess.
Tax-Payer Funded Anti-Abortion Marketing Agencies
Filla Life Media is a member of a national network called the Pro-Life Marketing Ethics Council made up of “unified Christ-centered and holistically pro-life” companies dedicated to promoting marketing strategies “grounded in biblical principles and informed by cutting-edge best practices.”
A key strategy of the Florida program is to boost its anti-abortion clinics in Google search results and place ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. State documents show the aim of the campaign is to “generate leads and inquiries” from pregnant people and that it uses “marketing strategies … with the goal of enabling her to carry the pregnancy to term and choose parenting or adoption.”
The new Filla Life marketing campaign is set to be the most aggressive to date, targeting women aged between 18 and 44 years old across Florida. Many of the ads specifically target teens and the uninsured.
The campaign will employ the latest in tracking technology and will leverage behavioral data—like what people are or are not doing in an app, on a website, or how they interact with campaigns—to personalize the message.
FPCN ads that appear at the top of Google searches for “unplanned pregnancy” or “pregnancy test” promise “Compassionate Counseling,” “Judgement-Free Pregnancy Support” and ”Pregnancy Pill Help.” Of 134 Google ads purchased this year by marketing companies on behalf of the state program reviewed by the Trident, only three explicitly warned the centers don’t provide abortions.
While the new ad campaign is super-charged, it’s nothing new. For years, Floridians’ tax dollars have gone to anti-abortion marketing agencies with little to no transparency. Before Filla Life, an Illinois-based company called Caledon, and its subdivision Choose Life Marketing, held the advertising contract.
The digital tactics promoted by Choose Life, alongside other anti-abortion marketing agencies, sparked a congressional investigation in 2022 that cited a number of the company’s tactics, including geofencing strategies, which use sensitive data from abortion seekers to facilitate government surveillance, harassment, intimidation and even violence. The company also featured prominently in a report issued by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which exposed the deceptive tactics of several anti-abortion marketing agencies.
Those marketing strategies also involved so-called “right-brain research” peddled by the Vitae Foundation, an anti-abortion research organization. Vitae uses extensive interviews with previously pregnant people involving repetition and relaxation techniques to “access the emotional mind and uncover deeply seated emotional needs and barriers,” according to its promotional materials.
“By studying the right side of the brain, which controls the emotional, intuitive and creative aspects of the person, Vitae was able to focus on women’s hidden, emotional response to pregnancy, abortion and motherhood,” the foundation explained in a report.
A key finding of the foundation is that “women carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when guilt wins out over shame,” a concept used by pro-life marketing agencies to craft their messaging to “abortion-minded women.”
To continue reading the article, open the link. It’s shameful that the state of Florida spends millions to tell women that they should not get an abortion, no matter how much they want one.
Ron DeSantis likes to boast about “freedom” in Florida, but apparently you are not free unless you agree with him.
Teachers of Black history are not free to teach the truth. Librarians are not free to use their professional judgment about books. Gays and trans kids are not free to live their lives. Drag queens are not free to perform their acts.
Women in Florida are not free to make major decisions about their own lives.
Pro-choice groups in Florida have gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot in November. But the hyper-conservative state Supreme Court must give its approval before the referendum can go forward. There have already been suggestions that the measure may be stricken because it says abortion should be legal until the fetus reaches “viability,” and critics say that the term is vague. Keep watching.
Fabiola Santiago is a columnist for the Miami Herald who is expert at skewering Ron DeSantis and his hateful policies. When he tried to take a victory lap during the Republican debates, she called him out. Kids are not better off in Florida, she writes, but racists and homophobes are. It turns out that DeSantis’s war against gays, Black history, and drag queens was not enough to sustain his campaign.
Santiago wrote:
Only in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ version of Fantasyland are kids in Florida “better off” under his watch.
The presidential job-seeker’s assertion, during Wednesday’s Iowa debate with Nikki Haley, that such is the state of childhood in Florida would be laughable — Exhibit No. 1, the man is trying to ruin happy-for-all Disney World — if his anti-science children’s healthcare policiesweren’t dangerous.
