Careful. The admins are looking for insightful comments rather than outrageous comparisons that can't possibly refer to things that might actually happen if enough people take their eyes off the ball.
So, say something insightful that doesn't risk offending anyone on the right side of this obviously-two-sided issue.
Lots of people don’t “keep a wide berth” at all, and make billions doing so. Look at all the corporate tax avoidance schemes that most megacorps engage in, many of which are only a few debatable legal technicalities away from criminal tax evasion
Teachers study & hard to work out the best techniques to motivate all students, find make lessons and experiences to encourage healthy curious minds.
It's laughable that those who have not studied childhood education think they are making the right call, or that these teachers have an agenda besides trying to help these kids be better.
No one cares more about my kids' well-being than I the parent do. It is quite clear that a large number of "educators" at best have no regard for the well-being of the children that they have authority over. The books that these school are allowing the kids to have access to are absolutely disgusting. The founders never intended for obscenity to be protected by the 1st amendment.
The founders are dead, and they no longer hold any power over our current government. Further, the case that considered if the first amendment covered obscenity was only considered in 1957, and even then left a big grey area.
The community I was raised in, and grew up in, and continue to raise my kids in, do not consider the same things this law considers obscene. A very vocal minority is flexing whatever power they can hold on to, and forcing this unwelcome intrusion into our communities.
If you listen to the teacher’s during their required
masters teaching coursework, the indoctrination begins subtly and then converts them away from recognizing anecdotal evidence not aligning with doctrine. The best example of this is group work.
As a school student, group work was always extra work load because the ones who were low achievers just waited for the high achievers to take care of things. Whether it was perniciously done or lazily, I ended up doing it and believing the teachers were out of their mind. All the high level students recognized this.
Having brought this up with colleagues who were getting their master’s degrees in teaching, they pointed out that studies showed that group work had the lower level kids be inspired by the higher kids. That’s why group work could show the lower kids how to be successful.
The goal here is to indoctrinate the teachers into believing social studies, (a college department that is worthless and devoid of any redeeming quality), that fly in the face of reality. The indoctrination then carries into the younger classes.
The one above who pointed out the system has been completely taken over is correct.
>>>It's laughable that those who have not studied childhood education think they are making the right call, or that these teachers have an agenda besides trying to help these kids be better.
The fundamental problem is the teachers are doing a REALLY bad job of communicating to parents how putting books about human sexuality in the hands of 7 year olds is "helping kids be better".
I thought first that it was a theatrical protest by just a single teacher or school, but it turns out to be broader in scope: The Manatee County School District directed teachers to remove all books that had not yet been approved by a specialist from their classroom libraries [..]
...so I thought that was worthy of mention. Library access/availability seems like a fundamental thing for me, in line with the hacker ethos of self-directed learning and maximizing access to information.
Just make the most empty, milquetoast statement saying nothing, but wrap it in multiple paragraphs with clever word choice so it looks like you’re actually saying something.
They don’t agree with the law, so they are deliberately interpreting it in the most extreme and nonsensical way possible, in order to make a political statement against it.
The fact is all laws are up to interpretation, and discretion is an essential part of their enforcement. I really doubt anybody would prosecute a teacher for an obviously non-controversial text which hadn’t technically been approved yet. I think the teachers have a pretty good idea of what texts are completely safe, and which texts are potentially problematic-but they are feigning ignorance to make a political statement.
Florida made it a felony to share books that weren’t approved. As a teacher, it makes sense to remove books instead of risk prosecution. This isn’t the school libraries, this is books individual teachers keep in the classroom.
How many teachers have been prosecuted for said felony?
How many unrelated felonies have they committed, which they don’t care about? If everything which is technically a felony were (successfully) prosecuted, probably every adult American would be a convicted felon - http://alex.kozinski.com/articles/Youre_Probably_a_Federal_C... - but I doubt they’d apply the same attitude to all those other laws
Consider the context in Florida. Are you aware of the political situation there? I think if you had the perspective of a Florida teacher, you would rightfully be cautious if not afraid.
You really think Governor DeSantis going to start throwing random teachers in prison, because they had non-controversial but not technically approved books in their classrooms? Like him or loathe him, he’s a pretty smart politician, why would he engage in such an act of political self-sabotage?
From what I understand, this is a state law, and there are 67 counties in Florida, and this is a report from a single county - is every teacher in the state doing this? Or is it just a thing in certain school districts? I suspect the later. I wonder what kind of characteristics would predict which school districts will have large large numbers of teachers reacting to the law in this way and which won’t?
The fact is that teachers have become a target from the right wing and DeSantis has been leading the charge with his words and actions. After the elaborate migrant flight fiasco, I don't think anyone wants to make big assumptions about what DeSantis won't do to satisfy his increasing bloodthirty base.
