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Scott Maxwell: Florida Digs in Deeper on the Good Side of Slavery

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2023 //
12

Scott Maxwell is an excellent columnist for The Orlando Sentinel. He brings us up to date on Florida’s efforts to promote the bright side of slavery.

He writes:

Every week lately, Florida seems to make more headlines for trying to turn public schools into a political war zone. The two latest examples:

The Sentinel revealed the Florida Department of Education has hired a new political operative who’s working with the book-censoring Moms for Liberty — and won’t say how many of your tax dollars the state is paying him or even why.

Also, the state has approved new classroom videos made by a guy who admits his goal is “indoctrination.”

One video features a cartoon version of Christopher Columbus telling kids that, while slavery might not be great, “being taken as a slave is better than being killed.” Another tells students that one of the most important things kids “need to know” about slavery is that “White men led the world in putting an end to the abhorrent practice.”

White men as saviors is quite the top-line takeaway on slavery.

The Orlando Sentinel first broke the news about the new hire, revealing that the state had hired Terry Stoops, a guy who pushed GOP education policies in North Carolina, to lead its newly created Office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts.

The office title sounds like gobbledygook. But what are Stoops’ job responsibilities? And how much are you, as a taxpayer, paying him? Well, the state wouldn’t answer either question.

Even Florida’s online employee-salary database somehow omitted Stoops.

But emails obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project — which is leading the fight against classroom book-banning and censorship — showed that Stoops seemed to be working as a state liaison to right-wing crusaders.

In one email, Stoops wrote a Volusia County school board member to say: “We would be happy to meet with the Conservative Coalition of School Board Members as a group to explore ways that our efforts may align.”

In another, he told Orange County school board member Alicia Farrant, a Moms for Liberty member leading Central Florida’s in-school book-banning crusade: “I just wanted to pass along a note to thank you for serving on the board and standing up for families.”

Just for argument’s sake, let’s say you think it’s a swell idea for government to use tax dollars to push a political agenda. What excuse could you possibly have for hiding from taxpayers how many of those dollars you’re using and for what allegedly public purpose?

In normal times, that secrecy would be big news. But that revelation was eclipsed by the even more disturbing news that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education department had also decided to welcome videos into classrooms from a guy who admits his goal is indoctrination.

As the Miami Herald reported, the Department of Education said it had concluded that the controversial PragerU program “aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards” and “can be used as supplemental materials in Florida schools at district discretion.”

If you’re not familiar with Prager, you should first know that PragerU is an actual university in the same way Dr. Dre is an actual doctor. It’s not. Instead, it’s the creation of conservative radio show host Dennis Prager who freely admits his goal is to indoctrinate kids.

Just last month, at a Moms for Liberty event, Prager said that when critics say to him “you indoctrinate kids,” he responds that is true. “That’s a very fair statement,” he said. “But what is the bad about our indoctrination?”

In Florida, where DeSantis often decries the evils of indoctrination, we’re again reminded that every accusation is often a confession.

I encourage you to watch some of the PragerU videos for yourself.

In one video, a cartoon version of Columbus tells kids who ask about his support of slavery: “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”

That’s quite a bar you’ve set for yourself, cartoon Chris. And for the kids.

Another video — “A Short History of Slavery,” narrated by conservative pundit Candace Owens — tells kids: “Here’s the first thing you need to know: Slavery was not ‘invented’ by White people.”

Yes, that’s actually “the first thing” PragerU thinks kids need to know about human captivity. Not how slavery destroyed generations of lives to help slavemasters enrich themselves. Or that, heaven forbid, that was wrong. But that White folks didn’t pioneer the system.

So were the harsh realities of human captivity at least the “second thing” kids need to know about slavery? Nope. According to PragerU and Owens, who is Black, the second-most important thing kids should know is that “White people were the first to put an end to slavery.”

So one of PragerU’s top two lessons on slavery is basically: Yay, White people!

Bizarre? Yes. Yet it seems to work well with the new Florida curriculum standards you read about last week — the ones that tell teachers to stress the “personal benefit” some slaves received in terms of learning job skills. And also with the laws GOP legislators passed that instruct educators to censor discussion about “systemic racism” and to sanitize history lessons that might upset some children’s parents.

