Florida’s new Black history public education standards outrage critics

MIAMI – The Florida Board of Education’s officials say the new academic standards for African American History are meant to “cement” the state as a national leader in education, but critics say is doing the opposite.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration approved the 216-page new set of public education standards during a public meeting on Wednesday in Orlando. Vice President Kamala Harris criticized it on Friday.

“They want to replace history with lies. These extremist, so-called leaders should model what we know to be the correct and right approach if we really are invested in the wellbeing of our children,” Harris said. “Instead, they dare to push propaganda to our children.”

Harris took issue with the state’s new instruction for middle school students including “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to the Florida Department of Education’s record.

“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?”

DeSantis, who is campaigning to become the Republican candidate to run against President Joe Biden in 2024, responded on Twitter, now rebranded as X, while raising his commitment to also disrupting sex education.

“Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children,” DeSantis wrote. “Florida stands in their way and we will continue to expose their agenda and their lies.”

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 about 50 in Florida’s Orange County. Instead, it instructs high school students must learn about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

This outraged Andrew Spar, the president of The Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers union, who released a statement that Wednesday saying “Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them.”

In response, Derrick Johnson, the president of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, released a statement saying the prominent civil rights organization condemns the new standards as “an attempt” to go back to devaluing Black lives and is prepared to fight.

“It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history,” Johnson wrote. “We refuse to go back.”

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