Archives for category: Florida
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

DeSantis: Maybe Florida Should Abandon AP, SAT, and Other College Board Products

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2023 //
68

Ron DeSantis didn’t like the College Board claiming that Florida was putting political pressure on the testing company to revise the AP African American Course. He didn’t like their lame attempt to stand up to his bullying. So he let it be known in public that Florida was thinking of replacing the College Board with other vendors.

Normally, the anti-testing organizations would have cheered his stance against the tests. But he made clear that he was looking for other tests.

Tens of thousands of Florida high school students take Advanced Placement courses every year to have a competitive edge heading into college.

Now, Gov. Ron DeSantis says he wants to reevaluate the state’s relationship with the private company that administers those courses and the SAT exam.

The move comes after the College Board accused DeSantis’ administration of playing politics when it rejected an Advanced Placement African American Studies course.

“This College Board, like, nobody elected them to anything,” DeSantis said at a news conference Monday in Naples. “They are just kind of there, and they provide a service and so you can either utilize those services or not.”

While DeSantis acknowledged the College Board has long had a relationship with the state, he said “there are probably other vendors who may be able to do that job as good or maybe even a lot better.”

Florida has long had a strong connection with the College Board. The state pays for students to take Advanced Placement exams, and provides bonuses to teachers whose students perform well.

In 2021, nearly 200,000 Florida teens sat for more than 366,000 tests, for which they can earn college credit. It had the fifth-highest rate of tests taken per 1,000 students in the nation.

The College Board also administers the SAT exam, which students may use to help them complete graduation testing requirements, earn entry into universities and become eligible for Bright Futures scholarships.

If the state were to move away from the College Board, other options exist. Students seeking advanced courses leading to college credits have International Baccalaureate, Cambridge Programme and dual enrollment classes available.

They also can take the ACT exam instead of the SAT.

DeSantis has not provided details as to exactly how the College Board’s relationship with the state could be impacted but said he has started talking to House Speaker Paul Renner about the matter. “I’ve already talked to Paul, and I think the Legislature is going to look to evaluate how Florida is doing that,” DeSantis said.

“Of course, our universities can or can’t accept College Board courses for credit, maybe they’ll do others. And then also just whether our universities do the SAT versus the ACT. I think they do both but we are going to evaluate how the process goes.”

No one from the College Board was immediately available for comment.

What tests do students take if they are not Christian?

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article272474953.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Standardized Testing

Florida: The Hostile Takeover of New College by Rightwing Zealots Threatens Academic Freedom Everywhere

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2023 //
11

Ron DeSantis is a dangerous ideologue and a wannabe Mussolini. He speaks of freedom but practices coercion and cancel culture. In Florida, you are free to echo his beliefs but not to disagree. He is a bully.

This frightening story by Kathryn Joyce in Vanity Fair is a MUST-READ. DeSantis engineered the right-wing takeover of New College, a small, progressive college by installing new board members and ousting the President of New College. The extremists are portraying their swift decapitation of a left wing college as a model for other red states. Their plan is to turn New College into its ideological opposite, the “Hillsdale of the South.” Public colleges and universities in other red states should be on high alert. Vanity Fair (to which I subscribe) is usually behind a paywall, but this article is a one-time freebie.

The article begins:

It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she couldn’t represent the mandate New College was being given through this “hostile takeover.” And she refused to support the claims of right-wing critics that the school had been indoctrinating its students.

In the audience, supporters hugged one another and students left in tears. The trustees moved on, voting to replace Okker with interim president Richard Corcoran, Florida’s recently departed education commissioner who, in a 2021 speech at Michigan’s right-wing Hillsdale College, came close to calling for the collapse of the public school system through student attrition and said the political war “will be won in education.” The trustees replaced the board chair too, made plans to replace the general counsel, and instructed administrators to start preparing to dismantle the college’s diversity offices. null

It was hard to imagine a starker change in leadership for New College, the small, nontraditional honors college of the Florida public university system, known for its lack of grades, individualized majors, and leftist student body, but which has also been eyed skeptically for years by Florida’s conservative-dominated legislature for its low enrollment and graduation rates. But that was exactly the transformation intended when Governor Ron DeSantis last month appointed six new trustees to the school’s 13-member board, in hopes they would remake New College into a right-leaning “classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south,” as his education commissioner Manny Diaz put it.

