Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s destruction of the once-vaunted state education system is taking hits from multiple directions as the GOP presidential candidate attempts to legitimize bigotry and slavery in the state schools’ curriculum.
As NBC News reports, DeSantis endorsed the adoption of a new college entrance exam, the Classical Learning Test, an eight-year-old standardized test that claims to provide an alternative to the SAT and ACT, but which concentrates its subject matter on a white, Western perspective, largely ignoring the history and contributions of other cultures. The Florida Board of Governors will vote in an upcoming meeting on accepting the test, giving it the same weight as the more established exams in admissions for Florida state schools. The CLT is used at around 200 universities across the United States, primarily conservative, Christian schools that shun ongoing academia, preferring to teach a worldview as believe in a white American suburb in the 1950s.
On another front, the College Board, the company that creates and oversees Advanced Placement tests, shot back sharply at the claim of a Florida education administrator who claimed the new Florida social studies standards that demand teachers instruct students that enslaved Blacks benefited from their status as chattel, primarily to white enslavers. Frances Presley Rice, a member of the 13-member workgroup appointed by DeSantis to alter education goals to weaken references to white oppression of other races, posted on Facebook that “Significantly, the highly-praised AP African American History course has nearly the exact language and sentiment as is in the text under question.”
That sentiment was pointedly rejected by the College Board: “We are aware that some in Florida have reviewed the Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies framework and have suggested that the state’s recently approved middle school African American History standards align with our course requirements,” the company said in a statement. “We resolutely disagree with the notion that enslavement was in any way a beneficial, productive, or useful experience for African Americans. … Unequivocally, slavery was an atrocity that cannot be justified by examples of African Americans’ agency and resistance during their enslavement.”
The rebuke comes as Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at an African Methodist Episcopal convention in Orlando, mocking an invitation to have a roundtable discussion with DeSantis and a noted slavery denier. “Right here in Florida, they plan to teach students that enslaved people benefited from slavery. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us in an attempt to divide and distract our nation with unnecessary debates,” Harris said in her remarks, according to USA Today. “And now they attempt to legitimize these unnecessary debates, with a proposal that most recently came in, of a politically motivated roundtable.”