To understand the state of education in 2022 Florida, take 19th century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous love question — and add a twist: How do I mess with thee, Florida public schools, this legislative session?
Let us count the ways.
The Legislature is attacking core critical-thinking values, censoring students and educators, forsaking real American history for whitewashed versions — and refusing children the right to a public education in a healthy environment.
Consider the misuse of taxpayer funds to punish urban districts seen as politically rebellious during the return to in-person schooling last fall at the height of COVID-19’s highly contagious and deadly delta variant.
Despite the calls still in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics for masks in schools, there isn’t a Florida school district now enforcing mandatory mask-wearing.
But Rep. Randy Fine, R-Palm Bay, isn’t a forgettin’ kind of man.
The House Education Committee’s budget rainmaker wants to defund schools to the tune of $200 million in counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward — with high COVID-19 infection rates — whose school leaders wisely insisted on students wearing masks. Serving the master, Gov. Ron DeSantis — not our kids — is the first priority of lawmakers like Fine.
In his book, children, teachers and administrators must learn the lesson that thou shall not dare shun the DeSantis administration’s kamikaze mask-optional approach to handling a pandemic. But, what else can you expect from a legislator who promulgated as truth the false claims of parents of a Brevard County student with Down syndrome that their daughter was abused by teachers who tied a mask to her face?
This is the type of brilliance, attention to detail and caring about accuracy that guides education policy in the Sunshine State. Add to COVID quackery that racial history, being gay and civics lessons are all under the microscope of lawmakers-turned-state-censors.
One of the hottest topics of contention is Florida’s heavy-handed crackdown on the teaching of American racial history.
The GOP calls for sanitizing lessons and ensuring that no part of history lessons result in “discomfort, guilt or anguish” felt by students whose racial group may have been guilty in the past of slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow laws.
As if the act of academic censorship weren’t cause enough for concern, this controversial bill also opens the door for parents to sue schools — and collect damages — if any signs of “wokeness” shows itself in the classroom.
The fascist leanings of DeSantis and the GOP are the only ones acceptable in Florida curriculum, and no one in leadership even cares that discriminatory legislation is being swiftly moved along partisan lines during Black History Month.
So what if this is a state where systemic racism is embedded in some cities and towns like the air we breathe? Places where the Civil War over slavery is openly celebrated with Confederate monuments, schools and streets are named after bigots, and racist flags are publicly displayed by neo-Nazis.
Another doozy of a proposal would shove patriotism down kids’ throats.
Legislators want to shape a robotic, one-size-fits-all civic servitude in kids through something scary that begins in elementary school and runs through high school called a “character-building program.”
Among the things it would instill is adoration for military service — just like the dictatorship does in Cuba, I should note. In fact, the senator sponsoring Senate Bill 148 — his office proudly passed an original long version of the bill to constituents, who gave it to me — is Cuban American Manny Diaz Jr. He represents Hialeah Gardens and is vice chair of the Education Committee.
A similarly hateful bill, SB 1834, prohibits discussion of sexuality and gender preference in schools. Nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay,” experts say the measure will be crushing to the mental health of trans and gay children, whose rights don’t matter to Republican legislators. The Education Committee passed the bill, 6-3.
As bills move along in the House and Senate, parts are stricken or massaged, but voters should know the kind of authoritarian language the education bills have contained, language in favor of submission, not independent thought.
The goal? Wholesale ideological domination of the population.
The strategy? Keep students ignorant and unquestioning.
Republican legislators don’t want schools to groom students like those in Parkland who stood up after a mass shooting with unrelenting calls and advocacy to change Florida’s lax gun laws. They organized voter registration drives, and staged a massive rally in Washington.
And legislators like Fine and Diaz aren’t happy enough with what they’ve been doing in previous sessions: funneling billions in public school funds to privately run charter schools. They’re not satisfied that those schools already push their political agendas with curriculum that caters to the conservative crowd.
No, the GOP wants to rule over the content of the secular public school system as well, shaping it to be more to the liking of a white, conservative, see-no-evil America.
Simply put, they don’t want our kids growing up to be critical thinkers capable of making their own political decisions.
Miami lawmakers should know better.
Manipulation through education was a key component of Fidel Castro’s scheme to engineer a “New Man” from the ground up, starting with the rewriting of history and the militarization of even the language used in schools.
Now in Florida, Republicans are seeking the same kind of power by exercising total control over a free and democratic country’s education system, only on the other side of the spectrum.
Watch out — Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poems also decried England’s child labor mines, slavery and other social injustices, might end up banned in Florida too.