The Freedom to Read organization is suggesting Florida families use the state’s new “parental rights” law to opt-out of PragerU’s indoctrination.

But it seems like it might be simpler to, oh, I dunno, maybe just not indoctrinate?

Maybe just teach history like it really happened, warts and all.

And maybe be fully transparent with taxpayer money and public positions.

Unfortunately, that all seems like too much to ask.

smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Lies, Racism

Florida Adopts Curriculum to Indoctrinate Students in Rightwing Views

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2023 //
46

Ana Cenallos of The Orlando Sentinel reports that the state of Florida adopted curriculum materials created by rightwing talk show host Dennis Prager with the explicit purpose of indoctrinating students to accept rightwing views of controversial topics.

Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly says he opposes indoctrination in schools. Yet his administration in early July approved materials from a conservative group that says it’s all about indoctrination and “changing minds.”

The Florida Department of Education determined that educational materials geared toward young children and high school students created by PragerU, a nonprofit co-founded by conservative radio host Dennis Prager, were in alignment with the state’s standards on how to teach civics and government to K-12 students.

The content, some of which is narrated by conservative personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Candance Owens, features cartoons, five-minute video history lessons and story-time shows for young children. It is part of a brand called PragerU Kids. And the lessons share a common message: Being pro-American means aligning oneself to mainstream conservative talking points.

“We are in the mind-changing business and few groups can say that,” Prager says in a promotional video for PragerU. He reiterated this sentiment this summer at a conference for the conservative group Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia, saying it is “fair” to say PragerU indoctrinates children.

“It’s true we bring doctrines to children,” Prager told the group. “But what is the bad about our indoctrination?”

The bottom line message: The US is the best place ever. Its history is unblemished by any troubling episodes. Slavery was practiced in many societies, and white people should be credited with ending it.

PragerU is not an accredited university and it publicly says the group is a “force of good” against the left. It’s a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles that produces videos that touch on a range of themes, including climate policies (specifically how “energy poverty, not climate change” is the real crisis), the flaws of Canada’s government-run healthcare system (and how the American privatized system is better), and broad support for law enforcement (and rejection of Black Lives Matter).

In some cases, the videos tell kids that their teachers are “misinformed” or “lying.”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civics, Curriculum, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, Florida, History, Lies, Propaganda

The Big Lie About America’s Public Schools and the Scheme to Privatize Them

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
49

America’s public schools were one of the glories of the nation until recently. Politicians hailed them as a symbol of democracy, a public institution open to all, supported by taxpayers, and controlled by elected local boards.

Local business leaders frequently served on local school boards. Americans broadly understood that the schools prepared the rising generation to be good citizens and to sustain our democracy. Certain principles were taken for granted: public funds were never used to fund religious schools; teachers and principals were career professionals, often the most educated members of their community, and were respected.

This is not to say that everything was rosy. I have written several books about the controversies that rocked the schools, especially over desegregation, which encountered vehement resistance in both the South and the North.

But despite the battles over race, curriculum, and other matters, the public schools garnered high praise from the public and elected officials.

However, this iconic symbol began to take a drubbing in 1983, when the Reagan-era National Commission on Excellence in Education released its harshly negative report called “A Nation at Risk.” The commission claimed that the nation’s schools were mired in a sea of mediocrity, that test scores were on a downward spiral, and that the nation’s public schools were responsible for the loss of major industries to other nations.

The reaction to the report was immediate: states set up task forces and commissions to find solutions to the schools’ crisis. Higher standards for students and teachers, more time in school, tougher curricula, etc.

The one refrain that became the legacy of “A Nation at Risk” was: Our schools are failing.

But we now know that the report was a hoax. James Harvey, who worked on the commission’s staff, explained that the books were cooked to produce a negative result. The data were cherry-picked to paint the schools in the worst possible light. The conclusions were a lie. The report ignored positive findings and chose to ignore the students living in poverty, the students with disabilities, and the other socioeconomic challenges facing the nation’s schools.

So today, relying on the Big Lie of 1983 (“our schools are failing”), ideologues, grifters, tax-cutters, religious interests, and others have joined forces to grab the money now devoted to public schools.

