OPINION:
When it comes to political stare-downs, weak-kneed Republicans invariably blink first, as we witness with frustrating regularity during omnibus budget battles, debt-limit increase fights, and lots of bad legislation.
But not Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Republican chief executive of the Sunshine State showed how these political battles should be fought — and can be won — when he stared down the left on the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American history course, stating flatly that he wouldn’t allow it to be taught in its current form in Florida schools.
Mr. DeSantis didn’t blink, much less back down, even when the left reflexively, and with utter predictability, labeled his actions racist, claiming falsely that the governor didn’t want Black history taught at all to Florida’s public school students.
The Joy Reids, Don Lemons and Karine Jean-Pierres of the world know full well that what Mr. DeSantis doesn’t want to be taught is a Marxist-inspired course on Black history whose syllabus read like it had been cobbled together by Black Lives Matter radicals in cahoots with The New York Times’ faux-history, America-bashing “1619 Project.”
Among the components of the Advanced Placement Black history course Florida objected to was the teaching of critical race theory (which has been banned in Florida), Black feminism and “queer theory,” reparations for slavery, and movements advocating the defunding of police and the abolition of prisons.
“That’s a political agenda,” Mr. DeSantis said on Jan. 23 at a press conference in Jacksonville. “That’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards. We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them. When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in ‘queer theory,’ you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”
The governor noted that Florida already requires teaching Black history.
“[T]hat’s part of our core curriculum. This was a separate course on top of that for Advanced Placement credit, and the issue is, we have guidelines and standards in Florida,” he said, adding: “We want education, not indoctrination.”
Unlike the neo-segregationist left, Mr. DeSantis wants “to do history” right: “That’s what our standards for Black history are. I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history.”
The course, as originally developed, is reportedly being offered as a yearlong pilot program in 60 schools across the country in the current school year. The aim was to make the course available to all schools in the 2024-25 school year.
Faced with the prospect of being shut out of the state with the fourth-highest number of schools and third-highest number of students in the country, the College Board wisely yielded — blinked first, so to speak — on Jan. 24. It said the curriculum would be revised to address Mr. DeSantis’ thoroughly justified objections.
(As an aside, why is Mr. DeSantis alone in speaking out against this academic agitprop? Where are the other Republican governors — and Democratic governors, for that matter — who should also bar it from their states’ classrooms?)
The Florida Department of Education said that it welcomed the forthcoming revisions, even though it had not yet seen them.
“We are glad the College Board has recognized that the originally submitted course curriculum is problematic, and we are encouraged to see the College Board express a willingness to amend,” Education Department spokesman Alex Lanfranconi said in a statement. “AP courses are standardized nationwide, and as a result of Florida’s strong stance against identity politics and indoctrination, students across the country will consequentially have access to a historically accurate, unbiased course.”
The revised course syllabus — minus the poisonous pedagogy — is supposed to be delivered by Feb. 1, in time for Black History Month. That’s encouraging, but as President Ronald Reagan cautioned us with this Russian proverb about dealing with adversaries: “Trust, but verify.”
We would caution Florida education officials to remain wary of a curricular bait-and-switch that could occur once the course is in place in the state’s high school classrooms, given the far-left predilections of the teachers unions.
That said, assuming the revised AP African American history curriculum does, in fact, comply with Mr. DeSantis’ requirements, establishment Republicans everywhere could take a page from the Florida governor’s playbook on how to stand up against bloated budget bills, debt-limit increase, and all other manner of bad legislation — and not blink first.
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