Or, his lie might have played out as the self-deprecating joke of a desperate, losing candidate — if DeSantis had kept his homophobia, transphobia, and discomfort with the legacy of racism in American history, where those sordid feelings belong, in the privacy of his home and wooden heart.
But DeSantis made his fears and prejudices against people who aren’t white, straight and ultra Christian-conservative the public’s business in Florida. And what he has unleashed isn’t child-friendly at all.
He used his power to get bills passed through the lily-livered Florida Legislature, signing into law medical practices that go against the advice of respected child healthcare experts like the American Academy of Pediatrics.
This means doctors and psychiatrists in Florida are limited by law on what they can do to address our children’s gender issues, and subject to felony penalties if they deviate from GOP wishes. Doctors also have their hands tied treating mothers facing an unwanted pregnancy discovered after six weeks, which also adversely affects entire families.
And, because the anti-vaxxer governor is a friend of debunked science and quack medical opinions, he has not only campaigned against children (and adults) getting the COVID vaccine, but he’s made it difficult for Florida parents to access boosters.
Under his mandate, schools are no longer safe zones for gay and trans children.
Before DeSantis, the intersection of healthcare, identity and lifestyle was a matter between parents and their doctors. Decisions about approach and care were based on individual cases and made as a family unit.
Now, healthcare and education are in the hands of Republican ideologues — social engineers who constantly feed voters misinformation and outright lies, feeding people’s lowest human instincts to shun the reality and preferences of others.
In schools, children unable to speak to their parents about conflicting identity issues, often were able to confide in a teacher, who in consultation with supervisors, would decide if it warranted parental intervention, or if the disclosure might put the child’s life in danger from family.
No more.
Teachers can be sued, fined, and fired if they allow gender identity discussions, pushing some excellent teachers to leave Florida or the profession, worsening a teacher shortage. This isn’t good for anyone, but least of all for children.
Adults have the power of choice — and many Floridians are exercising it by moving with their trans or gay children out of state, driven by the anti-LGBTQ laws, like former Heat star Dwayne Wade, whose teenage daughter Zaya came out as transgender in 2020.
Parents aren’t going to run the risk of the state taking transgender minors away from their families for receiving gender-affirming care. Nor will they stand for the atmosphere of hate and disrespect DeSantis’ constant harangues and policies have generated.
Unfortunately, not all children have parents with the financial wherewithal to move them to a more sane and accepting state — and remain stuck in DeSantis World suffering his pathology, especially in schools, where they’re no longer free to be themselves.
Nor to read literature that reflects their reality. Nor to play sports in the team where they feel they belong.
No, children are definitely not better off in Florida, where the education system is under-performing, according to national assessments. DeSantis’ solution: Get rid of the tests and dissuade kids from going to college.
With no accountability and ways to measure, he can claim success. With kids skipping higher education, his wealthy donors can access cheaper labor.
The governor’s culture wars and their harmful effect, however, are catching up to him.
In the process of trying to convince Republican voters that he and his “Florida Blueprint” are the alternative to disgraced Donald Trump, DeSantis recast his record — the vengeful attack on Disney World and his ruthless approach to LGBTQ and transgender children — to paint a pretty picture depicting major successes.
Oh, and what a macho man he was to take on Disney!
“We took on Disney and we defeated that and we won that fight and our kids kids are better off now,” DeSantis said.
A big lie that he kept repeating. Disney continues to celebrate Pride Month with “Gay Days,” and in 2023 released its Disney Pride Collection of clothing and accessories….
His neatly-packaged arguments, an attempt to camouflage what’s clearly discrimination, fear of difference and assaults on free speech, are coming undone.
Voters do have the last word — and, apparently, no matter how much the governor travels the nation, or perhaps because they’re getting to know him — polls show voters just don’t pick him.
Even in Florida, where DeSantis thinks he’s king, voters prefer 91-count, criminally-charged Donald Trump.
Turns out the people better off in Florida are possibly a minority: homophobic, racist adults.
Diane Ravitch's blog 