To the original Big Lie have been added new Big Lies to advance the cause of privatization and profits:

Big Lie number one: Test scores are reliable indicators of school and teacher quality. This simple but wrong idea was the basis for No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.

Big Lie number two: Teachers need not be professional to get good results. Inexperienced teachers with high expectations and a few weeks of training will get better results than career professionals. This lie undercut the profession, undermined respect for teachers, and was the founding myth of Teach for America.

Big Lie number three: the private sector will run schools more effectively than local government, therefore we need more charter schools. BUT: The charter sector has spawned scandals, with private entrepreneurs embezzling millions of dollars for themselves. Some charters get high test scores by excluding weak students, some get high scores by attrition of weak students. Many charter schools close every year due to academic or financial problems. On average, charter schools do not get better results than public schools.

Big Lie number four: vouchers will produce higher test scores. BUT: Voucher schools, funded with taxpayer dollars, are usually exempt from state testing and are not accountable as public schools are. Where voucher students do take state tests, they fall farther and farther behind their peers in public schools. Now that it’s well-known that voucher schools are academically behind public schools, their proponents have moved the goalposts to say: Parents should choose, no matter what the studies show about test scores.

The Republican Party, with few exceptions, has swallowed the Big Lies and is intent on giving every student—regardless of income—a voucher to attend a religious school, private school, or home school.

For the first time in two centuries, the very concept of public schools is in jeopardy.

Ninety percent of Americans were educated in public schools. That ninety percent made America a successful nation by most measures. Public schools built bridges among diverse communities.

What will the new paradigm contribute to our nation?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Fake, Fraud, History, Hoax

Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Big-Lie Ad Threatens Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
23

Journalist Thom Hartmann shows that Trump’s latest ad is an exercise in the Big Lie Technique. It contains vile smears that simple-minded people are likely to believe. It resounds with echoes of fascism.

He writes:

Trump’s people are promoting a new lie-filled fascist advertisement, which even the normally unflappable Frank Luntz called “disturbing.” It follows a fairly ancient pattern of destructive Big Lies that goes back to Renaissance Italy and even the Roman republic and ancient Greece.

German filmmaker Fritz Hippler, one of Goebbels’ most effective propagandists (he produced the infamous movie The Eternal Jew), said that two steps are necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it.

The first is to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand.” 

The second is to “repeat the oversimplification over and over.” 

If these two steps are followed, Hippler and Goebbels both knew, enough people will come to believe a Big Lie that it can change the politics of a nation.

In Hippler’s day, the best example of his application of the principle was his 1940 movie “Campaign in Poland,” which argued that the Polish people were suffering under tyranny — a tyranny that would someday threaten Germany — and that the German people could either allow this cancer to fester, or preemptively “liberate” Poland.

Hitler took the “strong and decisive” path, the movie suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the invasion little evidence was found that Poland represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful German Reich. The movie was Hitler’s way of saying that invading Poland was the right thing to do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it again.

The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United States of America, and what’s most troubling about it is the basic premise that underlies its use. For somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli’s premise (in “The Prince,” 1532) that “the ends justify the means.”

Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe — and then the world — in a thousand-year era of peace, which he claimed was foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a thousand years of peace is such a noble end that any means is justified to reach it, it’s a short leap to eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents and prisoners, and mass murder.

Believing that the end justifies the means is the ultimate slippery slope. It will kill any noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it will have been corrupted along the way by the means used to accomplish it…

In real life, it’s the story of the many tinpot dictators around the world who quote America’s Founders while enforcing a brutal rule, of fossil fuel executives pushing for lax CO2 rules to “help the American economy,” of the legion of lobbyists who work daily to corrupt democracy in the name of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry (among others).

Here in the US it was used by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to lie us into murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when there was little consequence to them personally or the GOP, Republicans decided to continue the Big Lie strategy and are using it to this day.

Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about this, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Kafka.

Be it “small sins” like the Green Party and No Labels getting into bed with Republicans to get on state ballots, or “big sins” like rightwing think-tanks working to turn America into a strongman oligarchy with their Project 2025, trying to accomplish a “good” by using the means of an “evil” like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.

Now the Trump campaign and its allies are encouraging a new series of Big Lies to assail President Biden and the very idea of democracy itself.

