https://www.thedailybeast.com/florida-puts-raging-maga-moms-on-book-banning-council?ref=scroll

This is far more invasive and serious than the way it started, which was an attack on trans kids.  Now the drive is to only allow materials, books, and teaching a hard right ideology from the 1950s.   What next for parents’ rights in school, the right of racist white parents to have their white children not be in classrooms with black students?   Is that also going to be the next step in regressing the country?  The right of Christian kids to not be in classrooms with kids who are not Christian?   Where does a single bigoted parents demands stop?   Notice one of the proud book ban women brags about taking away other parents rights to let their kids read the books with the forbidden knowledge in them, it is not about controlling their children it is all about controlling yours.    They already teach their child racist bigoted regressive stuff, they feel they must prevent other parents from teach their children tolerance, acceptance of LGBTQ+, and diversity as a good thing.   These people cannot have any kids getting that message.  It has long passed the time this is scary; this is US Taliban and moral police territory.    The article is a bit long but not bad, and it is a highly informative important read.    The last paragraph sums it up nicely.    Hugs

“The goal is to have the most conservative counties determine what the rest of the state has access to. It’s to allow a conservative ideology to hold rank over the rest of us,” said the project’s co-founder, Stephana Ferrell. “That’s what all of this is about. The attack on teachers, the banning of books—they need parents to not trust public education, so that they’re fed up and take taxpayer dollars into the for-profit education sector.”

‘A PLEASURE TO BURN’

 

Florida’s Education Department has quietly selected right-wingers for a book-banning council that’ll re-train public school librarians.

Brooke Leigh Howard

Reporter

Jose Pagliery

Political Investigations Reporter

Updated Oct. 24, 2022 7:06AM ET / Published Oct. 24, 2022 4:33AM ET 

 

 

 

 

EXCLUSIVE

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

 

 

 

In the name of “curriculum transparency,” Florida’s Republican-controlled state government has appointed several anti-gay and anti-mask conspiracy theorists to take charge of a new effort at public schools: banning books.

This hastily assembled censorship council—tasked with retraining public school librarians to abide by new restrictions—is the latest ploy in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crusade to upend the state’s education system.

But the council was also staffed under suspicious circumstances, with the state Education Department ignoring its own call for official candidates from local school districts and instead filling most of the slots with right-wing activists who have a history of proposing book bans. One was even nominated by a religious activist with close ties to the DeSantis administration a week before the department publicly called for candidates, according to government emails, hinting at secret coordination between them.

“It calls into question the process that the Florida State Board of Education is trying to implement. It raises significant transparency questions,” said Megan Uzzell at Democracy Forward, which obtained those government emails.

 

While the “parent workgroup” is only getting started, the Education Department’s recent meeting in Orlando last week revealed how the state is positioning itself to spread those controls from school libraries to teachers’ classrooms.

As the meeting ended, Clinton McCkracken, the head of the Orange County teachers union, made a comment to another parent: “I don’t know what to tell my teachers.”

The recent episode began with an Aug. 12 memo from Education Department senior chancellor Jacob Oliva. The memo called for local school districts to nominate “parents of students in K-12 schools for representation on a workgroup”—one charged with creating mandatory “training” that would guide librarians statewide on how to follow new library censorship rules signed into law by Gov. DeSantis earlier this year. School districts had a week to submit the names of qualified nominees.

The Education Department passed on nearly 100 potentially qualified applicants with relevant experience, records show. In Brevard County alone, it ignored the five submissions made by the bipartisan local school board, including the nomination of a former elementary school assistant principal, the director of Eastern Florida State College’s tutoring centers, and the administrator of a local scholarship fund.

Instead, the department went with a woman who nominated herself: Michelle Beavers.

While other candidates have teaching experience, Beavers’ bona fides consist of right-wing activism. She leads the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a MAGA contingent that has antagonized her school board for years over mask mandates—and allied with DeSantis for his recent attempt to outlaw critical race theory in schools.

Since then, Beavers has been actively seeking to ban books. In March, she emailed a Brevard County assistant superintendent about what was then the 19th title on her growing list of targets: the coming-of-age comic book This One Summer, which mentions lesbians and shows teenagers engaging in typical crude humor.