After the Republican-controlled Board of Governors appointed a seventh trustee, the new majority represented a team uniquely qualified to carry out DeSantis’s scorched-earth, right-wing education wars. There was Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-critical race theory hype man Christopher Rufo, who has most recently turned his efforts to laying “siege” to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; one of Hillsdale’s graduate school deans, Matthew Spalding, who also helped lead Donald Trump’s short-lived 1776 Commission; Charles Kesler of the right-wing Claremont Institute, which spent the Trump years retconning an intellectual platform for the MAGA movement; a senior editor at a religious right magazine; the Catholic author of a book accused of “fram[ing] LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness”; and a private Christian school cofounder with a penchant for Covid disinformation.

Following his appointment, Rufo immediately began speaking in martial terms: that conservatives were “recapturing higher education,” mounting a “landing team” to survey the school as well as a “hostage rescue operation” to “liberate” it from “cultural hostage takers.” Another new trustee, the private Christian academy cofounder Jason “Eddie” Speir, started a Substack to chronicle the transformation, sparking further panic in late January with a post proposingthe board declare a financial emergency, firing the entire staff and rehiring only those professors aligned with the school’s new business model. (Speir also used his newsletter to propose banning USA Today affiliates from covering campus events over a reader comment suggesting people throw dog poop on the new trustees; to request the entire board be given his essay, “‘Florida, Where Woke Goes to Die’ What Does It Mean?” as “supporting material”; and to ask if any readers had a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order he could borrow.)

Students, faculty, and alumni from New College and far beyond decried the takeover as an attack on academic freedom with national implications. Multiple scholarly organizations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Historical Association, denounced it as “an orchestrated attack on academic integrity.” The University of Florida graduate assistants’ union tweeted a message of “Solidarity with New College students, faculty, and staff as DeSantis appoints a card-carrying fascist to the presidency.” At a campus rally preceding last Tuesday’s meeting, former Democratic state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith warned, “New College is their first test, their first trial run.” Repeating a Twitter hashtag protesting students had used, Smith added, “your campus is next.”

As though to prove them right, on February 1, Florida Republican state representative Spencer Roach—who cosponsored a recent Florida law mandating ideological surveys of public university campuses to “stem the tide of Marxist indoctrination”—tweeted that Okker’s termination should be replicated “at every university of the state.” In a January essay published in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Rufo touted the opportunities for emulation as well, writing that “If we are successful” in carrying out the mission of “institutional recapture,” what happens at New College “can serve as a model for other states.”

One horrified alum, Cayenne Linke, who attended New College in the 1990s, compared the takeover to a violent assault. “I feel like I’m standing at the precipice of the Fourth Reich, and I’m mostly powerless to fight back,” Linke said. “I weep for our nation if DeSantis wins a presidential bid and inevitably installs Rufo as education secretary.”

Please open the link and read the article in its entirety.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Funding, Higher Education, Lies, Religion, Republicans

Florida: Only 11 of the State’s 67 School Districts Offer a “Mandated” Black History Course

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2023 //
38

Ron DeSantis responds to critics of his campaign to stamp out “critical race theory” by saying that Florida mandates a high school course in Black history. What he doesn’t say is that the course is offered in only 11 of the state’s 67 districts.

It isn’t offered because the state has not funded the development of a curriculum and has ignored the “mandate.”

The unenforced mandate was passed in 1994 in an attempt to make amends for the atrocities that occurred in Rosewood, Florida, exactly 100 years ago.

In 1923, 200 white terrorists sacked and burned the all-black town of Rosewood, Florida. The town was burned to the ground, and some who resisted were lynched.

Mary Ellen Klas wrote in The Miami Herald:

The painful details of the unpunished lynchings and vigilante violence went from being family secrets to the foundation for legislation awarding the first reparations paid by a state in the nation’s history to survivors of racial violence. They also became the catalyst for the 1994 law requiring the teaching of Florida’s Black history in K-12 schools. The law requires that courses comprise five components: African beginnings, the passage to America, slavery, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War and the “contributions of African Americans to society.”

DeSantis and his education commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. object to any mention of the state’s violent racist history, and they certainly don’t want people today to know that the state agreed to pay reparations to the few survivors of the Rosewood massacre. That may be why they objected vehemently to any mention of the reparations movement in the AP course. They have a guilty conscience.

As DeSantis defends against charges that he is “erasing the state’s Black history,” he cites the 1994 law as evidence that it is required to be taught, but he is confronted with contradictions:

▪ Budget records show that the implementation of the law that has been on the books for decades has been not only understaffed and barely enforced, but DeSantis and legislative leaders have rejected requests to beef up resources to expand the teaching of Black history in Florida.