With the smug assurance of damage done to the enemy, Republican governors are rewriting American history (the Big Lie that white children are injured by learning about Black history), criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community (the Big Lie that queer people are “groomers”), and throwing millions of people in Blue cities off the voting rolls (the Big Lie of voter fraud).

They are pushing and celebrating nakedly fascist policies, tropes, and memes.

Most recently, a Trump-aligned group rolled out an ad that strings a whole series of Big Lies together. It says:

If I was the deep state and I wanted to destroy America, I would rig the election with a puppet candidate, one that was so compromised that they would never say a word about it. I would create a false flag that allows for mail-in ballots. I would be in charge of the ballot-counting machines. I would create a false flag to blame all who question the results of the election.

If I was the deep state, I would prosecute anyone that went against me. I would sue and prosecute anyone that spoke up about the fraudulent election. I would use my powers to shut down all your internet businesses and bankrupt you.

If I was the deep state, I would make everyone an example why you should never question a Democrat ever winning an election. I would imprison my foes. I would use my corrupt DAs and blackmail judges to destroy you. I would make sure all crimes I ever committed never happened. I would prosecute my biggest competition. I would make sure they could never run for office ever again.

If I was the deep state, I would convince everyone that Ukraine Nazis were good, and women are men.

If I was the deep state, I would own every politician that mattered.

If I was the deep state, I would push my pedophilia ambitions on you.

If I was the deep state, you’d question your sexual identity, but not the medical establishment.

If I was the deep state, you would fear to ever resist me.

If I was the deep state, you would wish I was really the devil.

If I was the deep state, I would say mission accomplished.

Frank Luntz wrote of it, “This is the most disturbing political ad I’ve seen this year.”

Defenders of the Trump campaign are overrunning social media, defending the lies and threats in this new ad and Trump’s previous, “If you fuck around with us…” statements. They claim that Joe Biden is reviving our economy with “socialism and communism,” and Jack Smith and the DOJ prosecuting Trump and the January 6th traitors is some sort of “deep state tyranny.”

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the work the administration is doing to punish seditionists and rebuild our economy from the wreckage of the Trump years and these sorts of naked appeals to fascism.

Truths and issues — however unpleasant — cannot be weighed on the same scale as lies, threats, and character assassination, explicit or implicit.

Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, realized that the “ends justify the means” technique of campaigning he had unleashed on behalf of Reagan and Bush was both immoral and harmful to American democracy.

“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his [Dukakis’] running mate,’” Atwater said. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”

But Atwater’s spiritual and political protégés in the Trump campaign soldier on. He and his GOP allies in Congress are using Big Lies with startling regularity, and old Big Lies are being resurrected almost daily, most on social media, right-wing talk radio, podcasts, and TV.

The most alarming contrast in the coming election of 2024 is between those who will use any means to get and hold power, and those who are unwilling to engage in a Big Lie.

History tells us that, over the short term, the Big Lie usually works. Over the long term, though, the damage it does — both to those who use it, and to the society on which it is inflicted — is often incalculable.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Trump

Florida: DeSantis Doesn’t Want Students to Study Honest History

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
7

Andrew Spar, president of the NEA in Florida wrote the following opinion article for the Orlando Sentinel.

Florida’s public schools are the places where children of every race, religion and background learn and grow together. No matter what they look like or where they come from, all our children must have the freedom to learn the full and honest history of our nation. They deserve an education that teaches them about the past while helping them understand the present.

Accurate history is powerful knowledge that prepares our youngsters for the world while enabling them to create a better future by avoiding past mistakes.

Unfortunately, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his political appointees have made it clear that they don’t think Florida’s students deserve to learn the full truth of our nation’s history. Instead, DeSantis envisions a history curriculum that downplays the horror of slavery while ignoring pivotal events such as the 1957 resolution adopted by the Florida Legislature that proclaimed the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which justices ruled that racial segregation in public schools is illegal, was “null, void, and of no force or effect.” When our state intentionally forgets historical events such as Florida’s response to Brown, how can we ever reckon with the racial disparities that are still present in public education today?

In another example of the ahistorical nature of the proposed standards, the Society of Friends (Quakers) can be found five times, whereas “racism” is only found once. Are we truly to believe that the legacy of Quakers is deserving of five times the importance of the legacy of racism when it comes to understanding African American experiences?