Beavers thanked the assistant superintendent for her “efforts to get this material vetted and hopefully out of our minors hands.” In other emails, Beavers identifies herself as the “head of the Library Book Committee,” explaining that she built a “comprehensive report” that reviews all of the “offensive items” in certain books. She warned about “books that are porn” and opposed a parent opt-out program in a specious and sweeping statement full of grammatical errors.

“These books violate the law, it’s a felony. So why would you try and still defend there [sic] existence by letting parents opt out?” she wrote.

Beavers and the other three appointed parents are now in a working group that is finalizing the presentation that will be used to train school librarians statewide.

 

The Sanctity of DeSantis

The marching orders come from the top. In March, Gov. DeSantis said parental rights should be at the helm of a child’s education.

“We are not going to let politicians deny parents the right to know what is being taught in our schools. I’m proud to sign this legislation that ensures curriculum transparency,” the governor said in a statement at the time.

“While teachers, school administrators, and school board members have a tremendous amount of authority over what and how our kids are taught in school, at the end of the day, parents—not schools—are responsible for raising children,” added Florida state Republican Senate Leader Wilton Simpson.

 

 

“The state has created a situation that is harming students.”

— Clinton McCkracken, head of the Orange County teachers union

Last week’s Education Department meeting was the latest example of the encroaching restrictions, when it unanimously voted to implement rules guaranteeing so-called “parental rights.” The department determined that parents must be notified if their child uses a school restroom or locker room that does not correlate with the child’s sex assigned at birth.

Meanwhile, censorship measures that initially targeted school libraries were extended to individual teachers’ classroom collections, which must now “be reviewed by a district employee holding a valid educational media specialist certificate,” according to Florida’s state website. The board also decided that educators could lose their teaching certifications if they do not comply with the state’s Parental Rights in Education law.

 

Bad Apples

At Wednesday’s meeting, state education board member Grazie Pozo Christie, a senior fellow for The Catholic Association, cited the need “to hold teachers accountable” for those she called “some bad apples.”

Teachers already suffer through poor working conditions, low pay, and staff shortages—being subject to state review of classroom books adds even more to their plates, McCracken, the Orange County teachers union head, said in an interview with The Daily Beast.

“The board voted… to require that all of those books have to be cataloged now. Which, of course, is an arduous task for teachers who may have hundreds of those books. So, in effect, for a lot of those teachers, that means that those classroom libraries won’t be available to students any longer until we can figure out how to manage that,” he said. “Laws like this are created to demonize public education.”

McCracken criticized how the meeting was scheduled in a way that would conflict with teachers’ work schedules and low salaries: 9 a.m. on a school day at a hotel with a hefty price tag for paid parking.

Despite emotional testimonies from concerned teachers, the board didn’t budge.

Teachers who have taken years to build their classroom book collections—available to students who can’t always take solo trips to the library—will now be burdened with the task of indexing their own shelves for so-called content restrictions, McCracken said.

“The classroom library has been an amazing tool for teachers to be able to inspire kids to read,” McCkracken said.

“So what are those kids going to do if the libraries aren’t there?” he asked. “They’ll have less access to important material that would inspire them to read and to learn. The state has created a situation that is harming students.”

 

Book Burning Training

The little-known and quickly assembled “work group” developing this book ban training is a pivotal part of this effort—which makes it all the stranger that the Education Department engaged in what critics are calling a bad faith effort to staff it.

Two parents who applied for Florida’s Department of Education media workgroup told The Daily Beast they raised their hands because they were interested in the books being challenged in schools.

“I’m very familiar with the research of psychological research for children, where it can be disruptive to introduce some of the pornographic material early or over-sexualized material early,” said Hillary Earle, who applied for the media group after seeing an announcement on the neighborhood app NextDoor.

Despite her years of academic and mediation accolades, as well as an endorsement from a school board member, Earle didn’t know she wasn’t selected for the media workgroup until her interview with The Daily Beast.

“This is the first I’m hearing of it,” she said. “I haven’t received anything: a phone call, an interview, anything.”

By contrast, Scott Rooke received a Brevard County school board member endorsement after expressing previous interest in children’s reading material. But he only discovered he wasn’t selected by way of a blog, Account Baloney. He immediately recognized the names of two Moms for Liberty members who did make it: Michelle Beavers and Jennifer Pippin.