▪ The word “reparation,” which is central to the Rosewood saga that spawned the Black history law, is now considered off-limits in Florida classrooms because state officials have determined that discussion of the reparation movement, which involves offering financial restitution to the descendants of enslaved people for the harms of slavery and racial discrimination, is an attempt at “indoctrination.”

“We proudly require the teaching of African American history. We do not accept woke indoctrination masquerading as education,’’ wrote Education Commissioner Manny Diaz on Twitter last month as he defended the Department of Education’s decision to reject the Advanced Placement course in African-American Studies because it “lacked educational value.”

Hypocrites. DeSantis is hoping to become President by appealing to racism and to white grievances and resentment towards Blacks. He has amplified false claims about critical race theory, which involves the study of racism. He wants to make open bigotry respectable by loudly proclaiming that anyone who wants factual history and wants to eliminate racism is “woke.”

Lincoln spoke to “the better angels of our nature.” DeSantis appeals to the worst instincts of our nature.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article271882322.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Curriculum, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Hypocrisy, Lies, Race, Racism

The College Board’s Statement About Its Interactions with Florida Officials

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2023 //
14

The College Board released this letter last night. It seeks to demonstrate that it did not cave in to Florida’s demands. It does not explain why all of Florida’s targeted names and topics were deleted.

Our commitment to AP African American Studies, the scholars, and the field

COLLEGE BOARD COMMUNICATIONSFebruary 11, 2023

Our commitment to AP African American Studies is unwavering. This will be the most rigorous, cohesive immersion that high school students have ever had in this discipline. Many more students than ever before will go on to deepen their knowledge in African American Studies programs in college. 

Teachers and students piloting this course are everywhere voicing their enthusiasm for the discoveries they are making. They are thriving in the openness and respect of the classroom environments they have built.

There is always debate about the content of a new AP course. That is good and healthy; these courses matter. But the dialogue surrounding AP African American Studies has moved from healthy debate to misinformation. 

We are proud of this course. But we have made mistakes in the rollout that are being exploited.

We need to clear the air and set the record straight.

  1. We deeply regret not immediately denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s slander, magnified by the DeSantis administration’s subsequent comments, that African American Studies “lacks educational value.” Our failure to raise our voice betrayed Black scholars everywhere and those who have long toiled to build this remarkable field.
  2. We should have made clear that the framework is only the outline of the course, still to be populated by the scholarly articles, video lectures, and practice questions that we assemble and make available to all AP teachers in the summer for free and easy assignment to their students. This error triggered a conversation about erasing or eliminating Black thinkers. The vitriol aimed at these scholars is repulsive and must stop.

    Rather, scholars are essential to this course, and each AP teacher must select works by scholars to include in the syllabus they submit for AP course authorization, as they do in a range of other AP courses that require secondary sources in the syllabus. We are requesting copyright permission to include works on our AP Classroom digital platform by every author mentioned in any iteration of the framework, bringing these readings to students worldwide by enabling AP teachers to assign them with one click.
  3. We should have made clear that contemporary events like the Black Lives Matter movement, reparations, and mass incarceration were optional topics in the pilot course. Our lack of clarity allowed the narrative to arise that political forces had “downgraded” the role of these contemporary movements and debates in the AP class. The actual pilot course materials teachers used were completed on April 29, 2022—far prior to any pushback. In these pilot materials, teachers were told to pick only one such topic. This topic could be assigned after the exam since it didn’t count and would have no impact on the student’s AP score.

    The official framework is a significant improvement, rather than a watering down: three weeks are now dedicated to a research project of the student’s choice, which counts as 20% of the student’s AP Exam score for college credit. This model better aligns with the flexibility colleges themselves often provide students to do an extended paper on a topic of their choice. We encourage students to focus their projects on contemporary issues and debates to ensure their application of knowledge to the present.
  4. We have not succeeded in focusing the conversation on the remarkable work and flexibility of the pilot teachers in different states. The fact is that pilot teachers everywhere are introducing the core concepts of this discipline with skill and care. Sadly, in some states teachers have more room to maneuver than others. We recognize that in some states teachers and students will be able to draw more widely on Black Studies scholarship than in others. But we must resist the narrative that teachers in states with restrictions are not doing exceptional work with their students, introducing them to so much and preparing them for so much more.

