The State 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.
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.
But during an at-times tense meeting Wednesday in Orlando, critics, including teachers and Democratic state lawmakers, asked the board to table the standards to allow for changes. “I am very concerned by these standards, especially … the notion that enslaved people benefited from being enslaved. It’s inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish in our educational curriculum,” Eskamani said.
“If I were still a professor, I would do what I did very infrequently — I’d have to give this a grade of ‘I’ incomplete,” Thompson said. Thompson objected to wording in the standards that said violence was perpetrated “by” African Americans.
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