The parent-membership seems slanted from the start when I just saw those two names,” he said.

The woman that took his place, Pippin, was not officially recommended by a school district. Instead, emails show, her name was submitted by Keith Flaugh, a childless conservative activist whose “Florida Citizens Alliance” has closely advised DeSantis for years on reforming public schools to combat “cultural Marxism” and “LGBTQ values” in favor of “Judeo-Christian family values.”

When discussing proposed training for librarians and media center employees at a recent working group meeting, Pippin, who drove and sat in her car for the duration of the meeting, chimed in to remind everyone, “I’m not a media center specialist,” noting she didn’t even understand some of the abbreviations being used in the mandated materials she intends to craft.

A third MAGA mom now on the book banning work group is Jamie Merchant, a member of “Mamas for DeSantis” whose summer reading included the book Crimes of the Educators, a call to demolish American public schools written by two known conspiracy theorists—one of whom runs a website that warns about “cancer deaths from the COVID jabs.”

Contentious Consensus

By all accounts, the panel tasked with developing the oncoming mandatory librarian training for the Education Board is a slow-moving train wreck. When the group reviewed the PowerPoint slides at their recent meeting last week, the department’s director of instructional materials, Amber Baumbach, punted on presenting what would obviously be the most controversial and contentious material.

Faced with questions about disagreements, the group director revealed that the Education Department might soon get two versions of the presentation—in what critics like Stephana Ferrell with Florida Freedom to Read Project expect to be a sane version and one that caters to the crazies. The DeSantis administration—which has already spent considerable energy attacking “woke” culture—would decide which option to take.

“If we can’t reach a consensus…it is possible for us to route two different versions of the training,” one of the options that we have is to provide two different points of view,” Baumbach said.

The working group is scheduled to meet again publicly this coming Tuesday, when it will present the slides that address what these conservatives deem offensive material—and is expected to spark more protests from worried parent groups already battling these book bans, like Florida Freedom to Read Project.

“The goal is to have the most conservative counties determine what the rest of the state has access to. It’s to allow a conservative ideology to hold rank over the rest of us,” said the project’s co-founder, Stephana Ferrell. “That’s what all of this is about. The attack on teachers, the banning of books—they need parents to not trust public education, so that they’re fed up and take taxpayer dollars into the for-profit education sector.”

Many thanks to Ali for dropping a note about this and the link in a comment.   I find many of the people who read the blog have great suggestions of news they found that I missed.    This article on silencing the teaching of abortion is similar to the don’t say gay laws in republican controlled states, it is about making something / people disappear from society and keeping it / them hidden with no information about them available to the people effected by / needing the information.    Think of it, if you can control the information students at all levels get you can direct the culture in any way you wish.   No freedom of expression creates what is happening in China and other authoritarian places where the people have only lock step ideas because it is all propaganda driven by the political class / government.    It is a scary time where the republican party / right wing wants to deny advances in society in all categories such as medical, biological, knowledge of the planet, basically the right / republicans want to drive the country back to what they feel was a simpler time when they were in charge and people were not bothered by things different from them.    Got news for them, they will have to go back much farther than the 1950s to find that, the idea that the 1950s were the great social golden age where the stereotypes they love were true … is completely wrong.   That time was horrible for any minority or those who were not white cis men.   Women had little or no rights, blacks / non-whites were without rights and being killed or harmed with impunity, kids were mistreated with no way to complain or stop it, people were dying of health issues we have solved now, and lastly the fact that forced patriotism of kids being made to recite the pledge and forced Christian prayer in schools / public events did not make things better all it did was make clones who felt obligated to go to church and give money while hating it at the same time.   I did not live then, but I thank the Dogs That Love Gravy I did not. 

 Now one last thing, lets talk about what is meant by “woke”.   The right is trying to demonize the word.  I keep hearing interviewed right wingers saying they have to stop the left pushing woke in schools.   While I don’t really know of anyone on the left that uses the term I can tell you what it means.    Ready for this.   That scary word is another way of saying “to be nice”.   Yup that is all it is about or means.   It means not using slurs, not trying to hurt other people’s feelings, it is not being deliberately cruel or mean.   So when people claim I am being woke, I think them.   I want everyone to understand the goal of the right, which is to make the cruelty of the regressive times they claim were better a reality again.    I am woke as much as I can be, where ever I can be, when and to as much as I can be … because I love being nice to others.    Hugs 

Seeking to control what can be taught at public universities—including abortion—is dystopian and grim. It’s what conservatives have always wanted.