    By filling the course with concrete examples of the foundational concepts in this discipline, we have given teachers the flexibility to teach the essential content without putting their livelihoods at risk. The committee will continue to evaluate this approach, making further changes to the framework if they decide to do so.
  5. While it has been claimed that the College Board was in frequent dialogue with Florida about the content of AP African American Studies, this is a false and politically motivated charge. Our exchanges with them are actually transactional emails about the filing of paperwork to request a pilot course code and our response to their request that the College Board explain why we believe the course is not in violation of Florida laws.

    We had no negotiations about the content of this course with Florida or any other state, nor did we receive any requests, suggestions, or feedback.

    We were naive not to announce Florida’s rejection of the course when FDOE first notified us on September 23, 2022, in a letter entitled “CB Letter AP Africain [sic] Studies.” This letter, like all written communications we received from Florida, contained no explanation of the rejection. Instead, Florida invited us to call them if we had any questions.

    We made those calls, as we would to any state that says they have unstated concerns about an AP course. These phone calls with FDOE were absent of substance, despite the audacious claims of influence FDOE is now making. In the discussion, they did not offer feedback but instead asked vague, uninformed questions like, “What does the word ‘intersectionality’ mean?” and “Does the course promote Black Panther thinking?” FDOE did not bring any African American Studies scholars or teachers to their call with us, despite the presence in their state of so many renowned experts in this discipline.

    Since FDOE did not make any requests or suggestions during the calls, we asked them if they could share specific concerns in writing. They said they had to check with their supervisors and get permission. They never sent us any feedback, but instead sent a second letter to us on January 12, 2023, as a PR stunt which repeated the same rejection but now with inflated rhetoric and posturing, saying the course lacked “educational value.”

    On the day after Florida sent us that second letter, the AP executive overseeing the process of developing this course—the only AP leader who participated in the telephone calls with FDOE—followed up with the College Board’s FDOE liaison to ask whether we should ever expect any actual feedback from Florida. This is the response:

    “I don’t think they [FDOE] intend to provide any notes. My guess is that [the FDOE staff member] shared his notes with leadership (as he told us he would) and they shut it down. He might have even been instructed not to share notes.”
    We have made the mistake of treating FDOE with the courtesy we always accord to an education agency, but they have instead exploited this courtesy for their political agenda. After each written or verbal exchange with them, as a matter of professional protocol, we politely thanked them for their feedback and contributions, although they had given none.

    In Florida’s effort to engineer a political win, they have claimed credit for the specific changes we made to the official framework. In their February 7, 2023, letter to us, which they leaked to the media within hours of sending, Florida expresses gratitude for the removal of 19 topics, none of which they ever asked us to remove, and most of which remain in the official framework.

    They also claimed that we removed terms like “systemic marginalization” and “intersectionality” at their behest. This is not true. The notion that we needed Florida to enlighten us that these terms are politicized in several states is ridiculous. We took a hard look at these terms because they often are misunderstood, misrepresented, and co-opted as political weapons. Instead we focused throughout the framework on providing concrete examples of these important concepts. Florida is attempting to claim a political victory by taking credit retroactively for changes we ourselves made but that they never suggested to us.

    FDOE’s most recent letter continues to deride the field of African American Studies by describing key topics as “historically fictional.” We have asked them what they meant by that accusation, and they have failed to answer. The College Board condemns this uninformed caricature of African American Studies and the harm it does to scholars and students.

This new AP course can be historic—what makes history are the lived experiences of millions of African Americans, and the long work of scholars who have built this field. We hope our future efforts will unmistakably and unequivocally honor their work.

APTag

Contact

All Accessallaccess@collegeboard.org

The College Board respects your privacy, and we are committed to protecting it. Access our Data Privacy Principles, Privacy Statement, and Program-Specific Privacy Policies here.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Education Reform, Florida, Race, Racism

College Board Pushes Back Against Florida Narrative

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2023 //
6

Writing in the Tampa Bay Times, journalist Jeff Solochek reports that the College Board released a letter last night denouncing the Florida State Department of Education. The College Board says it was naive in trusting the latter agency, which wanted to score political points.

Taken aback by Florida’s attacks against its new AP African American studies course, the College Board late Saturday denounced the state Department of Education, saying it used the course to advance a politically motivated agenda.

The organization’s letter, published at 8 p.m. Saturday, came just two days after it released another statement that did not take such a harsh tone as it pushed back against the department’s claims that portions of the course are “historically fictional.”

“There continue to be conversations and misinformation, and we felt the urgency to set the record straight and not wait another day to do so,” a College Board spokesperson said. The College Board publishes AP courses and exams.

