KENDALL, Fla. – John Duebel, a Florida Department of Education official, appeared before a group of teachers on Monday at Miami-Dade College’s campus in Kendall.
Duebel, the director of Social Studies and the Arts Bureau of Standards and Instructional Support, defended the Florida Board of Education’s 216-page new set of public education standards passed on Wednesday in Orlando.
Some of the teachers furiously booed Duebel when he highlighted the state’s instruction for middle school students to teach “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“This has been interpreted to mean slaves benefited from slavery and that is not the standard at all,” Duebel, of Tallahassee, said. “What this is saying is, this is not the story simply of victims who withered in the face of repression, but rather the story of a resilient people who responded to their oppressors.”
Vice President Kamala Harris took issue with the instruction on Friday and said Florida extremists were using public education to “push propaganda” to the detriment of the students.
“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities,” Harris said, “that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
Paul Burns, a former Sarasota County Public Schools principal who is Black, serves as the Florida Department of Education’s deputy chancellor for education quality. He has publicly defended the state’s new instruction.
“For the folks in the media and in the teachers union who are watching, we want you to please pay close attention because you’ve been peddling really a false narrative,” Burns said during a public meeting.
Ariel Branch, a Duval County Public Schools teacher who was at the event in Kendall, said she can’t find the justification for the new instructions.
“The slave story doesn’t get to be told by the descendants of slaves because we weren’t the winners,” said Branch.
Six out of the 13 who worked on the instruction are Black. Branch said this reminded her of Zora Neale Hurston’s famous quote, “All skin folk ain’t kinfolk,” which suggests that even Blacks may be guilty of discrimination.
“Just because they look like us does not mean that they are one of us or that they have our backs or our best interest at heart,” Branch said.
The new instructions do not enhance lessons on The Ocoee massacre of Nov. 2, 1920, when a mob of white men stood against Blacks voting and killed dozens in Florida’s Orange County. Instead, it instructs high school students must learn about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
Richard Ocampo, a Miami-Dade Public Schools teacher who was at the event in Kendall, said he is concerned about the new changes.
“They are trying to have us teach a specific way, a specific content that is revisionist,” Ocampo said.
A 1994 Florida statute created the Commission of Education’s African American History Task Force and requires the state’s public schools to teach on the subject in response to attempts to cover up the Rosewood massacre of January 1923, when a mob of white men destroyed a town in Florida’s Levy County. The movement for awareness also resulted in “Rosewood,” a 1997 American historical drama film directed by John Singleton.
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