As we’ve seen in Idaho and Florida, expect more public university systems in red states to start being tentative, worried, and self-censored when talking about reproductive rights. Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group illustration

 

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, conservatives scored a victory decades in the making: controlling pregnant people’s bodies. They’re not satisfied with just that, though. The next step is to control any speech they don’t like.

Just as ever-shifting abortion bans leave people unsure as to the laws that govern them, there’s now a distinct lack of clarity as to what can and can’t be said—and what can and can’t be taught—in schools.

Witness the dual speech and behavior controversy that has roiled the University of Idaho. In 2021, the state passed the “No Public Funds for Abortion” law, prohibiting public university employees from “counseling in favor of abortion.” That’s painfully vague, but definitely inhibits speech. For instance, can you talk about ectopic pregnancies in a biology class without implying abortion? Things got even more opaque following the reversal of Roe in June, when Idaho’s near-total abortion ban kicked in. The university provided guidance to employees that they could now face felony charges if they provided birth control to students.

Two weeks later, everything got reversed. Sort of. University President Scott Green complained that the memo issued to employees “quickly took on a life of its own with misinformation.” He then proceeded to, ostensibly, reassure employees, but those reassurances were vague. To his credit, Green made clear that the university can continue to offer birth control, but he didn’t directly address whether people could or could not “counsel in favor” of abortion. All he really said was that current academic freedom policies had not been changed and that the university cannot and does not prosecute people.

Neither of those reassurances gets at the heart of the issue: Can employees talk about abortion without running afoul of state law?

A similar story is unfolding at the state university system in Florida. The University of Florida may be hiring Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) to be its president. Sasse is a big fan of “religious liberty” when it comes to dismantling the line between church and state, so his hiring likely doesn’t bode well for a university already under siege by conservative elected officials. The state recently asserted in a court document that curriculum and in-class instruction are government speech—not individual speech—and therefore it can regulate what public university teachers say.

The document was filed in a lawsuit regarding the constitutionality of the state’s “Stop WOKE Act,” which at root prohibits professors from teaching about the country’s pernicious history of racism. The state even tried to extend these speech restrictions to private companies, but that got tossed out by a federal court.

Seeking to control what people teach at public universities is impossibly dystopian and grim. It’s also the logical endpoint of what conservatives have wanted forever: public money free from the conditions that used to go along with taking public money—that religious institutions shouldn’t be funded with taxpayer dollars and groups that receive public money shouldn’t be able to discriminate.

Dismantling that line between church and state and enshrining bigotry into law has been quite a successful project of religious conservatives. They prevailed in an Iowa case where a student group at a public university, taking public dollars, excluded a gay student from leadership and won in court. They scored their biggest victory this past Supreme Court term in Carson v. Makin: The justices ruled that K-12 private religious schools can get public tuition money. And it’s just this sort of thing that allows a Christian K-12 school in Florida to take $1.6 million in public money while having a policy that they will expel LGBTQ students.

Conservatives have always embraced schools like Bob Jones University and Liberty University that completely control their students’ behavior and speech. The former went up to the Supreme Court in 1983 to fight for the right to receive IRS tax-exempt status while maintaining a policy of only admitting white students. The university lost. Bob Jones University also banned interracial dating until 2000.

Rolling back abortion rights is just the latest weapon in the religious right’s ever-growing arsenal. When you control what people can do, it’s just a short hop to controlling what they can say. When bans prohibit “aiding or abetting” an abortion, such as that in Texas SB 8, it directly leads to controlling speech. For example, can you donate to an abortion fund if you live in Texas? In theory, that should never be restricted. Donating money is free speech and is therefore protected under Citizens United v. FEC and is one of the sacred tenets of modern conservatism.

But modern conservatism has become very comfortable with “free speech for me, but not for thee,” and they’ve captured enough of the federal courts that they’ll continue to get their way. Meanwhile, expect more public university systems in red states to start being tentative, worried, and self-censored when talking about reproductive rights or racial justice. Idaho and Florida may have started this trend, but it certainly won’t end there.