In its latest unsigned statement, the College Board said it is proud of its “historic” course, which has been crafted by renowned scholars. It acknowledged it made mistakes during the rollout and accused Florida of exploiting the situation.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has criticized the course and said Florida would not accept it without revisions. DeSantis has been using attacks against the way race is taught in schools, calling it “woke,” in many speeches amid wide speculation that he will use the issue as part of a presidential campaign.

Neither the governor’s office nor the Department of Education could be reached for comments late Saturday on the College Board’s statement.

Related: Florida claims about AP African American studies are false, College Board says

The College Board stated in its latest letter that it regrets not having denounced the Florida Department of Education’s “slander” that the course “lacks educational value.” The failure to speak up “betrayed Black scholars everywhere,” College Board wrote.

It said it also should have made more clear that the course outline did not include all the scholarly articles, lectures and other materials that will be part of the course. That led to the idea that some important thinkers were eliminated, it said — something Florida officials claimed credit for.

“The vitriol aimed at these scholars is repulsive and must stop,” the group wrote.

College Board made other defenses of the materials and the course preparation. Then it turned its sights on Florida’s interaction with the course.

It called the Department of Education’s claims that it had been in frequent dialogue with College Board over the course content “a false and politically motivated charge.”

Florida officials have claimed credit for changes made to the course outline.

“We had no negotiations about the content of this course with Florida or any other state, nor did we receive any requests, suggestions or feedback,” College Board wrote.

It said the organization was “naive” not to publicize Florida’s course rejection when it first came in September. It said the letter misspelled the word “African” and contained no explanation of the rejection.

The article continues with more detail. What it does not explain is why every objection raised by Florida was met by either a deletion of the name or topic, or a shift from “included” to optional.

Did the College Board cave to Florida or reject Florida’s demands? You decide.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bias, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, History, Race, Racism

What Is CRT?

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2023 //
3

Here is a brief interview about what should never be taught in school.

Categories Censorship, Florida, Ignorance, Race, Racism

DeSantis Guts Florida’s Open Records Law

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2023 //
21

Florida has strong laws about giving the public access to public records. A taxpayer recently sued to find out who was advising Governor DeSantis when he selected judicial nominees. DeSantis argued that this information was a matter of executive privilege and was not covered by the state’s open records law. A judge agreed. The Miami Herald was outraged. They sense, as do I, that DeSantis not an ordinary Governor. He wants to be in total control of the state. He wants to do what he wants to do. He doesn’t tolerate dissent. He gives off the smell of a fascist. Since he seems to be a front runner to beat Trump, I watch him closely. Everyone should.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has opened yet another front in his endless war to remake Florida in his image. This time, it’s an attack on the public’s right to know and a claim of “executive privilege” that could result in a new level of unfettered power for the governor.

The latest effort to control our state goes to the heart of what government is supposed to do: Represent the people. Governors are not kings. They cannot do whatever they like. Their work is our work. Their records are our records.

We paid for them with our taxes — just like we pay for all the work that is done in Tallahassee, work done in our name and to which we should have almost complete access, except for rare situations in which the government can prove the reason for a (narrow) exception.

But now we have a ruling in a lawsuit, John Doe v. Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Executive Office of the Governor, that runs counter to all of those well-defined concepts of government-by-the-people.

As the Miami Herald reported, an anonymous person filed suit last year asking for documents showing any communication between the governor’s office and “six or seven pretty big legal conservative heavyweights” that DeSantis revealed on a podcast that he’d consulted when making judicial picks for the Florida Supreme Court.

DeSantis’ legal team (which we are no doubt paying for) argued in court that he shouldn’t have to hand over the documents because such things should be kept secret.

The governor needs to be able to talk to anyone and everyone in private if it helps him make good decisions for the rest of us, or so the argument went. In other words, just trust DeSantis, voters. He knows best. Now run along outside and play.

DeSantis is claiming that he does not have to reveal the names of what may amount to a shadow Cabinet because he has executive privilege, a hazy concept even on a federal level, though many presidents have tried to assert it.

Perhaps Florida’s governor has gotten confused about which job he has, amid the talk of a 2024 presidential run.

But the fact remains: No such thing was ever agreed on by voters in this state. Executive privilege is not in the state Constitution or statutes; DeSantis’ lawyers just want it to be so. They want it so badly they’ve tried it in other cases. This time, though, the judge bought it.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

In a Jan. 3 ruling, Leon County Circuit Judge Angela C. Dempsey said the governor does indeed have executive privilege and therefore John Doe — and the rest of us — aren’t entitled to see what he does behind closed doors. How does he select judicial nominees? None of your business, you annoying voters. (We’ll be over here cashing your checks, though.)…

And while executive privilege isn’t in the Florida Constitution, public records laws are. Florida voters in 1992 amended the Constitution to include open records and open meeting laws.

