Kamala Harris hits new Florida school standards: ‘They want to replace history with lies’
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a scathing rebuke of Florida education officials on Friday, using a hastily planned speech in Jacksonville to accuse the state State Board of Education of trying to whitewash how students are taught Black history and the country’s darkest chapters.
Speaking to a crowd at the Ritz Museum and Theater in Jacksonville’s historically Black LaVilla neighborhood, Harris painted a bleak picture of Florida’s education system under total Republican control of the state government. Books have been banned from school libraries, she said, and teachers are forced to do their jobs in fear, worried that they could violate restrictive laws on what can and cannot be taught in public schools.
“And now on top of all of that, they want to replace history with lies,” Harris said. “Middle school students in Florida to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery. High schoolers may be taught that victims of violence, of massacres, were also perpetrators. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us. And we will not have it.”
Harris’ trip to Jacksonville came just two days after the State Board of Education OK’d new standards for how public schools should approach Black history, including teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
The new curriculum has drawn fierce pushback from teachers and civil rights leaders, who have accused the board and the state’s Republican Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. of teaching “revisionist history.”
That was the theme of Harris’s speech on Friday. She blamed state education officials for feeding “propaganda” to Florida students, and warned that proponents of such initiatives wouldn’t stop in Florida, but that there is “a national agenda afoot.”
“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Harris said.
“It is not only misleading. It is false and it is pushing propaganda,” she continued.
DeSantis fires back
The speech was organized through the White House, but had the trappings of a campaign stop as Harris and President Joe Biden ready for a 2024 reelection bid. She met with activists and local officials ahead of her remarks, and was introduced by Brevard County School Board member Jennifer Jenkins, who is openly considering a Senate bid next year against Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott.
Notably absent from Harris’ remarks was any direct mention of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican presidential candidate who has put culture war issues – especially those surrounding education – at the center of his political brand.
DeSantis tore into Harris ahead of her visit on Friday, accusing her and other Democrats of lying about the curriculum and advocating for the teaching of “sexual topics” in schools – a claim he has made repeatedly over the years.
“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 tweeted. “Florida stands in their way and we will continue to expose their agenda and their lies.”
Diaz, the state education commissioner, has also defended the new standards, saying that public schools will still teach the “tougher subjects,” like the slave trade and Jim Crow laws, “as age-appropriate.”
“Nothing was removed, including what we continue to say was the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said at the Wednesday board meeting in Orlando where the guidelines were approved.
Yet the board’s decision and Harris’ trip to Jacksonville are only the latest examples of how Florida has become a main battlefield for culture wars under the leadership of DeSantis, one of more than a dozen Republicans running for the GOP nomination to challenge Biden in 2024.
Harris traveled to the state in January to deliver a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that established a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion. That ruling was overturned last year, allowing lawmakers in Florida and other states to clamp down on abortion rights.
DeSantis, who began his second term in the governor’s mansion in January, has carved out a national reputation as a culture-war crusader willing to use his office to tear down and remake various institutions, including the state education system, in a conservative image.
Both as governor and on the campaign trail, he frequently rails against so-called “woke ideology” and “cultural Marxism” that he argues has been used by the political left to “indoctrinate” children and sow division along racial, ethnic, gender and ideological lines.
Under DeSantis’ governorship, the state has barred lessons in public schools that deal with critical race theory, a decades-old legal concept that holds that racial disparities are systemic in the United States.
The Florida Department of Education has rejected math textbooks, accusing publishers of attempting to “indoctrinate” students with “woke” content. And at DeSantis’ behest, the Legislature has prohibited instruction that could make students feel responsibility or guilt about the past actions of other members of their race.
The state education department also moved earlier this year to ban an Advanced Placement African American history course in Florida schools.
Nearing the end of her speech on Friday, Harris offered a blunt assessment of Florida’s new curriculum on Black history, saying that it violated the basic expectation that when children are sent to school, “they’re being taught the truth.”
“It is a reasonable expectation that our children will not be misled,” she said. “And that’s what’s so outrageous about what’s happening right now: an abject and purposeful and intentional policy to mislead our children.”
Miami Herald staff writer Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.
