 Yesterday, the State Board of Education approved controversial new academic standards for instruction about African American history. They did so despite the fact that teachers across Florida objected to the changes and asked the board to put the proposal on hold. Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, is on the line now for a closer look at the standards and what they might mean for educators and students. Before we get started, we should note that we reached out to the Florida Department of Education but did not hear back from them prior to going live. However, if they want to talk to us, we absolutely want to talk to them. Now listen, you can join the conversation too. Call us at 549-2937 or tweet us at FCC on air. Email us at FirstCoastConnect at wjct.org or message us on Facebook. Andrew, are you there? I am. Good morning, Al. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. So please explain to me exactly what this decision by the Florida Department of Education, what it amounts to. Yeah, so the Florida Department of Education or really the State Board yesterday approved new standards as it relates to how teachers in our schools will teach specifically African-American history from kindergarten through 12th grade. And we have a lot of concerns that it's not just educators, it's parents, it's community groups, it's the faith community who have concerns about this whitewashing of the standards in our schools. For example, these standards talk to the fact that, or not the fact, but talk about how slavery may have been a good thing for African-Americans, which I don't believe anyone believes, but these standards are saying we should be teaching that. These standards also leave out a lot of history. For example, when they talk about the Supreme Court ruling of Brown versus the Board of Education, which ended segregation, these standards now actually don't talk about how Florida and other states try to ignore the Supreme Court ruling. Try to say it didn't apply to their state. Back to Florida passed legislation saying so. And that's not covered in the standards in high school when they talk about Brown versus the Board of Education. So how was this push forward with all the pushback like organizations like yours and the NAACP definitely were very much against these changes? So how does it get push forward if so many people were asking? And also I should say that teachers across the state were saying that they didn't want this to happen. Yeah, unfortunately, we're living in an environment where politics seems to be deciding what goes on in our schools. We've seen from the governor and his administration this continued attempt to whitewash history, to limit what kids are learning, to deny kids from seeing themselves in their learning when we see bookbands and stuff like that. And so that has been a constant concern. It's actually one of the issues driving the massive teacher and staff shortage we're seeing in our schools right now, because teachers and staff are just not willing to work in places where they're not allowed to actually do what is best for kids. And so we are seeing politics driving the day rather than good policy rather than actually listening to parents, educators and people who are working in our schools who really do understand how kids learn and how we have to teach them. Is there any way to challenge this decision? Well, I think what we are going to have to continue to do, I do believe there will be some legal challenges that come forward, but at the end of the day what this is going to take is it's going to take all of us in our communities. There are way more people who are concerned with what's happening to education in the state of Florida than those actually doing the harm to education. And we need to speak out more. We need to show up at school board meetings. We need to make sure that our voice is being heard, not just the minority who are banning books, who don't even have kids in school very often. Those folks who are driving those decisions right now, we have to be louder than they are, and we're going to have to engage quite honestly in ways that we saw people before us engage during the civil rights movement. I think that's where we're at at this point. Across the state, we are seeing teacher shortages happening. Do you predict that this will create more teacher shortages? Absolutely. I think this continues to feed into teacher shortage right now. It's really driven by two things. It's driven by a lack of pay and unfair pay in our schools, and then it's driven by this constant undermining of the teaching profession. So we got a message, an email from the Florida Department of Education. Let me read it to you. They just sent it to us like a minute ago. We're proud of the rigorous process that the department took to develop these standards. They were created by a work group consisting of 13 educators, academics, including nominations from the Commissioner's African American History Task Force. It's sad to see critics attempt to discredit what any unbiased observer would conclude to be in-depth and comprehensive African American history standards. They incorporate components of African American history, the good, the bad, and the ugly. These standards will further seem at Florida as a national leader in education as we continue to prove true and accurate instruction in African American history. What do you have to say to that? Yeah, you know, they're trying to spin it, obviously, right, but the reality of it is you can't sit there that thing that teaching