Only the Legislature can make exceptions. Take a look at Article 1, Section 249(c) of the Constitution if you want to read it for yourself. The exceptions must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses.

And any exception must overcome high hurdles including that it be a “public necessity” and narrowly tailored to fit only the specific bit of information to be kept secret.

It’s not supposed to be used just because the governor doesn’t want people to know the identities of his secret advisers.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article271924982.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Florida

Miami Herald: Legislature Holds Special Session to Clean Up After DeSantis Blunders

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
7

Time and again, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has exceeded his authority by one-man stunts, created to win national publicity and demonstrate that he’s more fascist than Trump.

Now, his puppet legislature is meeting in special session to clean up the mess DeSantis left behind.

The Miami Herald editorial board excoriates his authoritarian control of weak-kneed legislators.

With Gov. DeSantis’ iron-fisted control of the legislative process in Florida, it’s not elected officials who must conform to the limits of the law; it’s the law that gets modified according to the whims of elected officials.

If you pass a half-baked bill in vengeful haste, someone will clean up your mess. When you get sued for allegedly violating your own migrant-relocation program, no worries, your friends in the Legislature will expand that program and give you ample power — and cash — to make it “right.” When you tout illegal voting arrests of people who the state allowed to vote, and it turns out you might have chosen the wrong prosecutors to bring those charges, you simply change the law.

That’s the story of the special legislative session that began this week in the Florida Capitol. The urgent matter the Republican-controlled Legislature must address is cleaning up the governor’s most controversial policies. Lawmakers couldn’t even wait another month until their regular two-month session that starts in March.

To be fair, there are other valid issues being discussed: providing relief for Hurricane Ian victims and expanding a law that allows college athletes to sign endorsement deals. But this is no ordinary special session. The bulk of it is about giving DeSantis more — and unchecked — power.

Take the law that tried to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida last year. Created in the 1960s, the special taxing district is controlled by Disney and serves as the governing body for the Walt Disney World Resort. Was it time to revisit this unusual arrangement that ceded so much power to a private company (the district can even build its own nuclear power plant)? Maybe, but good governance wasn’t really top of mind. The Legislature, egged on by DeSantis, was retaliating against Disney for opposing the parental-rights law critics nicknamed “Don’t say gay.”

When lawmakers passed a bill to dissolve Reedy Creek last year, they didn’t hash out what to do with Disney’s $1 billion debt that, without the company’s ability to tax itself, would fall on the residents of Orange and Osceola counties.

There’s no mea culpa on the part of Republicans, though they did give themselves until June 1 to make changes to the law. They now want to maintain the district under a different name, take away Disney’s power to control it and give it to our almighty governor, who would nominate the five people who make up the district’s board. We suppose there’s one silver lining: The board would lose the authority to build a nuclear plant.

House Bill 5B and Senate Bill 6B are another gift to the governor from lawmakers. The state is defending a lawsuit filed by a Democratic state senator challenging the taxpayer-funded flights of mostly Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. Those migrants were duped into believing they would find jobs and resources on the island.

The lawsuit centers on a key component of the relocation program lawmakers funded last year at DeSantis’ urging: that it relocate migrants from Florida, not other states.

Republicans want to get rid of that fine print and give DeSantis the unchecked authority to relocate migrants from anywhere in the country as long as they have been released by the federal government pending the resolution of their case. He also would get $10 million and the possibility to access $500 million in emergency funds because he signed an executive order declaring an immigration emergency in January, the Herald reported.

This gives DeSantis the ability to tap into millions of dollars to target any voter-rich Republican primary state in his expected presidential run, courtesy of taxpayers. The premise of the program is that the border crisis presents a threat to Floridians, but whether or not those migrants would ever make it to the Sunshine State is inconsequential at this point.

The other legislative clean-up relates to the state’s new election-crimes office, created by the Legislature after Donald Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election became a major plank in the Republican Party platform. Last year, DeSantis proudly boasted the office had arrested 20 felons who voted illegally.

Those voters told the Herald and other news outlets they were given voter registration cards by their local election offices. DeSantis’ own administration didn’t flag them as ineligible. Some cases were dismissed by judges who found that the statewide prosecutors who filed the charges didn’t have the jurisdiction to do so.