Yet, that is exactly what DeSantis wants — a history devoid of context, a history that denies students their freedom to learn uncomfortable truths. He is even willing to flout state law in order to keep students from having the freedom to learn. In 2020 amid great fanfare, legislators passed and DeSantis signed into law HB 1213, which among other things required Florida’s African American History Task Force to look for ways to incorporate the Ocoee Election Day Massacre into Florida’s required history instruction.

The task force produced a comprehensive report outlining exactly how to do this. Yet, here we are mere weeks away from the start of the 2023-2024 school year, and the recommendations still have not been implemented. While the proposed standards do (finally) mention Ocoee, where at least 30 African Americans are thought to have been killed, they do not come anywhere close to providing the comprehensive history Florida’s students must learn to understand the connections between the past and the present. It would appear DeSantis is scared that a complete and honest reckoning of our state’s history will force people to draw connections between the voter intimidation of the past and his current attacks on the rights of Black and Brown people to vote.

Rather than showing true leadership by implementing the task force’s recommendations and ensuring Florida’s students learn the whole truth about Florida’s history, DeSantis has engaged in a multi-year campaign to sow division between parents and educators. Screaming about indoctrination and bemoaning everything that he doesn’t like as “woke” might have been a winning strategy for DeSantis electorally, but his ambitions come at a steep price for an entire generation of children whose freedom to learn is under attack.

Fortunately, with each passing day more and more people across Florida, and indeed across the nation, are rejecting DeSantis’ fearmongering and attempts to divide us. Instead, we are uniting across our differences and demanding Florida politicians stop censoring what students learn in our public schools.

Florida may be only a steppingstone for DeSantis, but for millions of educators, parents and students, this is our forever home. We are rooted in our communities and fully invested in a brighter future for our children. We are fighting to ensure a world-class public education that reflects and celebrates student identities, experiences, histories and cultures in order to meet students where they are and prepare them to succeed wherever they may go. We are fighting for students’ freedom to learn.

Andrew Spar is president of the Florida Education Association, representing more than 150,000 education professionals.


© 2023 Orlando Sentinel

Categories Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, History, Ignorance, Injustice, Lies

Alan Singer: DeSantis’s Effort to Whitewash Florida’s African American History

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
8

Florida has a sordid history of racism but Governor DeSantis wants that history to be literally whitewashed so that no white students feels “uncomfortable” learning the truth. DeSantis opposes “woke” history that others call telling the truth.

Alan Singer of Hostra University explains here why it is so hard to sanitize Florida’s history of racism.

He writes:

On Twitter, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted that “In Florida, we require the truth about American history to be taught in our classrooms. We will not allow schools to twist history to align with an ideological agenda.”

As part of Florida’s campaign against undefined “wokeness,” the Department of Education banned the teaching of a new African American Studies Advanced Placement course. It rejected the course as lacking “educational value and historical accuracy” and for violating Florida law.

Last week, the Florida State Board of Education unanimously approved new standards for how Black history should be taught in the state. The standards are designed to define “anti-woke” education. In its response, the Florida Education Association (FEA) branded the standards “a disservice to Florida’s students” and “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.” Eleven Florida civil rights and education organizations including the FEA and the NAACP sent a letter to Florida Board of Education that it ignored. The letter charged that “these standards purposely omit or rewrite key historical facts about the Black experience.” Vice-President Kamala Harris called the Florida standards “an attempt to gaslight us.”

Two of the most controversial clarifications in the social studies standards include a statement in the 6-8 grade guidelines that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and that instruction in high school on events like the 1920 Ocoee Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre that occurred in Florida should include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” acts of violence by African Americans that did not occur.

The major problems here are that Africans in Africa were agrarian people who had skills that were robbed from them when they were enslaved, and that enslaved Africans were considered property and any benefit from their skills accrued to their supposed owners. The Ocoee riots and murders occurred when African Americans attempted to vote in the Presidential election. In Rosewood, a mob of hundreds of whites murdered Black people they randomly caught and burned the town.

I found other statements and missing statements in the Florida social studies standards equally disturbing. The two places that refer to the Confederate states and the Civil War don’t mention which side Florida was on and which side African Americans fought for. Segregation is mentioned three times and the Klan is mentioned four times, but student do not learn what role they played in Florida.