> The fact is that teachers have become a target from the right wing and DeSantis has been leading the charge with his words and actions.
I wonder how many teachers in Florida vote for DeSantis, and still plan to vote for him even after all of this? While no doubt it is true that school teachers in the US (and public school teachers especially) tend to skew Democratic, I’m sure the number of DeSantis-voting public school teachers in Florida would be significantly greater than zero. I wonder if those teachers would agree that “teachers have become a target from the right wing”?
Any person who can't agree with the phrase “teachers have become a target from the right wing” despite the overwhelming evidence, including countless direct quotes and video clips from elected conservative politicians, should not be allowed anywhere near a classroom because they are not operating in reality.
The phrase is wrong because the target is a certain kind of left-leaning teacher. Not teachers qua teachers. Right-leaning teachers are not being targeted. Teachers who aren’t explicitly “right-leaning”, but who think socially controversial topics are best avoided in the classroom, are not being targeted either. Nor do I think the target includes “contrarian leftist” teachers (the kind of teacher who might admire the African-American Marxist Adolph Reed, who basically says that all these race/sexuality/gender debates have turned into a distraction from the real work of class struggle, and thus serve the interests of the capitalist ruling class)
> You really think Governor DeSantis going to start throwing random teachers in prison
Democracies don't function on the basis of a single person saying "trust me, I won't actually use this law that I enacted." And he didn't even give us that claim, you did.
> Governor DeSantis going to start throwing random teachers in prison
Governors don't throw people in prison. Prosecutors do. And there are a lot of them. Even if not prosecuted, committing a crime is grounds for termination for cause.
Why would they make it a felony if they aren't going to enforce the law. Laws that are arbitrarily enforced is authoritarianism.
Everyone in Russia is guilty of a crime under the Putin regime, just don't piss off the dictator. In America, the country as a whole is just now realizing how gross and arbitrarily enforced the war on drugs has been. Especially now that large swathes of the addicted are suburban and rural whites instead of black and brown people.
> You really think Governor DeSantis going to start throwing random teachers in prison, because they had non-controversial but not technically approved books in their classrooms?
Yes.
> Like him or loathe him, he’s a pretty smart politician, why would he engage in such an act of political self-sabotage?
If you can construct a plausible enough lie, the truth doesn't matter to his supporters anyways. See for example the anti-CRT rhetoric--where something as basic as "our founding fathers were individuals with complex, self-contradictory beliefs" is considered racial indoctrination because it doesn't say that the US is the bestest country to have ever existed. Or of course school board hearings involving people screaming over litter boxes.
All it takes is for one parent to get angry--and if you're involved with school politics, you'll know that parents getting angry is basically guaranteed--about one book, and that'll be enough for a politician to do something performative. And DeSantis is good at being performative.
I think those teachers are smart: is it worth the hassle to go through each book? It's not. Better to have nothing the administration can find 'just cause' for termination or whatever. Don't take any risks for people that won't take any for you.
More time for them, no 'mum for liberty' asking for a random comic to get banned because they did not hide it fast enough for the child the read the title and complain.
I might be too cynical and spent too much time avoiding management, but isn't this the sensible, non confrontational way of adapting to a law you don't care that much about?
Teachers don't want to get burned by a new law, choose to avoid exposing themselves to it, nice for them, predictable but nice.
The counterpart to that is how many teachers are giving their students inappropriate books, or refusing to discuss with their administrators/school boards/parents what is appropriate?
There's no reason for this to be a felony.
Just like there's no reason for a lot of other things to be felonies.
> If you have a lot of books like I do, probably several hundred, it is not practical to run all of them through (the vetting process) so we have to cover them up
I imagine teachers in Florida are expected to uphold their normal duties while complying with this new law, and teachers are famously overworked.
Manually checking hundreds of book against an allow-list seems rather time intensive. Since failure to comply with the law could result in a felony charge this course of action from the teachers seems perfectly rational to me.
ETA: Even if a court would throw out the charge (remains to be seen), would you really want to go though all the legal trouble?
You are talking about a state run by a man who has on multiple occasions shipped around human beings as a political stunt. Do you expect reasonableness and restraint from his administration? Or do you expect headline-grabbing stunts every few weeks?
Let's not just say he shipped them, he literally human trafficked asylum seekers to an island, by luring them under false pretenses of jobs and assistance, in a place that wasn't even in his state, using taxpayer dollars.
You know it is, when Alex Jones-tier posts saying that a political opponent is "literally" a human trafficker are upvoted. But I suppose that's just a reflection of how pathological American discourse as a whole has gotten.