The Legislature’s first order should be to prevent more ineligible voters from slipping through the cracks. Instead, its solution is to make it easier to prosecute them after they have already cast ballots. Legislation would clarify that the Office of Statewide Prosecution can investigate voting-related crimes. The office reports to a Republican, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and is a safer way for DeSantis to score wins than going through Florida’s 20 states attorney, prosecutors who are elected locally.

One-party control of Florida’s government is nothing new. What’s new is that the Legislature has become just another arm of the governor’s office. Its role isn’t to serve as a check on the executive power anymore, but to rubber stamp and inflate the man whose ambition and thirst for the spotlight have turned governing into a power-grabbing spectacle.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Vouchers

The College Board Lied about Black Studies AP Course. It Had Frequent Exchanges with Florida Officials

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2023 //
49

Governor Ron DeSantis and his Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. denounced the new AP African American Studies course in January. They listed specific objections to the syllabus. When the College Board released its final draft on February 1, everything that Florida opposed had been deleted.

The College Board insisted that it did not bow to political pressure because the revisions were made before Florida officials denounced the original.

The New York Times reported that the College Board and Florida officials were in frequent contact between September and February 1. The first attack on the AP course was written by Stanley Kurtz and published in the National Review on September 12. Kurtz warned that the AP course was “NeoMarxist” and takes “leftist indoctrination to a whole new level.”

About the same time, the College Board and Florida officials began negotiations.

The Times said today:

While the College Board was developing its first Advanced Placement course in African American studies, the group was in repeated contact with the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, often discussing course concepts that the state said it found objectionable, a newly released letter shows.

When the final course guidelines were released last week, the College Board had removed or significantly reduced the presence of many of those concepts — like intersectionality, mass incarceration, reparations and the Black Lives Matter movement — though it said that political pressure played no role in the changes.

The specifics about the discussions, over the course of a year, were outlined in a Feb. 7 letter from the Florida Department of Education to the College Board.

The existence of the letter was first reported by The Daily Caller, aconservative news site. A copy of the letter was posted on Scribd. Its authenticity was verified by a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education, which released a copy early Thursday.

The College Board responded to the letter with one of its own, released on Thursday, saying that Florida’s concerns had not influenced any revisions to the course, which had been shaped instead by feedback from educators.

“We provide states and departments of Education across the country with the information they request for inclusion of courses within their systems,” the letter said, adding, “We need to clarify that no topics were removed because they lacked educational value. We believe all the topics listed in your letter have substantial educational value.”

The discussions between the College Board and the state took place as right-wing activists across the country were increasingly taking aim at school lessons that emphasize race and racism in America. Governor DeSantis, who has presidential ambitions, has cast himself as the voice of parents who are fed up with what he has called “woke indoctrination” from progressive educators.

The back and forth between Florida and the College Board is sure to add to the controversy over the Advanced Placement curriculum, which has prompted a debate among academics in the fields of Black studies, U.S. history and beyond. It has also cast suspicion on the College Board, long criticized for producing exams that seemed to favor white and affluent students.

Supporters of the new A.P. course — which can yield college credit for high school students who do well in it — say it encourages the study of Black history and culture, which have often had only a limited place in high schools. They see another advantage as well, saying that the class will attract Black and Hispanic students, who have not enrolled in A.P. classes as frequently as white students, enriching their study skills and potentially enabling them to amass college credit.

The Florida letter suggests discrepancies with the College Board’s account of events. Florida publicly announced that it had rejected the A.P. course in January, a few weeks before the College Board released its final guidelines — too little time, the board said, to make any politically motivated revisions. But according to the letter, the state informed the College Board months before, in September 2022, that it would not add the African American Studies class to the state’s course directory without revisions.

The Florida letter also outlines a key Nov. 16 meeting to air differences between the state and the College Board over the course. In the meeting, the state claimed that the A.P. African American Studies course violated regulations requiring that “instruction on required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events.”

According to the state, the College Board acknowledged that the course would undergo revisions, while pushing back against the state’s request to remove concepts like “systemic marginalization” and “intersectionality,” which the College Board saw as integral to the class.

Nevertheless, by the time the course’s final framework was released on Feb. 1, those terms had largely been removed, except that intersectionality was listed as an optional subject for the course’s required final project, in which students can choose their area of focus.