But for me as a historian and a teacher the most disturbing part of the standards is the way slavery, and the slave trade are explained. It is intended to take responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery off the European countries that conquered and settled the Americas. “Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures,” “how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey),” and “how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.” Students “[e]xamine the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619.”

The lesson being taught in the Florida standards is that everybody had slavery and it was the same all over the world. But it wasn’t. Only the European colonies in the Americas and the new countries including the United States had race-based chattel slavery where enslaved people were no longer considered human, and their status was inherited by their children. Even after slavery ended as a result of the Civil War, Florida and the other states in the former Confederacy instituted laws to keep African Americans in virtual bondage and white Southerners enforced those laws through vigilante groups like the Klan.

Florida has many reasons to want to bury its sordid racial history. In the first have of the 19th century white settlers massacred and expelled Florida’s Native Americans.  Between 1870 and 1950, 311 African Americans were lynched in Florida. Three Florida counties, Lafayette, Taylor, and Baker were especially notorious. Florida had some of the strictest Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1881, it banned interracial marriage and in 1885 it mandated racially segregated schools. The interracial marriage ban was added to the Florida State Constitution in 1944. Starting in 1927, it was a criminal offense for a teacher to teach someone of a different race. At least 50 African Americans were murdered in Ocoee, Florida on November 2, 1920, after local Blacks attempted to vote. On January 1, 1923, white rioters stormed through the African American community of Rosewood, Florida, burning the town to the ground, killing six people, and driving the rest of the population into the forest and swamps to escape.  On August 27, 1960, peaceful Black students conducting a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Jacksonville were attacked by a mob of over 200 whites armed with baseball bats and ax handles. No African American student was permitted to earn a bachelor’s degree from the formerly segregated University of Florida until 1965.

Solomon Northup was a free Black man living in New York State who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northup’s memoir, published after he escaped from slavery, was made into movies in 1984 and 2013. There is a scene in the 1984 PBS version of Solomon Northup’s Odyssey where Master Epps and friends are sitting on the veranda arguing with a Canadian carpenter named Bass about the legitimacy of slavery. Northup is near by trimming hedges and overhears the debate. Bass tells the story of a runaway who was captured and brought to court. The judge is puzzled why the enslaved African attempted to escape when he was fed and not beaten. The African replied “That job’s still there if you want to go ask for it.”

Maybe, with his Presidential campaign flailing, Ron DeSantis should apply for a job like that and get some skills.

Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies
Teaching Learning Technology
284 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
(P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196

Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present my views and not those of Hofstra University.

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Fraud, History, Injustice, Lies, Racism

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner: Teach the Truth

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2023 //
18

Dan Rather and his associate Elliot Kirschner explain here why it is important to teach the truth, no matter how unpleasant it is.

They write:

I was born 66 years after slavery was legally abolished by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Not exactly ancient history. Today, that’s how long ago the Eisenhower administration was, or Elvis Presley’s first number one hit.

And the legacies of slavery — lynchings, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement — were woven tightly into the American tapestry of my youth. They still echo with us. Loudly and persistently. No matter how much some would want us to ignore the clamor of justice.

As much as we wish American history were different, tragedy is part of our reality. We do a grave disservice to future generations if we sanitize the truth. People can behave horribly. Societies that profess noble values can countenance violent bigotry. We can either look back from whence we have come with clarity, or we can try to muddy the roots of the present and weaken ourselves in the process.

This week, the Florida State Board of Education reworked its standards for teaching Black history. The changes come in response to the state’s so-called “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.” Passed last year, it limits training and education around issues of race, sex, and other criteria for systemic injustice. At its heart is a core belief that has animated right-wing culture warriors: that people alive today should not be made to feel bad or even uncomfortable by the sins of the past. The thinking goes, that was a long time ago.

But of course it really wasn’t. And the legacies of the past live on. And if we don’t learn from history, we are bound to repeat it.

Proponents of these new standards, especially their biggest cheerleader, Governor Ron DeSantis, say they promote teaching positive achievements of Black Americans in history. No problem there. It’s when it comes to the other side of the coin that we have a big issue — the new lessons seem intent on downplaying the horrors of the Black experience. In other words, once again, the truth. The truth revealed by hard facts.

