Don’t be fooled by the spin: Republicans are banning courses and harassing teachers out of their job

Another week, another lesson in a truth that will not be heeded by the mainstream media: Republicans are liars, and you should never take what they say at face value. This time it was over yet another education scandal in Florida under the leadership of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. It started when the College Board, a non-profit that manages educational standards for those seeking higher education, announced that Florida had banned an Advanced Placement (AP) psychology course that over 30,000 Florida high school students had enrolled in for the fall.

Long story short: The DeSantis-signed bill barring schools from offering “instruction” in gender or sexual orientation, dubbed the “don’t say gay law” by critics, made it impossible for teachers to address very basic ideas like “sexuality is a part of the life experience.” Rather than offer a substandard program, the College Board was forced to pull the AP classes, which many students could use for college credit, from the schools. 

In response to the bad press, the GOP-controlled Florida government went into heavy spin mode, releasing a letter claiming the AP Psychology course can be “taught in its entirety,” but only “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.” This was widely — and falsely — reported in the press as a “reversal,” with even LGBTQ-oriented sites getting caught up in the hype. Thankfully, the team at Popular Information was on hand to debunk the lie, pointing out that the “developmentally appropriate” language is a poison pill that amounts to a de facto ban on the AP Psychology course. 

---

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

---

“A teacher can exclude the content in AP Psychology related to sexual orientation and gender identity and put their students at risk of not receiving college credit,” Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria explain. “Or a teacher can include those topics and risk losing their certification and their job.” Despite reports implying otherwise, therefore, Florida schools are canceling the classes. 

Luckily, the Washington Post quickly updated the story with the correct information, under the headline “Florida schools drop AP Psychology after state says it violates the law.” 

All this confusion is very much by design. The mixed messages coming from Republican leaders on what is and isn’t allowed in schools serves a larger purpose: making it so impossible for teachers to do their jobs that they give up even trying.

In some cases, teachers leave the profession or move to a less hostile state to work. In others, it’s more a quiet-quitting, as the limitations force teachers to offer a substandard education to their students, out of fear that actually challenging kids to learn will cross some legal line that will land teachers in serious trouble. Either way, children in red states are losing access to quality education. 

All these various faux-outrages over education are being ginned up by Republicans and groups like Moms for Liberty for one reason: As pretexts to make it impossible for teachers to do their jobs. The strategy increasingly embraced by Republicans is to destabilize schools by harassing the teachers out of even trying to do their jobs, through confusing and contradictory rules. 

As Kathryn Joyce reported for the New Republic in 2021, Republican leaders object to “the very existence of public schools.” Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education described the end game that Republicans are aiming for: “It will be a stratified system, where wealthy kids receive the absolute best education; kids in the middle will probably receive a decent education; and kids that are poor and disadvantaged will sit in a big room in front of computers with someone standing at the door keeping them in.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told MSNBC that this attack on AP psychology is more of the same. “What this is doing is just eroding opportunity for Florida’s students. That’s what the governor is doing, and that’s what the department of education is doing.” 

The absurdity of teaching under Republican rule is illustrated by another recent story from the Tampa Bay Times about Florida schools pulling the complete text of Shakespearean plays from the classroom. The Bard is considered too risqué under the DeSantis-era speech regulations. Instead, students will only read highly censored excerpts of a play like “Romeo and Juliet.” The are-you-kidding excuse is that high school kids are too young to know that the famous couple has S-E-X on their W-E-D-D-I-N-G-N-I-G-H-T.

This also makes it impossible for public school English teachers to prepare their students for college, which expects kids to be grounded in the basics of literature like Shakespeare. This no doubt suits the goals of Republicans, who clearly think that college should be a privilege only for those wealthy enough to afford private school tuition. 

So instead of teaching Shakespeare, Florida teachers are now being told to use materials created by a right-wing disinformation mill called “PragerU.”  Unsurprisingly in the anti-reading world of Republican politics, PragerU focuses not on books but on videos that are rife with lies and misrepresentations. Videos now deemed “educational” materials in Florida are on topics like why racism is a myth that Black people prop up because of  “the victim mentality.” Or how being a climate change denialist is the same thing as “the Warsaw Uprising, when the city’s Jews fought back against the Nazis.” One especially vile video uses a cartoon figure of Booker T. Washington to make excuses for American slavery. 

Replacing real materials with right-wing propaganda isn’t just immoral, but makes it pretty much impossible for teachers to do their job. First of all, good teachers don’t lie to students. Plus, this sort of thing makes it difficult for students to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to go to college or get jobs in the real world. PragerU materials both encourage bigotry and discourage basic literacy. They are functionally an anti-education, meant to make the person receiving it less intelligent than they were before. 

It’s not just Florida. In Oklahoma, the Republican Superintendent for Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, has made it a habit of publicly targeting individual teachers with conspiracy theories. One teacher, Summer Boismier, was hounded out of her job for sharing a link to the Brooklyn Public Library’s “Books Unbanned” program, which gives access to the library’s catalog to out-of-state teens. Now Walters is accusing “communist China” of “giving money to Tulsa public schools in order to try to undermine our United States government.” It’s not true, of course, but the goal of the lie appears to be putting a target on the back of a Chinese language teacher for the sin of being good at her job. 

Walters has borrowed from the DeSantis playbook of imposing contradictory regulations on teachers. As the Daily Beast reports, teachers “are required by state law to cover the Tulsa Race Massacre and the Holocaust, but are also required to do so without talking about race or making the subject matter controversial.” Walters in particular made comments arguing that the Tulsa Race Massacre was somehow not about race, even though it was caused by white people mass-murdering and stealing from Black people in an orgy of racist violence. 

Walters is taking advantage of the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-don’t situation he created, threatening to strip the entire Tulsa public school system of accreditation. The strategy isn’t even hidden: Write the rules so that there is no way to avoid breaking them, and then use the rule-breaking as a pretense to end public education entirely. 

We can see how this plays out in Texas, where Republicans used phony claims of school underperformance in the racially diverse city of Houston as a pretext for the state to forcibly strip Houston voters of control over the local school district. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott instead installed a crony, Mike Miles, as the school district superintendent. Miles was chosen for his destructive talents, having left the Dallas school system in tatters after a three-year stint of successfully driving down test scores and running off talented and experienced teachers and principals. Now Miles is in Houston, pretending to lead while actually setting things on fire. One of his first decisions was so on the nose that it’s almost hard to believe: He is shutting down libraries —so they can be replaced with “discipline centers.”

The goal has never been more starkly illustrated. Republicans want to convert public schools from places of learning to prisons for children, where they will be kept in ignorance until they’re too old to ever compete with the children of well-heeled white people for spots at elite universities. 

Public education in the U.S. has long been underfunded and under-served. But even when it falls short, it’s an important part of realizing the American dream of equal opportunity. That is due in large part to the dedication of school teachers, who miraculously show up in droves, ready to do what they can to help kids learn and grow, even as they face obstacles like racism, poverty, oppression, and even just benign neglect. Some students manage to leverage a public education into higher education and careers that their parents never dreamed of. Everything great about public education is why Republicans hate it so much. These attacks on schools and teachers aren’t just penny ante culture war politics meant to rile up the base for the next election. It’s part of a larger assault on the very idea that every kid deserves an education, no matter who their family is.