Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida Friday and delivered critical remarks in response to the state Board of Education's approval of new standards for how Black history will be taught in public schools.
The Florida Board of Education on Wednesday approved new academic standards for instruction about African American history, after numerous teachers from across Florida objected to the changes and asked the board to put the proposal on hold.
Among the new standards, Florida's public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills, according to a 216-page document about the state’s 2023 standards in social studies, posted by the Florida Department of Education.
Other language that has drawn the ire of some educators and education advocates includes teaching about how Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres.
“Middle school students in Florida to be told that enslaved people benefitted from slavery, high schoolers may be taught that victims of violence of massacres were also perpetrators; I said it yesterday, they insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not have it,” Harris said to applause.
The vice president's trip to Jacksonville will highlight efforts to "protect fundamental freedoms, specifically, the freedom to learn and teach America’s full and true history," a White House official said in an announcement first shared with NBC News.
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The Vice President’s criticism was rebutted in advance in a tweet from Gov. Ron DeSantis, saying in part, “Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students.”
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“Why does DeSantis want children in Florida to not know?” said Dr. Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University. “In Florida, your chances during the lynching era of being lynched were greater than they were in Mississippi or Alabama.”
Dunn has studied violence against Blacks in Florida for 20 years, leading educational trips to sites where mob attacks happened, such as Ocoee and Rosewood. He said it’s insulting for the state to order teachers to tell their students that “slaves developed skills … which could be applied to their personal benefit.”
“You might say, a great thing that you made me a blacksmith, but had you not enslaved me, I might’ve been a king or a queen in my country, it’s a tremendous rationalization of evil in our history to say that Black people, that enslaved people benefitted from their chains, from the malicious treatment that they were given,” Dunn said.
Harris, whose mother was a civil rights activist, will also meet with parents, educators, civil rights leaders and elected officials, the official said.
The new framework has been sharply criticized by the Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers’ union representing about 150,000 teachers, as a “step backward.”
The United Teachers of Dade also spoke out against the new standards, saying that the education board is trying to rewrite history.
“We are outraged and appalled by the manipulation of the Florida Department of Education to whitewash history, minimize the horrors of slavery, and indoctrinate our children," the union said in a statement. "The facts are that the only people who benefited from slavery are those who gained economic advantages from its immoral construct and those who continue to benefit from racism. Educators won’t stand for inaccurate teaching. We must be concerned and have the moral conviction to call it out, in the ballot box, and with acts of resistance.”
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava also criticized the new standards.
In a tweet Thursday, the mayor said "Slavery didn’t benefit the enslaved—period. And here in Miami-Dade, we don’t rewrite history. African Americans fought to overcome slavery & segregation, & are still fighting racism to this day. We must condemn disinformation, ensuring the next generation learns from our past."
Meanwhile, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. pushed back on assertions by groups such as the Florida Education Association teachers union and the NAACP Florida State Conference that the standards “omit or rewrite key historical facts about the Black experience” and ignore state law about required instruction.
Diaz defended the standards, while commending a workgroup involved in developing the curriculum and the Department of Education’s African American History Task Force.
“As age-appropriate, we go into some of the tougher subjects, all the way into the beginnings of the slave trade, Jim Crow laws, the civil-rights movement and everything that occurred throughout our history,” Diaz said.
Paul Burns, chancellor of the Department of Education’s Division of K-12 Public Schools, accused critics of “peddling really a false narrative” about the guidelines.
“These standards really also provide our Florida students with a robust depth of knowledge regarding the difficult circumstances overcome by African Americans and the vast contributions to the American story,” said Burns, who is African American.
William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, who are members of Florida’s African American History Standards Workgroup, defended the new standards in a statement, calling them “rigorous and comprehensive” and saying they aimed to show “that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted.”
The topic of voting rights, gun violence and women’s choices about their own bodies, will also be addressed during Harris’ visit, the White House official said.