Human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people through force, fraud, coercion or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit.
It checks out factually.
I'm a non USAian with no particular interest in either of the two US parties (other than a historic awareness that the original founders had a disdain for Political Parties and would have hated the current disfunctional bicameral mess).
However both the US Gov. of Texas and the US Gov. of Florida delibrately deceived humans (fraud) and transported them for political profit.
That makes them both literal textbook human trafficers.
> I'm glad judges don't declare someone guilty of a crime based on reading a (layman) dictionary definition.
First the DOJ brings charges, as is currently being considered:
Authorities in Massachusetts said Sunday that they have requested a federal human trafficking probe after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis boasted of sending about 50 Venezuelan migrants to Martha's Vineyard to shine a national spotlight on immigration issues.
and
A criminal investigation is being launched into how a group of migrants was sent from Texas to Massachusetts with Florida taxpayer money on orders from Governor Ron DeSantis.
The Bexar County Sheriff's office confirmed that to CBS4 News.
Sheriff Javier Salazar says these migrants were "Lured, hoodwinked and exploited" for political purposes and that's why he's opening an investigation.
It’s apparently a felony if you don’t comply. How many jobs carry a risk of committing a felony for faithfully trying to perform your job? Will you trust a judge or jury to acquit you if an inappropriate book found its way onto the shelves outside your control?
Teachers are in the crosshairs now in a lot of communities and any action taken against them under state law could takes years to get heard in higher courts. If I were a teacher, I wouldn't be betting on the restraint of state regulators under DeSantis or any exceptional speed and efficiency from the court system.
Across the country, many laws are passed by red states that might not hold up if they are challenged in Supreme Court. But how many cases can SC take on? How long will these cases take?
Primary objective of these laws is to scare people and theatrics. By that metric, this law seems to be doing well.
That said, are we even sure the current SC will act in the best interests of the ordinary citizen?
The reason red states are passing laws like this is that they believe the Supreme Court, recently stacked by Conservatives hand-picked by the Federalist Society, will either leave it to the states or rule in their favor.
And given Roe v Wade, a so called by the Catholic majority “settled decision”, has been reverted, all the evidence suggests it will rule in their favour.
If the SC can’t protect a freedom as fundamental as person’s bodily autonomy and integrity, they will do nothing here.
While I understand your point I think that ruling came down to the technicalities of constitutional law. It should not be up to the judicial branch to make laws only interpret them. If there is a problem with the law congress needs to fix it.
While I agree with your interpretation of the responsibilities of the SC, my problem is with the course of action taken by the justices.
The SC did not have to change the ruling, but the majority chose to do so, with full knowledge that a repeal would trigger laws that put the health and livelihood of conscious, living and breathing citizens at risk.
The SC gave a metaphorical loaded gun to certain states, allowing them to aim and shoot at bystanders, at people who can not get out of the way (= i.e. have an out of state abortion), and in the process enact economic violence towards its own citizens [1] and put their life in danger.
I am not expressing that the states are not at fault, I am expressing that the SC could have simply not taken any course of action given that they had previously expressed that it is a settled matter.
Again, the Supreme Court's role is not to cause or avoid social outcomes; it's to rule on the constitutionality of law. To suggest otherwise is confirming that you believe in an activist court--as long as it suits you, of course.
I am not going to entertain a strawman by a throwaway account. If you wish to discuss this properly, log in to your main account, and attempt to communicate your argument without a strawman.
To help you, I did not claim that the bodily autonomy and integrity of a __child__ should not be protected.
Hell, even in blue states. I live in Oregon and we're fighting a gun law that was clearly laughing at the hurdles one must go through in order to undo a law.
No, such cases would have to go through eleven circuits before ending up at the supreme court, and a school would literally have to make the choice between "running the school" and "going bankrupt" from paying for the legal fees to defend themselves in eleven courts. Even with help from the EFF and related law non-profits, there is no choice to make. Because this is the US.
> No, such cases would have to go through eleven circuits before ending up at the supreme court
The case needs to reach just one circuit, the appropriate circuit that is the appellate court of whatever federal district the case is on (in this case, 11th). Sometimes, you need a circuit split (where two circuits come to opposite conclusions of the law), but that's usually not necessary where a constitutional question is at play.
Also, there are 13 circuits. There are 11 numbered circuits, plus the DC circuit, plus the Federal Circuit.
It’s not so much being ultimately found guilty that I would be afraid of. It’s coming under the spotlight of the cultural right and becoming a character in their fever dreams. At that point it’s only a matter of time before they label you a pedophile.
We deserve it for making the executive and federal government in general so powerful. We should be able to elect almost any idiot with minimal damage so long as congress and the court are not too stuffed with idiots of equivalent bent.
>New training approved by the State Board of Education also asks media specialists to avoid materials with “unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination.”
Sure, but the issue here is different people want different things out of school for different reasons.
We happen to know a dangerously large group of people wants to make everything about race - ie, classic racist ideology. We happen to have a couple centuries of evidence that this is not a good idea. If they are organising under the banner of critical race theory then that needs to be resisted. There is no place for racism in the public school system.
Fair enough. What is it? Because as far as Wikipedia goes it seems to be a socially constructed mechanism of grouping and classing people that has nothing to do with their personal abilities.
It has all the marks of classic racism. Drawing arbitrary boundaries, formally treating people differently based on them and not letting people switch between them.
The right way to educate kids is to be showing them a diverse range of excellent role models that they can copy. Not drilling in to them that race influences every aspect of their lives and they should go looking for racial explanations for the world they see.
My layman's understanding of CRT is that it's a study performed at the collegiate level of how a system can systemically and disproportionately disadvantage minorities, whether by intended design or not.
I'm throwing you easy ones, but the better explanation I was told is that it could be a study of how tax law over several generations has resulted in affluence for some class of 3rd generation Asian families on the West coast (hypothetical).
It doesn't necessarily have to be about harm, just a study of a system and its impact. Understanding the nuance of how a system produced "this set of circumstances for this class of people" is why it's a college level deep-dive.
That is one of the goals of CRT. But one of assumptions is that lack of equity is evidence of systemic oppression, there are arguments for and against this idea.
That is, fundamentally, not an argument that can be differentiated from "your skin colour changes what you can expect to achieve in our society". It is an argument by the same academic racists that crawl out from time to time, who've figured out that if they put a lot of new words between the start and end of the argument that they can expect to be given the benefit of the doubt.
The healthy form of "systems have outcomes" is economics; but economics suggests personal effort and decentralisation get good results rather than obsessing over inherent facts about bodies and so the CRT people had to form their own new quasi-conomics to try and influence how policy is written.
I wrote a response to your comment that I don't think was fair.
I acknowledge and I do believe what you're saying: I've seen racists articulate something terrible with enough complex words to hide that message in academic settings and pretend it's not hot garbage. That exists. I've been to Berkeley, California as a visiting student. :-) Social justice can wrap around to ugly places.
Economics - to me - seems like a study from a much higher perspective. I don't believe economic theory would go to all the places of why a class of people is being advantaged or harmed.
Do you believe systemic racism exists? Should we study it? I don't understand why a large group of folks are very against asking these questions. You seem like a rational person, and I wouldn't hold you among these. Do you believe the media has skewed and tailored the image of what CRT is? Is it possible to rally or radicalize a lot of people behind the idea that "these teachers are telling your kids to be ashamed"? For most of my life I've seen an assault on public schooling, and I was never taught to feel guilty about my race. I did learn of things like the Trail of Tears in college, however.
No, the idea is absurd. Every policy will affect different demographics differently - be that race, age, class, location, schooling and profession. If the academics could come up with a way to tease out individual threads from that tangle then we'd probably find that everything else is more important than race.
There are racists using the system to achieve their aims - but that tends to be intentional. I like to cite the efforts at stymieing Asians from getting into top-tier universities for example. But we don't need academic study to identify it, and teaching people to go look for a race angle is a bad idea. The academics are going to be people who focus on race all day, see race issues everywhere and are going to get caught up thinking racialist policies are the solution to problems - which will then fail massively as racist policies tend to do.
> I did learn of things like the Trail of Tears in college, however.
That is the central issue, isn't it? All the people involved have been dead for more than a century, the political ideologies at the time have largely been washed away and have no public support and I don't know much about that specific incident but there are unlikely to be special lessons there given how many horrible things happen in history (which is a large and horrible place!).
Compare that the large amount of damage authoritarianism and war has done recently, and there is a pertinent question of why are children being told to focus on race? The communists did more damage to their own people than any other faction. The Nazi's famously managed to get their empire dismantled through warmongering. The Cold War was not a racial issue, it was a clash of major ideologies. We're in a situation that looks to me like the prelude for WWIII and people don't seem to be able to recognise the hubris of being reckless in internationally tense situations.
I'm not against the idea of teaching a few nasty race incidents, but there is so much more history to look at that is recent, relevant and more important. We don't need people analyzing Russia-Ukraine-US-Europe through a race lens. We don't need racial dynamics of Afghanistan, Iraq and friends. We don't need to study economic hardship through race. We need policies that are race-blind and benefit everyone that promote peace and prosperity. Studying things based on their impact on peace and prosperity is where the focus should be. It also means suddenly we'll have divisions being created on racial lines which is a waste of effort arguing against.
> I acknowledge and I do believe what you're saying
If we're going to be overcome by reasonable discussion, not that the policy in the article is wildly stupid, because the premise is that parents are leaving their children in the care of known racists and the authorities are going to control the situation by adding more bureaucrats.
- If they have misjudged the situation they're going to look really silly.
- If they have correctly judged the situation they're attempting to deal with it in a stupid and ineffectual way. They'll probably end up with even worse ideologies than race creeping in if they have one person picking the reading list.
They'll rue this particular aspect of the law if it ends up achieving anything, at best it is a well executed own goal.
It's a lost battle. Teachers have decided what and how they want to teach, and no matter how democratic, legislation is too blunt a tool to change course. The long march through the institutions was a stunning success, and they're already instituting political litmus tests [1,2] and more [3,4] to strengthen the hold of the right-thinking over academia.
I don't know this person, and I'm glad he writes children's books.
I wonder if he has been shot by a six year old while writing any of those books [0]. All while the government actively undermines all the work he does.
Any teachers here? Or folks married to teachers? I can't cite all the horrible pay, and parents ridiculing you, but it happens to my wife almost constantly. I doubt it is very different for other teachers.
If it is so noble maybe they deserve some more money and respect. I wouldn't stand up to this governor in a state that elected him. Maybe I'd move to another state and get a teaching job there (which I could not do if I picked up a felony in Florida).
I left in June. After six weeks of looking, I took a position at a small tech consultancy and doubled my salary, improved my benefits, and work about 15 fewer hours per week. I have very conflicted feelings about leaving education, but my life - and my family life - is much better in some significant and measurable ways.
It's bad on both sides. As a parent. If your child ends up in a class where other children are abusive there is almost no recourse for changes and you are treated poorly for trying. Ditto if the teacher is abusive, which also happens.
Most of the time the only recourse is to pull them out.
Five years ago, my company offered me a fully funded relocation package to Florida. The shitty education system was one of the primary reasons we declined the offer. I have never regretted the decision for one single minute since then.
Out of everything I have to say it’s the weather that’s going to drive me out. I was born and raised in the south, but at least other states I’ve lived had seasons.
Having gone through said system many years ago, it actually was not a bad system for certain types of people:
1. My area had gifted programs, unlike SF where I live now, which has dispatched them in the name of “equity”. I lived in a 2/10 school district because my parents were poor and got bused across the county to a 10/10 gifted school for free
2. College tuition is the lowest in the nation —— far lower than any Blue state. UFlorida is $6k/year, and there are easy scholarships that halve that or more
I will say I agree that Florida tuition is a godsend if you’re a resident, but otherwise, I find the job market better in Atlanta or Raleigh, so I’d pick those above anywhere in FL if I wanted to stay in that south.
It's really time for some radical civil disobedience. I'd love to see a video of every teacher in a district shelving a copy of the same unapproved book or giving one to a kid.
Unapproved book? You mean something like White Identity by Jared Taylor? Or do you mean "unapproved" that you can find on Amazon and every other online or offline bookstore? Everyone's against book bans, until it's a book they want to ban.
Lucky for you, teachers agree with you, so there's no need for a ban to keep it from school library shelves or curricula - teachers simply don't stock or assign it, and you can pat yourself on the back about how pro-knowledge, pro-academic-freedom, and anti-censorship you are.
Whichever book. I simply mean the ones the law is looking to ban. I'm literally not against any book being available. It's the cultures of domination that are the issue and those need to be practiced to spread.
I'm uncertain what you're upset about. I'm literally talking about civil disobedience against laws. Is that something you disagree with?
We have wanted to home school for years but the more I think about it the better it seems. Social values around the world seem to be diverging.
States will now struggle to offer families an education that matches their values. They'll come up with law like this that end up making it near impossible for teachers to do their job.
I was reading up on the history of Iran the other day and thinking: "wow, how can a relatively educated and secular country end up with such fanatical laws?". This sounds likes it's in the same wavelength.
I'm interested in hearing if there are non religious people that support these kind of laws. I come from a secular country, so all this is very difficult to understand
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 78.1 ms ] threadSo, say something insightful that doesn't risk offending anyone on the right side of this obviously-two-sided issue.
I work in a regulated industry. Keeping a wide berth from criminal conduct, even when a bit ridiculous, is the rational move.
They're a few technicalities away from civil tax evasion. The difference is disclosure.
Parents are tired of these educators not teaching the basics. And indoctrinating their kids.
Teachers study & hard to work out the best techniques to motivate all students, find make lessons and experiences to encourage healthy curious minds.
It's laughable that those who have not studied childhood education think they are making the right call, or that these teachers have an agenda besides trying to help these kids be better.