In its response to the Florida letter, the College Board said, “We are confident in the historical accuracy of every topic included in the pilot framework, as well as those now in the official framework.” The board has also said that students and teachers could still engage with ideas like intersectionality through optional lessons or projects and through A.P. Classroom, a free website that will serve as a repository for important texts for the class.

Even so, many scholars have noted the omission of terms that, according to the College Board’s own research documents, are considered central to African American Studies as it is taught on college campuses.

Intersectionality, for example, is an influential theory first laid out by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It posits that race, class, gender, sexuality and other forms of identity intersect in ways that shape individuals’ experience of the world.

Professor Crenshaw’s work is important to several disciplines, including African American studies, gender studies and legal studies. She is also closely associated with critical race theory, a concept that has become a lightning rod among conservative curriculum activists, who object to schools emphasizing the concepts of racism or white privilege.

Ron DeSantis threw his weight around, and the College Board capitulated. He is now the official arbiter of what history may be taught to advanced students in American high schools.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, DeSantis, Failure, Florida, Race, Racism

Florida: Legislature Wants to Loosen Gun Control Law

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2023 //
50

Florida leaders want to remove requirements to register and get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. In the ideal libertarian state, there would be no gun control at all. More murders, more killing. Does Florida have a minimum age requirement? That will be next to go.

Florida House Speaker Paul Renner is pushing a measure that would allow people to carry concealed firearms without a permit and without training, saying he wants to remove the “government permission slip.”

Renner had previously said that he wanted a permitless carry bill — something Gov. Ron DeSantis has also advocated for — during this year’s legislative session, which starts March 7.

He announced the legislation during a news conference Monday, surrounded by the bill’s sponsors and Florida sheriffs.

Standing alongside Renner, Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis, president of the Florida Sheriff’s Association, endorsed the legislation. “I think we can assume that our citizens are gonna do the right thing when it comes to carrying and bearing arms,” he said.

Twenty-five states already have what supporters call “constitutional carry” measures, meaning they don’t require a permit to carry a concealed firearm.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article271838402.html#storylink=cpy

However, gun lovers complained that the proposed bill doesn’t go far enough. They want every Floridian to be able to carry their gun in the open. They call it “constitutional carry,” because the Constitution doesn’t say anything about background checks, training or any of the other requirements sought or imposed by gun control advocates.

The red states are competing, it seems, to see who can go farthest to erase any limits on gun ownership and use.

The opposition to Florida’s proposed legislation to allow Floridians to carry concealed firearms without a permit or training was expected from gun safety advocates.

But at a Tuesday hearing on the bill, there were just as many disgruntled Second Amendment supporters, who said the bill didn’t go far enough because it doesn’t allow for open carry, the visible carrying of a firearm.

Only a few of the dozens of public commenters told legislators they were happy with the measure as written.

But Republican members of the House Constitutional Rights, Rule of Law & Government Operations Subcommittee passed the bill out of the committee on a 10-5 vote along party lines.

The bill now only has one other committee hearing to move through before it goes to a vote on the House floor. House Speaker Paul Renner has expressed strong support for the bill, holding a news conference last month with uniformed sheriffs to announce its filing.

Senate President Kathleen Passidomo has also expressed her support for the measure, though no matching legislation has yet been filed in the Senate. Sen. Jay Collins, R-Tampa, has said he will be the bill’s sponsor.

‘CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY’ IN PLAY

Permitless carry, often called constitutional carry by supporters, allows people within certain legal parameters to carry weapons without having to go through the permitting process.

In Florida, that includes a background check, fingerprinting, a payment of $97 for a new application and the completion of a training course, which includes firing a live round in front of an instructor. Gun carriers would be required to carry a personal ID.

Some of those gun rights advocates said Florida’s proposal is not true “constitutional carry” because it applies only to people being able to carry a concealed weapon; it doesn’t permit open carry of weapons in public and still restricts gun possession for people under the age of 21 and on college campuses.

“To call this bill constitutional carry is an insult to our intelligence,” said Bob White, the chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Florida. Luis Valdes, Florida director of Gun Owners of America, said the bill is a step in the right direction compared to prior years when similar bills didn’t make it out of committees.

But he said it doesn’t go far enough. “The governor has pledged he wants constitutional carry, he didn’t pledge that he wants permitless concealed only,” Valdes said.

Should there be any age limit for purchasing or owning or carrying guns? Is 10 years old okay? How about 6? Should guns be okay in schools? How about in the legislature? Why not let prisoners carry guns? Why should they lose their “constitutional rights”?

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article272248473.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Florida, Guns, Safety
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »