Civil rights attorneys out the state of Florida on notice that it was prepared to sue if the state bans the new AP course in African American studies.
Florida’s Black leaders delivered a warning to Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday that if he doesn’t stop attempts “to exterminate Black history” in Florida classrooms, they would sue him for violating the constitutional rights of students.
“We are here to give notice to Gov. DeSantis,’’ said Ben Crump, a Tallahassee civil rights attorney, to a cheering crowd of supporters in the Capitol Rotunda, as three high school students stood at his side.
They were protesting the announcement last week by the Florida Department of Education that it had rejected a new Advanced Placement elective course on African-American studies, developed by the College Board for high school students.
“If he does not negotiate with the College Board to allow AP African-American Studies to be taught in the classrooms across the state of Florida, these three young people will be the lead plaintiffs,’’ said Crump, who has represented families in several high-profile civil rights cases.
The College Board is expected to release its updated version of the AP course on Feb. 1, the first day of Black History Month. As a pilot program taught in 60 select classrooms around the country, the board has been soliciting feedback from teachers for modifications to the curriculum. It is unknown how many schools in Florida are involved in the pilot program.
A Florida judge threw out a lawsuit that Donald Trump filed against Hillary Clinton and fined Trump’s lawyers nearly $1 million.
A federal judge in South Florida who threw out Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and other Democrats over the 2016 election campaign slammed the former president’s attorneys with legal fees and costs totaling nearly $1 million for filing a “completely frivolous” complaint against them.
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks on Thursday ruled in his sanctions order that lawyer Alina Habba and her law firm Habba Madaio & Associates must pay $937,989.39 in attorneys’ fees and costs to the lawyers for Clinton and 30 other plaintiffs in the case. Middlebrooks had dismissed Trump’s lawsuit last year.
Middlebrooks concluded the suit was a bad-faith use of the federal court system, in which Trump’s lawyers echoed his allegations that Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and others orchestrated a “Russia Hoax” that falsely portrayed Trump in a conspiracy with the Russians to meddle in the 2016 election campaign. Clinton lost the election to Trump, who was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller but was not charged with a crime after Mueller found that the Russian government meddled in the U.S. presidential campaign.
In the lawsuit filed in South Florida, Trump’s lawyers claimed that Clinton and other major Democrats had “orchestrated a malicious conspiracy to disseminate patently false and injurious information about Donald J. Trump and his campaign, all in the hope of destroying his life, his political career, and rigging the 2016 Presidential Election in favor of Hillary Clinton.”
Middlebrooks, responding to the defense lawyers’ motion for sanctions, found that “this case should never have been brought.”
“Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start,” Middlebrooks wrote in a scathing 46-page sanctions order. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.” The judge alluded to the “telltale signs” of Trump’s “playbook”: “Provocative and boastful rhetoric; a political narrative carried over from rallies; attacks on political opponents and the news media; disregard for legal principles and precedent; and fundraising and payments to lawyers from political action committees.”
“Thirty-one individuals and entities were needlessly harmed in order to dishonestly advance a political narrative,” Middlebrooks concluded. “A continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources from those who have suffered actual legal harm.”
Trump’s lawyers will appeal. However, after the Florida ruling, Trump dropped his $250 million lawsuit against New York State Attorney General Letitia James. His lawyers must have persuaded him that they did not want to risk their own firm’s assets.
In other Florida news, another federal judge ruled against Governor DeSantis for firing the elected state attorney for Hillsborough County, Andrew Warren. DeSantis has already named a replacement for Warren. So Warren wins the case but does not get his job back. DeSantis fired Warren because he signed a statement saying that he would not prosecution for “abortion crimes.” DeSantis accused Warren of being “woke,” which he cannot tolerate.
Despite concluding that Gov. Ron DeSantis violated the Florida Constitution and the First Amendment when he suspended Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren last year, a federal judge ruled Friday that he didn’t have the power to restore Warren to office.
U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle found that DeSantis suspended Warren based on the allegation that the state attorney had blanket policies not to prosecute certain kinds of cases. ”The allegation was false,” Hinkle wrote in a ruling issued Friday morning.
“Mr. Warren’s well-established policy, followed in every case by every prosecutor in the office, was to exercise prosecutorial discretion at every stage of every case. Any reasonable investigation would have confirmed this.” Yet Hinkle concluded that the U.S. Constitution prohibits a federal court from awarding the kind of relief Warren seeks, namely to be restored to office.
What’s going on in Florida? Governor DeSantis thinks that he should control what is taught in all public schools and in public higher education. He wants to make sure that everyone is exposed only to approved thoughts, his thoughts. He told all the state colleges and universities to report what they are spending on diversity, of which he disapproves. He has made it illegal to teach about racism, which he thinks is synonymous with critical race theory.
To understand Ron DeSantis and his ideology, you should first study critical race theory.
The presidents of Florida’s 28 state and community colleges said in a statement on Wednesday that they would identify and eliminate, by February 1, any academic requirement or program “that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.”
The unusual statement comes on the heels of a request by the office of the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, for public colleges and universities to submit comprehensive lists of their spending related to diversity initiatives and critical race theory. It’s unclear if Wednesday’s announcement is directly related to that request.
The presidents’ joint statement is unclear. Read into it what you will.
What is disturbing is the stench of thought control. I am gobsmacked by DeSantis’ total disregard for academic freedom and the First Amendment. Day after day, he chips away at norms, seeking the power to censor ideas he doesn’t like. Of course he goes after public schools and public higher education. But as he showed in his smack down of Disney, he’s quite willing to give orders to private corporations as well.
He appears to be growing into nativism, fascism, authoritarianism. It comes naturally to him.
Florida has one of the largest voucher programs in the nation, and Republicans expect to make the program even larger. With a large majority in both houses and a choice-friendly governor, they will push their bill through with little or no resistance. Florida’s voucher schools are not required to hire certified teachers; their students do not take state tests. Although accountability was a major thrust of the Florida “reforms,” voucher schools are exempt from any accountability. Most are religious schools.
The Miami Herald reported:
Florida’s school voucher program could see a major expansion under new legislation filed Thursday by House Republicans. Standing at a lectern with a sign reading “Your Kids, Your Choice,” House Speaker Paul Renner introduced House Bill 1 to make vouchers available to all Florida children eligible to enter kindergarten through 12th grade. Children from families with incomes up to 185% of the federal poverty level, which is $55,500 plus $9,509 for each additional family member, would continue to get priority for the funding. Children in foster care also would receive priority.
The bill would allow voucher recipients to use the public funds for more than tuition at a private school and transportation, as is currently in law. Families would be allowed to spend the money on home-schooling, college courses, private tutoring and specialized testing such as Advanced Placement exams, among other expenses.
Students may not be in public school to qualify for a voucher, which is the equivalent of per-student funding in a public school — currently about $8,216 per year.
Families would receive the money through state-funded education savings accounts, a longtime goal for Florida Republicans. “It’s about freedom and opportunity,” Renner, R-Palm Coast, said during his news conference. “We empower parents and children to decide the education that meets their needs.”
State Rep. Kaylee Tuck, chairperson of the House Choice and Innovation subcommittee, is carrying the bill. The Lake Placid Republican said the measure should allow families to customize education for their children.
Renner predicted broad bipartisan support for the bill, which he said also should clear the waiting list for students with special education needs to receive a state scholarship. Currently about 9,400 children are on that list, according to Renner’s staff.
DEMOCRATS CALL IT ‘DEFUNDING PUBLIC EDUCATION’
House Democratic Leader Rep. Fentrice Driskell disagreed with Renner’s comments regarding support for the bill. She called it a “defunding of public education” and said she expected most members of her party to oppose it. “There is nothing in this bill that I like, because we continue to take these public dollars and use them for private purposes,” Driskell, D-Tampa, said.
Other Democrats attending a news conference to counter the Republicans’ announcement held similar views. They said they support vouchers for students who need special services, and agreed that parents deserve choices — including within the public schools, which 2.9 million children attend.
“Let’s not defund one institution to fund another one,” said Rep. Felicia Robinson, D-Miami Gardens, who also called for more accountability in the voucher system. Schools that accept vouchers should at least have certified teachers, Robinson said.
And parents who accept funding should have to prove the money is going toward approved education services, added Rep. Yvonne Hayes Hinson, D-Gainesville. ”There is no accountability for tracking funds,” said Hinson.
“This might be a get-rich scheme. I’ve seen it all over the country.” Rep. Allison Tant, D-Tallahassee, referenced her city’s Red Hills Academy, a charter school that closed within weeks of opening last year, citing low enrollment and processing issues, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. ”They got state funding to go create themselves,” Tant said. “Then they turn the kids back to public schools and guess what? They kept the funding.” In Palm Beach County, the founder of one charter school was found profiting off the venture by steering school contracts to companies he owned, according to the Palm Beach Post.
RENNER OFFERS REBUTTAL ON FUNDING
Renner said critics who claim the Republicans are seeking to dismantle public education ignore the fact that the Legislature has put more total dollars into district schools every year, something he said would likely continue. He also pointed to the state’s efforts to improve teacher pay, adding millions of dollars to boost the base salary.
“It’s going to be a good year for our traditional public schools as well,” Renner said.
Just in case there was any doubt about what Governor DeSantis and Florida legislature banned when they outlawed any discussion of “critical race theory,” that doubt has been resolved. They do not want schools and teachers to acknowledge race, racism, or the very existence of people of color in the United States. Sight unseen, the DOE has banned an AP course on African American studies. The Department claimed that the content of the course is historically inaccurate and violates state law, even though the Department has never seen the course syllabus.
The Miami Herald reported today:
Without a detailed explanation, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies for high school students, broadly claiming it violates state law and that it “lacks educational value.”
When asked for specifics on the content, the Florida Department of Education did not respond, making it unclear what items the state believes are unlawful or objectionable.
“In the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion,” the state wrote in a letter to the College Board, the company that administers the course as well as other interdisciplinary courses and the SAT exam.
The Advanced Placement program is the first course in African American studies to be offered by the College Board. It would allow high school students to earn credits and advanced placement at many colleges across the country.
The course has been in development for more than a decade, and it focuses not just in history, but explores the “vital contributions and experiences of African Americans” in literature, the arts, political science, geography and science, according to the College Board. A syllabus is not yet publicly available.
Mercedes Schneider takes issue with the new authoritarians who are imposing book bans in the name of “freedom” and limiting free expressions of views they disagree with in the name of of “choice.”
She writes:
We are certainly in an age in which the term, “free speech,” is indeed not free because of increasing conservative pressure to shape speech into that which a minority of extreme, right-wing conservatives would agree with.
Of course, that is not “free speech” at all.
In my school district, the St. Tammany Library Alliance is combating the right-wing conservative push to ban library books not to its liking. In its campaign declaring “Libraries Are for Everyone,” the Alliance is circulating a petition that states the following:
St Tammany Parish is a welcoming community to all and we stand firmly against banning books. As such we endorse the following statements:
We believe that all young people in our Parish deserve to see themselves reflected in our library’s collection.
We know a large majority of Americans (75%) across the political spectrum oppose book bans.We stand in opposition to the St Tammany Parish Accountability Project’s proposed “Library Accountability Board” ordinance because we believe parents should not be making decisions for other parents’ children about what they read or what is available in our public libraries.
Banning books from public libraries is a slippery slope to government censorship and a violation of our first amendment rights.
We hold our library Director, board and library staff in high regard and trust them to do their jobs.
We are united against book bans and we ask that our Parish President and Council pledge to act to protect the rights of members of our community to access a variety of books, magazines and other media through our public libraries.
Those truly adhering to and protecting free speech are at risk of losing their jobs– and under increasing pressure to modify their speech in order to please the extreme, disgruntled few.
I gladly signed the petition. Even though it is not likely that I might choose to read certain books harbored in my local public library, there is something much greater at risk if I try to impose a self-tailored book purge, and that something is freedom itself.
Freedom is not freedom if I tailor the freedom of others to suit my own preferences.
A great irony is that some of the same folks who would shape education and curriculum into their preferred image also promote themselves as great advocates of “school choice.”
Mercedes goes on to describe examples of “choice” that is no choice at all.” Freedom is curtailed when one group of people can curtail the rights of others to disagree.
Please open the link and read her warning about the threat to democracy posed by today’s narrow-minded ideologues.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to stake his claim to be the leader of the libertarian anti-vaxxers. He has banned any mandates by schools or businesses to require masking or getting vaccinated. The legislature went along with him, on a temporary basis, but now he wants the legislators to mandate non-compliance with CDC public health protocols. (Because he opposes mandates!). In short, he is mandating that no one can require a mandate to wear a mask or get vaccinated.
Is he stupid, clever, craven, cunning or what? If nothing else, he’s getting attention.
The Miami Herald reports:
Despite facing pushback from medical professionals and businesses, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced legislation Tuesday that would make permanent a law to penalize companies that require employees to wear masks or be vaccinated for COVID-19 and added a new ban on medical boards reprimanding doctors for spreading COVID misinformation.
“This is just nuts that we’re still doing this,’’ DeSantis said to cheering supporters in Panama City Beach. “We need to be leading on this by making all of these protections permanent in Florida statute as we need to do in the upcoming legislative session.”
The proposal will attempt to make permanent a series of laws passed by legislators in November 2021 after DeSantis called a special session aimed at restricting Florida businesses that were following a federal law requiring mask mandates or requiring employees to be vaccinated. If approved by Florida legislators, the measure would continue to prohibit COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements in schools and government, and prohibit COVID-19 vaccine requirements for employment or travel.
Those laws are set to expire in June. DeSantis wants them re-enacted and made tougher to be sure that no one feels compelled to wear a mask or get vaccinated.
This year, DeSantis wants to expand the sanctions on businesses by prohibiting employers from hiring or firing based on vaccine status or wearing a mask, and he wants to revive a failed proposal from last year’s legislative session that would make it more difficult for a medical licensing board to reprimand or sanction a doctor for views expressed by the medical professional — including on social media.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo also spoke at the news conference Tuesday and repeated his claim that masks are not effective in preventing the spread of the virus and dismissed the effectiveness of vaccines. “This is the first time in history where we are using this technology widely in human beings,’’ he said, referring to the mRNA vaccines.
“You’re telling people to put it in children, and you’ve never even shown the children to gain from it in terms of an actual help. That’s the land of crazy. Florida is the land of sanity.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website lists several studies that have shown masking to be helpful in curbing the spread of the virus. In January 2022, a CDC report found vaccinated Americans were far less likely both to contract the virus and die from it.
LEADING HOUSE DEMOCRAT RESPONDS
House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell of Tampa called the governor and his administration “the No. 1 peddler of misinformation from the anti-vax establishment.”
“It is a fake ideology with real consequences,’’ she said, noting that less than one-third of Florida’s nursing home residents, the most vulnerable age group, are up to date on their vaccines, even though the state Department of Health recommends it.
Driskell emphasized that “no one ever promised total immunity, but those vaccines do lessen the chance of infection and they increase the likelihood of a milder case if you do get sick.” She accused the governor of “rewriting history” after promoting the vaccines when they were first available.
Since former President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid, DeSantis sought to become the face of the opposition to the Biden administration’s COVID policies which the governor said were overreaching. He called lawmakers into special session in November 2021 to punish companies that followed the federal law.
DeSantis wanted the legislature to punish businesses that required their employees to get vaccinated, but more than 100 corporations objected to the state’s interference in their operations, and the legislature did not adopt DeSantis’ most punitive measures. However, after his sweeping re-election, the legislature is likely to give him what he wants…
“The Free State of Florida did not happen by accident,” DeSantis said at the news conference Tuesday in which he took no questions. “It required us over these last few years to stand against major institutions in our society — the bureaucracy, the medical establishment, legacy media and even the President of the United States — who together were working to impose a bio medical security state on society.”
Billy Townsend writes in the Tampa Bay Times about how Florida politicians game the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores to boast about unearned “success.” The gaming consists of bragging about fourth grade scores (which are high) while ignoring eighth grade scores (which are unimpressive).
The big Florida trick is third grade retention—holding back the children in third grade who have low reading scores. This artificially boosts fourth grade scores. But then comes the eighth grade scores, and Florida falls behind. They can’t hide the low-scoring students forever.
He writes:
A close look at ‘the Nation’s Report Card’ shows how Florida fails its students as they move up through the grades.
A few years ago, just before COVID hit, a Stanford University study of state-level standardized tests showed that Florida’s “learning rate” was the worst in the country — by a wide margin.
Florida has the worst learning rate, according to a Stanford study. [ Provided ]
Florida students learned 12 percent less each year from third to eighth grade than the national average from 2009 to 2018. The next worst state was Alabama, according to The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Florida’s political and education leaders completely ignored that finding.
Contrast that deafening silence with the hype and misinterpretation that comes with the release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), “the Nation’s Report Card.” When those results came out last fall, Gov. Ron DeSantis crowed on Twitter that, “We kept schools open in 2020, and today’s NAEP results once again prove that we made the right decision. In Florida, adjusted for demographics, fourth grade students are #1 in both reading and math.”
Tellingly, DeSantis ignored the eighth grade results, which came out far worse than fourth grade — just as they have in every NAEP cycle since 2003.
The “Nation’s Report Card” is a snapshot of group proficiency taken by different cohorts of kids every two years in reading and math in fourth grade and eighth grade. It produces state-by-state results and proficiency rankings. It does not track individual kids year over year. But it does tell you how Florida’s fourth and eighth graders compare with students in other states. I crunched the data, and here’s the bottom line: Florida’s students perform worse as they move up through the grades. There is consistent, massive systemic regression with age. And the gap is widening.
This is a state failure, not a local one attributable to individual districts. Yet, in every NAEP cycle, Florida politicians and education leaders brag about fourth-grade NAEP results in press releases.
But ignoring the eighth grade results or the “learning rate” study does not change these facts:
· Florida kids regress dramatically as they age in the system. Since 2003, Florida’s eighth grade rank as a state has never come close to its fourth grade rank on any NAEP test in any subject.
· The size of Florida’s regression is dramatic and growing, especially in math.Florida’s overall average NAEP state rank regression between fourth and eighth grade since 2003 is 17 spots (math) and 18 spots (reading). But since 2015, the averages are 27 spots (math) and 19 spots (reading).
· No other state comes close to Florida’s level of consistent fourth to eighth grade performance collapse. In the last three NAEP cycles — 2017, 2019 and COVID-delayed 2022 — Florida ranked sixth, fourth and third among states in fourth grade math. In those same years, Florida ranked 33th, 34th and tied for 31st in eighth grade.
· For comparison, Massachusetts typically ranks at or near #1 among states on both the fourth grade and eighth grade NAEP for math and reading. Its eighth grade rank has never been more than one spot lower than fourth.
· Florida has never matched the U.S. average scaled score on eighth grade math NAEP.
· In COVID-marred 2022, Florida’s eighth grade scale scores in reading and math both lost 8 points relative to the national average, compared to fourth grade. That’s larger or equal to the overall collapse of NAEP scores nationwide attributed to COVID.
To restate, what happens every NAEP cycle between fourth and eighth grade in Florida matches and mostly exceeds the negative impact of COVID. Overall, recent NAEP cycles show Florida collapsing from elite test scores in fourth grade reading and math to abysmal in eighth grade math and average in eighth grade reading, even after its much-hyped approach to COVID in 2022.
And, worse, there is no reason at all to believe Florida’s test performance regression with age stops at eighth grade. The only two years the NAEP tested 12th graders — 2009 and 2013 — the Florida collapse worsened significantly with further age, but against a smaller pool of states.
Willful ignorance, useless testing
So what to make of this?
You can rest assured that your top education officials know all about Florida’s eighth grade NAEP and learning rate failures, which is why they never discuss them. I suspect these test data realities helped drive Florida to drop its big state growth test — the Florida Standards Assessment — and move toward a “progress monitoring” regime this year that may or may not create functionally different data reporting models.
The discourse around Florida’s NAEP performance — and the catastrophic learning rate that we ignore on our state tests — makes me deeply skeptical of standardized tests and their use in our education systems and society. I see them as punitive political and social sorting tools, rather than “assessments” designed to help individual children reach their potential.
Forget whether test results are valid or biased. We can’t even accurately describe what the test results say — on their face — about the success of our state school system. So what use are they?
Florida’s politicians, education leaders, policy community and journalists should look at these results and ask this basic question: The data tells us your child will regress dramatically every year he or she stays in the Florida system. What’s going on?
If we can’t do that, then why do we force standardized tests on kids at all?
What we should be studying
I’ve been attempting to draw attention to this dramatic Florida regression dynamic for years. So I was pleased to the see the Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board and Hillsborough County Schools Superintendent Addison Davis notice and publicly address the massive drop in test performance between fourth and eighth grade in Florida on the 2022 NAEP. But I was puzzled by suggestions that it was something new, caused by COVID. It isn’t; and it wasn’t.
Indeed, if we took standardized tests seriously as diagnostic and development tools, we would have long ago started asking: What causes this? What changes need to be made beyond rebuilding and supporting a developmentally focused teacher corps? What are the system quirks of Florida that cause this dynamic?
Here are some good questions to ask and study:
· Why doesn’t “learn to read, read to learn” work in Florida?
One of our treasured education cliches is “learn to read” so you can “read to learn.” It’s essentially the policy justification for imposing mass retention on third graders, as Florida does. And yet, although Florida routinely ranks high fourth grade NAEP reading, our readers immediately lose massive ground relative to other states. The data shows that Florida’s often punitive emphasis on “learn to read” by third or fourth grade creates no benefit in “reading to learn” in later grades — in math or reading. Why not?
· What is the role of mass third grade retention in Florida’s fourth grade peak and subsequent collapse?
Florida pioneered mass third grade retention based on reading standardized test scores in 2003. This prevents the lowest scoring third grade readers from taking the NAEP with their age cohort in fourth grade. And when that low scoring third grader finally takes the fourth grade NAEP, retention has made it as if he or she is a fifth grader taking the fourth grade NAEP.
Florida law theoretically subjects more than 40 percent of Florida’s roughly 200,000 public school third graders to retention because of low scores. A smaller — but still significant — number is actually retained. Florida does not appear to publish that actual total number of third graders retained.
· What is the cost to the individual children and overall system performance?
Is that affecting Florida’s learning rate for older kids and the eighth grade NAEP collapse? A 2017 study of a cohort of southwest Florida students showed that seven years after retention, 94% of the retained group remained below reading proficiency. It also showed that third and sixth graders find retention as stressful as losing a parent.
· How many voucher third grade testing refugees are there? What effect do they have on the fourth grade NAEP?
Third grade retention is not Florida’s only way to get low scoring fourth graders off the books for the NAEP. It’s been well-established that Florida over-testing and third grade retention is a primary sales tool for vouchers.TheOrlando Sentinel’sPulitzer-worthy “Schools without Rules”report in 2017 about voucher schools reported: “Escaping high-stakes testing is such a scholarship selling point that one private school administrator refers to students as ‘testing refugees’.”
How many testing refugees are there? And how does Florida’s massive voucher program — America’s largest and least studied — affect performance on the NAEP by allowing low scoring kids to duck it?
· What effect do voucher school dropouts have on scoring when they return in massive numbers to public schools?
Enormous numbers of “low-scoring” kids duck third and fourth grade tests and then come back into the public system to be counted in the eighth grade NAEP and other yearly tests. That’s likely a recipe for score collapse. But there is no hard data to analyze. Florida is long overdue for such a study, and voucher advocates know it will be a data bloodbath.
· Does chasing test scores kill test scores over time?
Test-driven instruction isn’t engaging. Kids come to understand how useless these tests are to their lives; and they behave accordingly. Teachers come to hate the test-obsessed model and leave the profession. How has that affected test scores?
A longstanding waste of human potential
For me, the eighth grade NAEP and “learning rate” failures are evidence that we’ve wasted a generation of human potential and severely damaged Florida’s teaching profession. Will anyone “follow the data” where it leads? Will anyone ask: Should our kids peak at age 9 and decline inexorably from there?
I believe Florida has long had one of America’s worst test-performing state school systems because of its governance model and intellectual corruption and pursuit of useless measures and fake accountability.
I
Billy Townsend was an award-winning investigative reporter for The Lakeland Ledger and Tampa Tribune. He oversaw education reporting as an editor for The Ledger. He has been an independent writer and journalist since 2008, focused on Florida history, education and civic systems. He was an elected Polk County School Board member from 2016-2020. Today he writes the Florida-focused email newsletter “Public Enemy Number 1.” He can be reached at townsendsubstackpe1@gmail.com.
Ron DeSantis wants to prove he is more like Trump than Trump, to show he has even less humanity than the Master.
The Miami Herald reported:
A Leon County Circuit Court judge on Friday refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Ron DeSantis brought by a North Miami Beach state senator who has accused Florida’s governor of illegally using taxpayer funds to fly migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts last September.
Judge John C. Cooper set a Jan. 30 trial date to hear the constitutional challenge brought by Sen. Jason Pizzo, a Democrat who is suing in his capacity as a private citizen. Cooper rejected attempts by DeSantis’ lawyers to dismiss the case, although he did agree to release Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis as a defendant. Pizzo argues that the 2022-23 state appropriations bill that financed the controversial flights improperly used the budget to create a substantial new program instead of authorizing it through a separate law. Under long-standing principles of the Florida Constitution, substantial policies and programs must be first authorized in a separate law so that they can be widely discussed and reviewed by lawmakers.
DeSantis signed the budget on June 8, including the provision that allocated $12 million in interest the state earned from COVID relief funds to pay for “relocation services” run by the Florida Department of Transportation “to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state.” Records obtained by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, the Miami Herald, and other news organizations have shed light on the covert operation involving the governor’s staff, who worked with a politically connected vendor to wriggle around the budget requirement that Florida use the money to export Florida migrants — not those living in some other state.
Pizzo argues that in addition to violating the Constitution by using the budget language to create a new program, the Florida Department of Transportation violated another law when it created written “guidelines” for the contract, rather than requiring vendors to submit a sealed bid as is required by state law for contracts over $35,000. Pizzo also argues that the $1.5 million paid to Vertol Systems Company, Inc. , the Destin-based company whose CEO is a former legal client of the governor’s “public safety czar” Larry Keefe, “far exceed the $35,000 cost threshold triggering the competitive solicitation.” The money appears to be for payments of $650,000 and $950,000, although three purchase orders for $950,000 have been posted on the state contract disclosure web site. The Miami Herald learned that after Vertol coordinated two planeloads of migrants to Massachusetts from Texas on Sept. 14, it expected to conduct a second flight the next week bringing migrants from San Antonio to Delaware. But, after intense media scrutiny and an investigation by a Texas sheriff, that flight was called off.
State transaction records show that Vertol was paid in advance for both projects, including the flights that were never completed. Pizzo argued that Patronis should also be a defendant in the lawsuit because he “has failed to take action to recover any portion of those funds … for services which to date have not been performed.” He also accused Patronis of failing to demand information from FDOT to justify the expense and explain its contracting decisions. Patronis’ lawyer, Ty Jackson of the GrayRobinson law firm, argued that the CFO had no role in deciding how to spend state funds. Cooper agreed and dismissed him as a defendant in the case. “It’s not his baby,’’ Cooper concluded during the hearing Friday. “He’s not the one who decided to do it and says he’s going to do it again. The CFO cut a check.”
Nicholas Meros, deputy general counsel for DeSantis, argued that the governor and legislators “did not create a new program” when they inserted the authority to spend $12 million on migrant relocation services into state law. The reason, he said, is that the provision expanded on another law that prohibited the state from entering into a contract with anyone who transports “an unauthorized alien” into Florida except to detain or remove that person “from this state or the United States.” That provision became law through SB 1808, a bill that passed on March 9 but wasn’t signed by the governor until June 17. That was 15 days after the governor signed the budget and Section 185, the provision that included the $12 million in relocation funds.
Under questioning by Cooper, Meros did not appear to be aware that the law he argued the budget was modifying wasn’t on the books yet when legislators passed the budget. It was another example of the confusing arguments the governor and his staff have had to pursue to justify spending Florida money to relocate migrants arriving in Texas, not Florida.
Cooper noted that before DeSantis could say he was relocating migrants out of Florida, he had to pay to fly them in. “I don’t’ see anything … that says you can go to Texas and pick up people, bring them to Florida for a few minutes and then take them to another state under this program,’’ he said.
Records released in November, after the Florida Center for Government Accountability filed a lawsuit, show that the two planes carrying migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard made a 30-minute pit stop in the Panhandle town of Crestview.
The flights have been denounced by the governor’s critics as a stunt, but they have also contributed to his stature as a conservative stalwart among Republican voters as he considers a run for president in 2024. The attention also put a spotlight on the immigration crisis along the southern border.
As Republicans accused President Joe Biden of not doing enough to stem the growing influx of migrants, DeSantis announced last week he would increase state resources aimed at the surge of migrants from Cuba and Haiti. His deputies said the effort will focus on using state airplanes to help the federal government’s efforts to interdict and return migrants to their countries of origin.
Pizzo is asking the court to declare the section of the budget that includes the $12 million in relocation funds unconstitutional, and to prohibit the governor from spending any more of the money. He also argues the state violates the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution because Congress gives the federal government exclusive power over immigration, and that by inserting itself into immigration enforcement, the state is violating the federal Constitution.
DeSantis’ lawyers argue, however, that the relocation program “does not regulate the flow of aliens into or out of the United States or determine anybody’s citizenship status.’’ Instead, they said in a motion filed last week that the state is only making funds available to “facilitate the transport of consenting unauthorized aliens from Florida to other states.”
Michelle Goldberg, a columnist for the New York Times, writes here about Governor Ron DeSantis’s bold move to crush a progressive public college in Florida by naming right wingers to its board. DeSantis boasts that Florida is the state where “woke” goes to die, so of course he must take control of this “woke” college and destroy it. He’s showing his fascistic instincts. Whatever he can’t control, whatever dissents from his hardline views must die.
She writes:
New College of Florida has a reputation for being the most progressive public college in the state. X González — a survivor of the Parkland school shooting who, as Emma González, became a prominent gun control activist — recently wrote of their alma mater, “In the queer space of New College, changing your pronouns, name or presentation is a nonevent.” In The Princeton Review’s ranking of the best public colleges and universities for “making an impact” — measured by things like student engagement, community service and sustainability efforts — New College comes in third.
Naturally, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wants to demolish it, at least as it currently exists. On Friday, he announced six new appointments to New College’s 13-member board of trustees, including Chris Rufo, who orchestrated the right’s attack on critical race theory, and Matthew Spalding, a professor and dean at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan with close ties to Donald Trump. (A seventh member will soon be appointed by Florida’s Board of Governors, which is full of DeSantis allies.)
The new majority’s plan, Rufo told me just after his appointment was announced, is to transform New College into a public version of Hillsdale. “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values,” he said.
The fight over the future of New College is about more than just the fate of this small school in Sarasota. For DeSantis, it’s part of a broader quest to crush any hint of progressivism in public education, a quest he’d likely take national if he ever became president. For Rufo, a reconstructed New College would serve as a model for conservatives to copy all over the country. “If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory, we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States,” he said. Should he prevail, it will set the stage for an even broader assault on the academic freedom of every instructor whose worldview is at odds with the Republican Party.
Rufo often talks about the “long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by the German socialist Rudi Dutschke in 1967 but frequently attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Thwarted in their hope of imminent revolution, the new left of Dutschke’s generation sought instead to bore into political and cultural institutions, working within the system to change the basic assumptions of Western society. Rufo’s trying, he said, to “steal the strategies and the principles of the Gramscian left, and then to organize a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march through the institutions.”
This grandiose project has several parts. Rufo has been unparalleled in fanning public education culture wars, whipping up anger first against critical race theory and then against teaching on L.G.B.T.Q. issues. This year, he is turning his attention to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and, with his colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, will soon unveil model legislation to abolish such programs at state schools. In New College, he sees a chance to create a new type of educational institution to replace those he’s trying to destroy. When we spoke, he compared his plans to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
Later this month, Rufo said, he’ll travel to New College with a “landing team” of board members, lawyers, consultants and political allies. “We’re going to be conducting a top-down restructuring,” he said, with plans to “design a new core curriculum from scratch” and “encode it in a new academic master plan.” Given that Hillsdale, the template for this reimagined New College, worked closely with the Trump administration to create a “patriotic education” curriculum, this master plan will likely be heavy on American triumphalism. Rufo hopes to move fast, saying that the school’s academic departments “are going to look very different in the next 120 days.”
The values of the people who are already at New College are of little concern to Rufo, who, like several other new trustees, doesn’t live in Florida. Speaking of current New College students who chose it precisely for its progressive culture, Rufo said: “We’re happy to work with them to make New College a great place to continue their education. Or we’d be happy to work with them to help them find something that suits them better.”
Of course, as both leftist revolutionaries and colonialists have learned over the years, replacing one culture with another can be harder than anticipated. New College students may not go quietly. Steve Shipman, a professor of physical chemistry and president of the faculty union, points out that tenured professors are covered by a collective bargaining agreement, which makes it hard to fire them unless there’s cause. People like Rufo “are making statements to make impact,” Shipman said. “And I really don’t know how viable some of those statements are on the ground.”
We’ll soon find out. “We anticipate that this is going to be a process that involves conflict,” said Rufo.
Diane Ravitch's blog 