One passage that has gotten a lot of attention is for middle schoolers. It states they should learn that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The danger of this narrative is striking. A system that brutalized, raped, and killed human beings while stealing their freedom and denying their humanity is rotten to its core. That enslaved people were able to find resilience and build lives in some form is a testament to their courage and spirit. There is no “other side” to the story of slavery.

It is true that these new standards, as horrific as they are, would have been a great improvement over what I learned in my segregated middle school. We have come a long way. But that was because of the bravery of civil rights leaders and activists who fought, sometimes with their lives, for a full realization of American values. Any receding from progress — as this surely is — represents a threat to our democracy. We have been strengthened as a nation, all of us, by a national movement to right the wrongs of our past.

It is tempting to try to ignore DeSantis. He is a bully. He wants a reaction. He uses cruelty and disingenuity to garner headlines. He feeds off the anger of his adversaries.

But he also has power. And the lessons of history tell us that we should not ignore would-be autocrats.

The generation that lived through the fights over civil rights in the 1950s and ‘60s is passing away, much as the generation that remembered the Civil War did during my own youth. The loss of the earned knowledge of living through and fighting for change is profound.

This makes it all the more important that when we teach history, we teach the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Or as close to it as is humanly possible.

Categories DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake News, Florida, Fraud, Freedom to Read, History

Heather Cox Richardson: Florida’s Distorted Standards for African American Studies

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2023 //
78

The people in Florida who wrote the standards for African American studies had a challenge: how to write them to satisfy Governor DeSantis’ hatred for anything that speaks about racism and injustice. Admitting that whites who enslaved Blacks were racist might make whites today feel “uncomfortable” and would be “woke.” So how is it possible to paper over the brutality and inhumanity of slavery?

Heather Cox Richardson explains how they did it.

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

One senses the hand of advisors from Hillsdale College in this prettified version of U.S. history.

To read the standards, open the link and see the footnote.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Florida, History

Jennifer Rubin: Florida Is the State Where Kindness and Decency Go to Die

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2023 //
47

Jennifer Rubin is a super-smart journalist-lawyer who became a regular columnist for The Washington Post, where she was supposed to express conservative views. However, the election of Trump changed her political outlook. Here, she writes about how Ron DeSantis’ hate policies are hurting the state of Florida.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his obedient Republican legislature have made bullying and attacking the vulnerable the hallmarks of their governance. Whether it is “don’t say gay” legislation (and retribution against Disney for supporting inclusion), denying medical care to transgender youths, muzzling teachers and professors who address systemic racism in the United States, firing a county prosecutor who dared object to DeSantis’s refusal to protect women’s bodily autonomy, or shipping unwary immigrants to other states, Florida has become not where “woke” died but rather where empathy, decency and kindness go to die.


DeSantis’s stunts frequently fail in court and cost taxpayers money. But his MAGA war on diversity and tolerance might be negatively impacting the state in other ways.


DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. “An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,” according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.

Moreover, Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs. In February, USA Today reported, “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country, but not when it comes to Gen Z. They are the only generation that chose to exit Florida, with an outflux of 8,000 young adults, while every other generation moved in.”

In addition, evidence points to a brain drain from Florida universities and colleges, although data is hard to come by. Records show “an upward tick in staff departures at some of Florida’s largest universities. … Across the State University System, the murmurs are getting louder: Some Florida schools are having trouble filling positions,” the Orlando Sentinel reported. “At the University of Florida, 1,087 employees resigned in 2022 — the only time in the last five years that the number exceeded 1,000.” Record numbers of faculty are not returning to University of Central Florida, Florida State University and the University of South Florida. This is hardly surprising, given DeSantis’s assault on academic independence and his suggestion that students go out of state if they want to study topics such as African American studies.

In addition, some businesses might be getting cold feet about spending convention dollars in the Sunshine State. The Sun Sentinel reported, “Broward County has lost more than a half-dozen conventions as their organizers cite the divisive political climate as their reason to stay out of Florida.” If the trend continues, the significant share of jobs and state revenue attributable to convention business could shrink. DeSantis and his supporters counter that tourism is still booming. They insist low taxes will continue to attract the wealthy and businesses.