that slavery was a good thing is an honest dealing in our schools. You can't sit there and say that when we leave out key pieces of history, like I talked about earlier, or other aspects of history that really have an impact. Look, we're talking about these standards in our primary grade. We're not even telling kids to understand the contributions that certain African Americans made to society, to our history. They just want them to identify them. That is the lowest of academic rigor we ever have seen in any kind of teaching, and that's what they're saying for elementary kids. Just identify key black figures. Don't necessarily need to know what they did. One thing that you said a couple of times, and I would love for you to drill down, the idea that in these standards it says that slavery might have been beneficial to black people. Exactly, because that's a statement that, I don't know, it just stretches a little bit. I'm just curious to understand exactly what it says. Yeah, it says that slavery may have, I guess the question I'm asking is, how was it beneficial to black people? Yeah, they're saying because it gave them a trained African Americans who were slaves, it gave them skills that they otherwise wouldn't have had. That's what they're trying to say in these standards. I don't think any of us believe that, but that's what they're trying to say in these standards. It's really horrible to think that people would try to put a positive spin on such a really horrible thing that happened in the history of not just our country, but our world and to downplay slavery. Look, we saw it even in the civics training they did for teachers. In the civics training for teachers, they actually told teachers in those trainings a couple of things about slavery. They said, one, don't talk about how the founding fathers of this country owned slaves, only talk about how they wanted to end slavery. That would be whitewashing history. And also if the founding fathers only wanted to end slavery, they could have. If they didn't own slaves, they could have. Who was the invisible force that they were fighting against if they really wanted to end it? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Andrew, I'm curious. This committee that put these together, and I know I'm asking you to just guess, but do you think they actually believe this themselves? You know, it's hard to know. What we know is that what I continue to believe is happening right now in education in Florida is politics are making decisions. And so I don't know that a lot of what is being said is believed other than I believe it is trying to serve a political purpose. I would push back a little bit on that. Not that I disagree with you, but I think that politics have always been in our schools. I think that like when you look at, I mean, going all the way back to Brown versus Board of Education or Plessy versus Ferguson, like all of those were fights about the larger fight of racism and discrimination in this country, but the place that they showed up first, or at least the place that we see them go into the Supreme Court, would be in the classrooms. So I would say like this issue of race and classrooms and politics has been with us since we were started doing public education in this country. I think acknowledging that race has an impact to me is not a political decision. It is a reality of what we get when you try to spin how that impacts the learning of the system of education in our schools. When you try to change what's happening, when I talk about politics, I'm talking about someone using our schools for their political purpose, for a political purpose. I don't think when you're trying to create equality that's using our schools for a political purpose, trying to make sure every kid has access to a high quality public education. But when you're using schools and curriculum to advance a political agenda, that's what I see happening now. These standards were developed under this premise of the Stop Locat. The governor of this state has said we are not going to teach certain things in our schools. When I was in school, which was a while ago, but when I was in school and we talked about history, history in our social studies classes always had a component of current events and how current events were shaped by events from the history. You've got a governor talking about saying we're not going to teach certain current events that people are seeing every day, every time they turn on the news, every time they turn on the TV or listen on the radio or go on social media. And you literally have the governor of this state saying you're not allowed to teach that stuff. And this rewrite of the standards is under that. There are certain things we are now no longer allowed to teach. And when we teach it, we teach it from a factual standpoint and allow kids to analyze and compare it to what they're seeing today. And that's what's very concerning. We are limiting the learning of our students with these standards. Andrew, I'm going to go ahead to some callers. We got Todd on the south side. Todd, please keep it on topic and keep it brief. How are you, Todd? Yes, good morning. I'd like to say that what we're seeing is a rewrite of history, like the rewrite that the United Daughters of the Confederacy did at the Civil War. Also, the move here is to condition and control the mindset of both black and white students. And my question goes out to the black organizations and the white organizations, not only here in Florida, but throughout the country that need to stand