TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (PAI)—With the Republican-gerrymandered Florida legislature and right-wing Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis still in power, the state’s teachers and their union are fighting on multiple fronts to defend themselves, their students, and their freedom to teach again.
The most immediate threat is identical bills that moved through legislative committees the week of March 31, to let local school boards disregard parents, teachers, and principals completely—never mind the kids—and convert public schools to charter schools, willy-nilly.
The teachers, through the Florida Education Association, the state’s joint AFT-NEA affiliate, are lobbying hard against the measures, SB140 and HB123. The Sunshine State’s ruling Republicans, like their counterparts in other red states, view charters as a way to bust unions and exclude kids—read Black and brown kids—whom charter managements dislike.
Charters can also avoid state and federal curriculum, salary, other rules, and oversight. Supporters won’t admit those motives, of course. They couch their drive for more charters in terms of “school choice” and giving parents an alternative to “failing public schools.”
While FEA can now challenge converting public schools into charters, it won’t be able to do so under the new legislation, says its prime sponsor, State Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview. “We don’t want any one group to be able to veto or stop a majority of parents if they want to make this school choice option available in their community,” he told a Senate Community Affairs Committee hearing.
The two bills let “neighborhood public schools be converted to charter schools without the consent of the teachers,” says FEA. The charters would get the buildings rent-free.
Municipalities could also convert regular schools into “job engine” charters designed to attract new industries or serve a particular corporate entity. Think charters around Orlando training kids to be Disney World workers.
The measures also let the State Board of Education, now dominated by right-wingers, “deem school district property as ‘surplus,’” the union says. “Charter schools will then get priority to take over the surplus property.”
The surplus buildings could also be converted to housing for teachers, military service members, and first responders.
The Republican-backed bills “disrupt school communities and create additional bureaucracy,” says FEA. “Students enrolled in a public school converted to a charter school are not guaranteed the ability to remain enrolled in that school.
“This bill benefits only charter school corporations, not students or educators,” FEA adds. Teachers and other school workers are “likely to see” salary, health care, and benefit cuts.
The other threat is an expansion of the state’s current whitewashing of U.S. history. Florida would now deliberately exclude any teaching, through primary and middle school, about African-American history and contributions, the nation’s historic racism and oppression, and similar ideas. High schoolers would get only limited exposure.
That builds on a DeSantis dictate several years ago ordering teachers to say enslaved African-Americans benefited from what pre-Civil War Southern gentry called “the peculiar institution.” The leading Southern racist then, Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, coined the phrase. DeSantis’s praise of slavery’s “benefits” to the oppressed produced worldwide condemnation.
Incomplete and pro-white nationalist U.S. history, literally as well as rhetorically, is also the aim of the GOP Donald Trump regime in the Nation’s Capital as well as his “platform,” the far-right’s Project 2025. Trump eliminated “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives in federal offices and programs.
Federal contractors, including major universities that received millions of dollars in research grants, also knuckled under and abolished DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) offices and programs.
Abolishing complete and truthful teaching of history, warts and all, is also an objective of the corrupt capitalist class. It seizes on every lever it can find to foster racial and economic divisions, from putdowns of people of color to right-to-work laws to outright segregation.
The chief State Senate sponsor of the charters bill, Don Gaetz, is a political heavyweight in the Pensacola area. He’s also the father of now-infamous and scandal-scarred former Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, whom Trump nominated late last year to be U.S. Attorney General.
Matt Gaetz retired from the House to take that job but was so toxic to his former Republican colleagues that he had to withdraw from that race, too. Pam Bondi, a Trump personal lawyer, replaced Matt Gaetz and is now AG, doing Trump’s bidding. State Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, is the House bill’s sponsor.
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