The community I was raised in, and grew up in, and continue to raise my kids in, do not consider the same things this law considers obscene. A very vocal minority is flexing whatever power they can hold on to, and forcing this unwelcome intrusion into our communities.
If you listen to the teacher’s during their required masters teaching coursework, the indoctrination begins subtly and then converts them away from recognizing anecdotal evidence not aligning with doctrine. The best example of this is group work.
As a school student, group work was always extra work load because the ones who were low achievers just waited for the high achievers to take care of things. Whether it was perniciously done or lazily, I ended up doing it and believing the teachers were out of their mind. All the high level students recognized this.
Having brought this up with colleagues who were getting their master’s degrees in teaching, they pointed out that studies showed that group work had the lower level kids be inspired by the higher kids. That’s why group work could show the lower kids how to be successful.
The goal here is to indoctrinate the teachers into believing social studies, (a college department that is worthless and devoid of any redeeming quality), that fly in the face of reality. The indoctrination then carries into the younger classes.
The one above who pointed out the system has been completely taken over is correct.
The fundamental problem is the teachers are doing a REALLY bad job of communicating to parents how putting books about human sexuality in the hands of 7 year olds is "helping kids be better".
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21197512-2021-porn-r...
examples of the material pushed to young children: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h92v3omjlahyob4/Harris_Candlewick_...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rc8wq89cp4dpxcz/Silverberg-Smyth_T...
...so I thought that was worthy of mention. Library access/availability seems like a fundamental thing for me, in line with the hacker ethos of self-directed learning and maximizing access to information.
The fact is all laws are up to interpretation, and discretion is an essential part of their enforcement. I really doubt anybody would prosecute a teacher for an obviously non-controversial text which hadn’t technically been approved yet. I think the teachers have a pretty good idea of what texts are completely safe, and which texts are potentially problematic-but they are feigning ignorance to make a political statement.
How many unrelated felonies have they committed, which they don’t care about? If everything which is technically a felony were (successfully) prosecuted, probably every adult American would be a convicted felon - http://alex.kozinski.com/articles/Youre_Probably_a_Federal_C... - but I doubt they’d apply the same attitude to all those other laws
From what I understand, this is a state law, and there are 67 counties in Florida, and this is a report from a single county - is every teacher in the state doing this? Or is it just a thing in certain school districts? I suspect the later. I wonder what kind of characteristics would predict which school districts will have large large numbers of teachers reacting to the law in this way and which won’t?
I wonder how many teachers in Florida vote for DeSantis, and still plan to vote for him even after all of this? While no doubt it is true that school teachers in the US (and public school teachers especially) tend to skew Democratic, I’m sure the number of DeSantis-voting public school teachers in Florida would be significantly greater than zero. I wonder if those teachers would agree that “teachers have become a target from the right wing”?
Democracies don't function on the basis of a single person saying "trust me, I won't actually use this law that I enacted." And he didn't even give us that claim, you did.
Governors don't throw people in prison. Prosecutors do. And there are a lot of them. Even if not prosecuted, committing a crime is grounds for termination for cause.
Everyone in Russia is guilty of a crime under the Putin regime, just don't piss off the dictator. In America, the country as a whole is just now realizing how gross and arbitrarily enforced the war on drugs has been. Especially now that large swathes of the addicted are suburban and rural whites instead of black and brown people.
No need to exercise the law if its mere existence is enough to alter people's behavior. ;)
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/897/chilling-ef...
Yes.
> Like him or loathe him, he’s a pretty smart politician, why would he engage in such an act of political self-sabotage?
If you can construct a plausible enough lie, the truth doesn't matter to his supporters anyways. See for example the anti-CRT rhetoric--where something as basic as "our founding fathers were individuals with complex, self-contradictory beliefs" is considered racial indoctrination because it doesn't say that the US is the bestest country to have ever existed. Or of course school board hearings involving people screaming over litter boxes.
All it takes is for one parent to get angry--and if you're involved with school politics, you'll know that parents getting angry is basically guaranteed--about one book, and that'll be enough for a politician to do something performative. And DeSantis is good at being performative.
More time for them, no 'mum for liberty' asking for a random comic to get banned because they did not hide it fast enough for the child the read the title and complain.
I might be too cynical and spent too much time avoiding management, but isn't this the sensible, non confrontational way of adapting to a law you don't care that much about?
Teachers don't want to get burned by a new law, choose to avoid exposing themselves to it, nice for them, predictable but nice.
There's no reason for this to be a felony.
Just like there's no reason for a lot of other things to be felonies.
It’s a new law, and AFAIK no teachers have been charged yet. Not sure why that should ease teachers’ fears.
From the article:
> If you have a lot of books like I do, probably several hundred, it is not practical to run all of them through (the vetting process) so we have to cover them up
I imagine teachers in Florida are expected to uphold their normal duties while complying with this new law, and teachers are famously overworked.
Manually checking hundreds of book against an allow-list seems rather time intensive. Since failure to comply with the law could result in a felony charge this course of action from the teachers seems perfectly rational to me.
ETA: Even if a court would throw out the charge (remains to be seen), would you really want to go though all the legal trouble?
Astounding levels of performative cruelty.
I'm a non USAian with no particular interest in either of the two US parties (other than a historic awareness that the original founders had a disdain for Political Parties and would have hated the current disfunctional bicameral mess).
However both the US Gov. of Texas and the US Gov. of Florida delibrately deceived humans (fraud) and transported them for political profit.
That makes them both literal textbook human trafficers.
Don't like it? Take it up with the OED.
And American pathology has a tendency to spread to other counrties thanks to their overwhelming cultural influence via the internet.
No. It isn't. Be smarter.
> I'm glad judges don't declare someone guilty of a crime based on reading a (layman) dictionary definition.
First the DOJ brings charges, as is currently being considered:
and etc.Desc: working as intended
Primary objective of these laws is to scare people and theatrics. By that metric, this law seems to be doing well.
That said, are we even sure the current SC will act in the best interests of the ordinary citizen?
If the SC can’t protect a freedom as fundamental as person’s bodily autonomy and integrity, they will do nothing here.
The SC did not have to change the ruling, but the majority chose to do so, with full knowledge that a repeal would trigger laws that put the health and livelihood of conscious, living and breathing citizens at risk.
The SC gave a metaphorical loaded gun to certain states, allowing them to aim and shoot at bystanders, at people who can not get out of the way (= i.e. have an out of state abortion), and in the process enact economic violence towards its own citizens [1] and put their life in danger.
I am not expressing that the states are not at fault, I am expressing that the SC could have simply not taken any course of action given that they had previously expressed that it is a settled matter.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/economics-of-abortion-bans/?...
Does the evidence suggest that the SC is filling that role and is not an activist court?
To help you, I did not claim that the bodily autonomy and integrity of a __child__ should not be protected.
This is definitely not specific to red states.
The case needs to reach just one circuit, the appropriate circuit that is the appellate court of whatever federal district the case is on (in this case, 11th). Sometimes, you need a circuit split (where two circuits come to opposite conclusions of the law), but that's usually not necessary where a constitutional question is at play.
Also, there are 13 circuits. There are 11 numbered circuits, plus the DC circuit, plus the Federal Circuit.
Shit, you gotta have a concrete enemy. They’re just unlucky enough to be an easy target.
Because that’s where this is heading.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-athletes-menstrual...
Unsolicited?
We happen to know a dangerously large group of people wants to make everything about race - ie, classic racist ideology. We happen to have a couple centuries of evidence that this is not a good idea. If they are organising under the banner of critical race theory then that needs to be resisted. There is no place for racism in the public school system.
It has all the marks of classic racism. Drawing arbitrary boundaries, formally treating people differently based on them and not letting people switch between them.
The right way to educate kids is to be showing them a diverse range of excellent role models that they can copy. Not drilling in to them that race influences every aspect of their lives and they should go looking for racial explanations for the world they see.
Here are some examples:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/nyc-cops-did-a-work-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/nyregion/bloomberg-stop-a...
I'm throwing you easy ones, but the better explanation I was told is that it could be a study of how tax law over several generations has resulted in affluence for some class of 3rd generation Asian families on the West coast (hypothetical).
It doesn't necessarily have to be about harm, just a study of a system and its impact. Understanding the nuance of how a system produced "this set of circumstances for this class of people" is why it's a college level deep-dive.
There are claims that it is the modern adaption of Marxist theories into the realm of race. https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2021/05/06/what-crit...
The healthy form of "systems have outcomes" is economics; but economics suggests personal effort and decentralisation get good results rather than obsessing over inherent facts about bodies and so the CRT people had to form their own new quasi-conomics to try and influence how policy is written.
I acknowledge and I do believe what you're saying: I've seen racists articulate something terrible with enough complex words to hide that message in academic settings and pretend it's not hot garbage. That exists. I've been to Berkeley, California as a visiting student. :-) Social justice can wrap around to ugly places.
Economics - to me - seems like a study from a much higher perspective. I don't believe economic theory would go to all the places of why a class of people is being advantaged or harmed.