up and actually come out and fight against this move to rewrite the history of black folks in this country. Thank you. Thank you. We've got a tweet of Jags fan Brian and Jags fan Brian says it was a pretty gross meeting. The opposition was vocalized and they celebrated these rule changes by saying that the timing couldn't have been better based on the comments. They praised mom's for liberty while in session, but they rarely commented because they have direct access to the board of education. Andrew, were you in these meetings? I was not there yesterday. I'm actually in Washington DC for some meetings, but we had a whole bunch of people there. There were teachers there. There were students there. Some of our folks from FEA were there. And we had a lot of people who spoke, and there were a lot of folks who spoke. I want to point something out though. This meeting was held at a hotel, a private property, which had a high parking cost, which made it hard for a lot of citizens to be able to get to that meeting. I thought that was interesting because typically the state board holds their meeting in public buildings where anyone has access. So it was kind of interesting that they did that while they're passing some serious policy standards here. So that's also quite concerning in how they handled this. Let's hear from Ed in Orange Park. Ed, please keep it on topic and keep it brief. How are you, Ed? Yes, sir. Thank you. Yes, I do hope that we're teaching history where the good, the bad, and the ugly. And hopefully they're going to be teaching historical facts like the Republicans was formed, created as the abolitionist party while the Democrat was created as the pro-slavery party, which is playing why at the time of the Civil War, almost 100% of the slave owners were registered Democrats. At the end of the war, the KKK was formed at the worst time with the barbarity that they did for decades with all 100% Democrats, formed by Democrats. And Jim Crow laws were created and forced and passed by Democrats in the South. Okay, Ed, thank you so much for calling. We're talking about the Department of Education obscuring history and changing history around, and that's a topic to talk about, but I will not allow history to be obscured and changed around on my program. And that's exactly what you were doing there because the truth of the matter is, is that absolutely, that way back in the day, Republicans were the party of abolition, but there was a shift in politics. And so the same people who were Republicans back in the day, and they were abolitionists for against slavery, they became Democrats. So it was a shift. And so this finger pointing and saying that like, Oh, the Republicans did X, Y, and Z, you're not talking about the same Republicans that we're talking about today. And when you compare those two and say it the way you were saying it, Ed, you are obscuring the actual truth and playing this shell game that I will not allow on my airwaves. And now I'll just say we actually teach all of that history. Like that's part of it. What's happening now, though, is it is an attempt to say certain parts of history should not be taught. Exactly. And just as the point of the caller, he was giving a certain part of the history, but not giving the complete history. Exactly. And that's the problem with the standards. We can't just teach parts we like or don't like. We have to teach all of history so that the context is there and true learning comes out of it. The founding fathers of this country wanted it a citizen tree that was educated. And in order to be educated, we need to know everything that happened, not just certain parts that some people pick and choose. Exactly. You can't talk about history without putting history into context. There is a question on Twitter asking, Andrew, if you could speak about moms for liberty and I guess the metaphor that they're creating or the equivalency they're creating, excuse me, is that it's the rebirth of the daughters of the Confederacy. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, well, look, moms for liberty is not all mom number one. Or let's put it this way, not all moms who have kids in public schools. It is extremely well funded, well connected, operative of a political party that has been made very clear. They made that clear that that's what they're trying to do. And they're actually, they are a voice piece and they are funded by the same groups that are funding a lot of these other anti-public school anti-worker initiatives across the country. So, you know, they've been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. And I think rightfully so that this is a group that one of their chapters put a quote from Adolf Hitler at the top of their newsletter. Then when they apologized for it, they didn't say they necessarily disagreed with it. They just apologized for putting it in there. And at their conference recently, someone said, we shouldn't apologize for quoting Adolf Hitler. If that's the kind of organization that someone wants to say is productive, I have a totally different vantage point. That is a political operation, not a group of moms coming together to support schools and the learning for their children. Andrew, it appears to me that through moms for liberty and other organizations, that people who want to change the standards for African American history and other things, that they are absolutely organized. People who want to take books out of schools, they are organized. If you don't like those movements, how does the average parent who wants