There is little sign that the rest of the country is enamored of censorship, book bans or anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. The question remains whether DeSantis’s act wears thin at home.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Character, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Higher Education, History, Injustice

John Thompson: Oklahoma Superintendent Contends that Tulsa Race Massacre Was Not About Race

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2023 //
332

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, describes how State Superintendent Ryan Walters tied himself up in verbal knots trying to explain why the Tulsa race massacre wasn’t about race or racism.

He writes:

I’ve been teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre, and discussing Critical Race Theory since the 1990s, but I finally learned the true facts about both, when “Oklahoma school officials announced plans Friday to begin teaching students that the Tulsa Race Massacre was a crime of passion that resulted from loving Black people too much.” The State Superintendent, Ryan Walters, explained:

It’s important that students are educated on how this horrifying event—which resulted in hundreds of deaths and the destruction of Black Wall Street—only happened because of how electric and wild the love was between white people and Black people at the time. … White people had been getting jealous because their African American counterparts were doing too well economically and couldn’t hang out as much as they used to. “We often end up hurting the people we love the most, and … Sometimes burning down more than 35 city blocks and 1,250 homes is the only way to express the fiery passion of your love for someone.”

Walters further explained that “the Tulsa Race Massacre had been left out of history books out of respect for Black people’s privacy.”

Okay, that was the narrative told by The Onion. But, still, it leaves open the question: which is crazier, The Onion’s satire or Superintendent Walters’ claims?

As KFOR T.V. and the Oklahoman reported, Walters spoke at Republican event at a library where “Silence!: Intense, heated moments” took over. He “was asked three times by someone in the crowd why the Tulsa Race Massacre doesn’t fall under his definition of Critical Race Theory (CRT).” The next day, Walters supposedly “walked back his statements. ‘I am referring to individuals who carried out the crime. They didn’t act that way because they were white, they acted that way because they were racist.’” And, as reported by The Frontier, Walters has also said,

“The media is twisting two separate answers. They misrepresented my statements about the Tulsa Race Massacre in an attempt to create a fake controversy.”

Reading the transcript of the meeting, it’s hard to understand Walters’ weird words, but it is impossible to deny he was saying contradictory things – that the Tulsa Massacre should be taught in school while also saying that the role of race, when it is mentioned in terms that he see as CRT ideology, is making whites feel bad about the history of violent racism, and that is banned by HB 1776.

Walters said:

Folks, I believe this is absolutely the greatest country in the history of the world. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. That doesn’t mean there weren’t mistakes. … The only way our kids have the ability to learn from history and make this country continue to be the best country is to understand those times we fell short, a very clear, very direct understanding of those events.

Walters then may have tried to explain his understanding of the “mistakes” made during the Tulsa massacre where members of one race committed mass murder of persons of another race. But Walters’ words – that threaten schools and teachers – were incomprehensible. And as the Oklahoman noted, “Two Oklahoma school districts had their accreditation downgraded for touching on topics of race and privilege, and educators risk having their teaching license revoked.”

An audience member pushed further and asked, “How does the Tulsa Race Massacre not fall under your definition of CRT?” Walters then replied, “I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of your color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or in or are inherently racist. That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals.” But with critical race theory:

You’re saying that race defines a person. I reject that. So I would say you be judgmental of the issue, of the action, of the content of the character of the individual. Absolutely. But let’s not tie it to the skin color instead of the skin color determine it.

So an audience member then asked, “How does the Tulsa Race Massacre not fall under your definition of CRT?” Walters replied, “I answered it. That’s my answer. Again, I felt like…. (inaudible)”

So, what did Walters mean when he said the Tulsa Massacre and/or CRT should not be tied “to the skin color instead of the skin color determine it?”

The next day, after having the time to choose his words carefully, Walters said he wanted to be “crystal clear” that the “The Tulsa Race Massacre is a terrible mark on our history. The events on that day were racist, evil, and it is inexcusable.” But he didn’t seem to explain what could be taught about the “mistake,” the mass murder of around 300 Black people by a white mob, “Folks, I believe this is absolutely the greatest country in the history of the world. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. That doesn’t mean there weren’t mistakes.”

Categories Bigotry, Failure, History, Oklahoma, Race, Racism
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