Do you believe systemic racism exists? Should we study it? I don't understand why a large group of folks are very against asking these questions. You seem like a rational person, and I wouldn't hold you among these. Do you believe the media has skewed and tailored the image of what CRT is? Is it possible to rally or radicalize a lot of people behind the idea that "these teachers are telling your kids to be ashamed"? For most of my life I've seen an assault on public schooling, and I was never taught to feel guilty about my race. I did learn of things like the Trail of Tears in college, however.
No, the idea is absurd. Every policy will affect different demographics differently - be that race, age, class, location, schooling and profession. If the academics could come up with a way to tease out individual threads from that tangle then we'd probably find that everything else is more important than race.
There are racists using the system to achieve their aims - but that tends to be intentional. I like to cite the efforts at stymieing Asians from getting into top-tier universities for example. But we don't need academic study to identify it, and teaching people to go look for a race angle is a bad idea. The academics are going to be people who focus on race all day, see race issues everywhere and are going to get caught up thinking racialist policies are the solution to problems - which will then fail massively as racist policies tend to do.
> I did learn of things like the Trail of Tears in college, however.
That is the central issue, isn't it? All the people involved have been dead for more than a century, the political ideologies at the time have largely been washed away and have no public support and I don't know much about that specific incident but there are unlikely to be special lessons there given how many horrible things happen in history (which is a large and horrible place!).
Compare that the large amount of damage authoritarianism and war has done recently, and there is a pertinent question of why are children being told to focus on race? The communists did more damage to their own people than any other faction. The Nazi's famously managed to get their empire dismantled through warmongering. The Cold War was not a racial issue, it was a clash of major ideologies. We're in a situation that looks to me like the prelude for WWIII and people don't seem to be able to recognise the hubris of being reckless in internationally tense situations.
I'm not against the idea of teaching a few nasty race incidents, but there is so much more history to look at that is recent, relevant and more important. We don't need people analyzing Russia-Ukraine-US-Europe through a race lens. We don't need racial dynamics of Afghanistan, Iraq and friends. We don't need to study economic hardship through race. We need policies that are race-blind and benefit everyone that promote peace and prosperity. Studying things based on their impact on peace and prosperity is where the focus should be. It also means suddenly we'll have divisions being created on racial lines which is a waste of effort arguing against.
> I acknowledge and I do believe what you're saying
If we're going to be overcome by reasonable discussion, not that the policy in the article is wildly stupid, because the premise is that parents are leaving their children in the care of known racists and the authorities are going to control the situation by adding more bureaucrats.
- If they have misjudged the situation they're going to look really silly.
- If they have correctly judged the situation they're attempting to deal with it in a stupid and ineffectual way. They'll probably end up with even worse ideologies than race creeping in if they have one person picking the reading list.
They'll rue this particular aspect of the law if it ends up achieving anything, at best it is a well executed own goal.
[1] Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn't Propose Specific Plans To Advance Diversity - https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...
[2] Study: Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/opinion/liberal-college-a...
[4] Minneapolis teachers union will fire white teachers before laying off any "educators of color," - https://notthebee.com/article/minneapolis-teachers-union-wil... - If you dislike the source, NPR says the same, but words it more delicately, and keeps the key details out of the headline or first paragraph: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/02/1120798679/a-new-minneapolis-...
I wonder if he has been shot by a six year old while writing any of those books [0]. All while the government actively undermines all the work he does.
Any teachers here? Or folks married to teachers? I can't cite all the horrible pay, and parents ridiculing you, but it happens to my wife almost constantly. I doubt it is very different for other teachers.
If it is so noble maybe they deserve some more money and respect. I wouldn't stand up to this governor in a state that elected him. Maybe I'd move to another state and get a teaching job there (which I could not do if I picked up a felony in Florida).
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teacher-shot-6-year-old...
Most of the time the only recourse is to pull them out.
1. My area had gifted programs, unlike SF where I live now, which has dispatched them in the name of “equity”. I lived in a 2/10 school district because my parents were poor and got bused across the county to a 10/10 gifted school for free
2. College tuition is the lowest in the nation —— far lower than any Blue state. UFlorida is $6k/year, and there are easy scholarships that halve that or more
I’m actually considering moving my family back
Harsh, yeah, but doing something for the money has a name and it's not always considered favourable.
Lucky for you, teachers agree with you, so there's no need for a ban to keep it from school library shelves or curricula - teachers simply don't stock or assign it, and you can pat yourself on the back about how pro-knowledge, pro-academic-freedom, and anti-censorship you are.
I'm uncertain what you're upset about. I'm literally talking about civil disobedience against laws. Is that something you disagree with?
States will now struggle to offer families an education that matches their values. They'll come up with law like this that end up making it near impossible for teachers to do their job.
I'm interested in hearing if there are non religious people that support these kind of laws. I come from a secular country, so all this is very difficult to understand