their children to have access to diverse books who wants their children to understand the true history of the United States? What's the movement that they should be making in order to make their voice heard? So there are other groups out there. There's a group in Florida called Families for Strong Public Schools, for example. There's other groups out there as well, local parent groups. Of course, the parent teachers associations, parent teacher organizations and other groups like that, that parents get involved in. I want to push back. I wouldn't say these groups are highly organized. They're extremely well funded and they run like machines in the sense that they have endless resources. But I want to point this out. They're using moms for liberty as a way to say, this is about powering parents. I'm a parent. I have two daughters, one still in school. She's going into ninth grade, she's going into high school. Here's what I want as a parent. I want my child to be able to read books of that she relates to. I'm a white Jewish guy. My wife is an African-American Christian. And we want our daughter to be able to learn about her heritage. And so when you're pulling books out of school that is about kids like my daughter, then she doesn't get to learn about her heritage. When you block her, as the governor has done, from taking an advanced placement class on African-American studies, then I as a parent do not have the right to have my kid take that class because someone else has said no. When groups like Moms for Liberty or some of these other groups ban books that I want my daughter to read, then I as a parent don't have those rights. So this is not about empowering parents. This is exactly the opposite. This is a small group of individuals, very often not even parents of kids in our schools who are dictating what we as parents get to expose our kids to. That is not freedom and that is not liberty. All right, we're going to go to the phones. We're going to take Charlie and Jack's Beach, please, man. Keep it on topic and keep it brief. How are you this morning, Charlie? I'm great, guys. I just wanted to ask you a question. When you talk about education and what people are teaching and what people are learning, when you have children today, your children, if you put a phone in their hand, they have the biggest library on the planet. They can pull up and read both sides of every issue on everything. So one of the questions I have is, are you telling your child to use their phone to see the history, to see what's out there, whether it's right or left? Hey, Charlie. Charlie, just a question for you. I'm following your line of questions, but I just want to follow up with that and say that when we're talking about public education, that is like as taxpayers that we are all paying into. And so I guess, also, I think that the assumption that you're making is that everybody is equally connected to the internet and can go out and find these facts, so to speak. I think that what public education, taxpayer-funded education, is like it's creating a baseline, right? It's creating an understanding of like, this is how the world operates around us. And if we block some of the education from that or if we can't agree on that, it just creates an imbalance. Yeah, and I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you. However, I know you're smart enough that you're not going to let anybody, whether they're right-wing or left-wing, any of your family, get the wrong information. You're going to figure out how to get it to them. And today we're blessed and we're fortunate that we're not like, you know, one of my, a couple of my favorite people on this planet are Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln had no education. He wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. He wrote the Gettysburg Address. So it is possible to do things in your smart man, and I know you would teach your family to be as happening and do it as best they can. And so that's what I would suggest that today we're blessed that if someone is giving you the wrong information and you have a child, you have a child and not everybody has phones, but if your children have phones or not your children, you don't want them to have phones, but, you know, your kids in school, you teach them to find the truth. Thanks, Charlie. We got to keep it moving. I got to get some more people in, but thank you so much. Andrew, did you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I want to, I want to say a couple of things, right? One, the Internet is not all accurate information. We know that there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet. Number one, number two, the Internet is based largely, a lot of these apps and resources now on algorithms, which means you only see what the algorithm says you can see. So to say that the Internet is a substitute of education, I think is way off base. We have to make sure that we are actually teaching kids today to understand that information, how do you know if information is valid and truthful? How do you know if it's not? And that's actually been a challenge in public education spaces today, especially with AI coming on board now with this artificial intelligence. How do we know that what we're getting is actually truthful, accurate, factually based, and what what gives both sides of what an event might be. Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association. Thank you so much for talking to us about these changes to our public schools. Absolutely. I'll have a good one. You too.