TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday his administration rejected a recent Advanced Placement course on African American studies for top school students because a number of the topics attempted to make use of Black history to push a political agenda.
Critics of the choice, nonetheless, say it’s one more politically motivated step the administration has taken to degrade the state’s education system, particularly on issues about race.
The political tug-of-war over the Advanced Placement course has reloaded the talk over how DeSantis is reshaping the state’s K-12 curriculum in an try and do away with what he has called “indoctrination.”
“If you happen to fall on the side of indoctrination, we’re going to say no. If it’s education, then we are going to do it,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Jacksonville.
For instance, DeSantis identified that the Advanced Placement course included elements of “queer theory,” discussions about abolishing prisons and lessons on intersectionality, an idea that refers to the best way by which racism, sexism and classism can overlap and affect people.
“Now who would say that a vital a part of Black history is queer theory? That’s anyone pushing an agenda on our youngsters,” DeSantis said. “While you use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you might be clearly attempting to use that for political purposes.”
The curriculum, which is being developed by the College Board, has not been released to the general public. But in a document released by the Florida Department of Education on Friday, the state noted it objects to readings about many African American scholars, activists and writers, and the inclusion of topics that the state says are foundational to critical race theory, which the state says “ranks people based on their race, wealth, gender and sexual orientation.”
Among the writers include Roderick Ferguson, a professor of girls’s, gender and sexuality studies and American studies at Yale University; Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor at Columbia Law School and the UCLA School of Law, whom the state identifies as “founding father of intersectionality;” and Angela Davis, a professor on the University of California, Santa Cruz, whom the state called a “self-avowed Communist and Marxist.”
The state also singled out readings from Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor at UCLA who studies the history of social movements within the U.S., partially because his first book was “a study of Black communists in Alabama.”
The College Board said in an announcement that the course is being tested in select schools and stays subject to changes because it continues to be finalized. But as currently written, DeSantis said, it isn’t acceptable in Florida since it is more focused on “ideology” than history.
“We would like to do history,” he said, noting that he views Black history as American history. “I don’t view it as a separate history.”
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High-profile figures react
Many high-profile figures have spoken out in regards to the decision. Vice President Kamala Harris — the primary Black woman to serve within the nation’s second-highest office — criticized the choice while visiting Tallahassee on Sunday and said it was an motion made by “extremist so-called leaders.”
“Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future,” Harris said.
Jerome Adams, the previous U.S. surgeon general under former President Donald Trump, questioned the “logic” behind what he called “selective/contradictory/politically motivated picking and selecting of when to use school ‘selection’ and ‘freedom’ arguments.”
The backlash has drawn the eye of other national figures, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and Ben Crump, a high-profile attorney whom Sharpton has called “Black America’s attorney general” because he has turn into a voice for a lot of Black individuals who have been killed by police.
Sharpton and Crump are planning to carry a “Stop the Black Attack rally” in Tallahassee on Wednesday on the steps of Florida’s Capitol.
The rally is more likely to discuss greater than just the Advanced Placement course rejection. Black lawmakers, including state Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-West Park, have long criticized what they are saying is an attempt by the state to “whitewash” American history.
In lower than three years, the State Board of Education has barred lessons that take care of critical race theory, a Eighties legal concept that holds that racial disparities are systemic in america, not only a set of individual prejudices, in addition to lessons about “The 1619 Project,” a Recent York Times project that reexamines U.S. history by placing the results of slavery and contributions of Black Americans at the middle.
Florida has also rejected math textbooks for what the state called “indoctrinating topics,” and schools and employers are limited in what they will teach about racism and other facets of history under a law signed by DeSantis last summer.
The changes, DeSantis argues, are essential because progressives have tried to infiltrate the education system with politically tinged topics which can be departing from what he says is cut-and-dried education.
“How drained is it to sit down there and think that just imposing some rote talking points from regardless of the political skirmishes of the day are that that could be a lasting type of education?” DeSantis said.