News4Jax: “The governor’s office said the course violates state law and is historically inaccurate. In 2021, the state banned teaching Critical Race Theory. Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill restricting how schools can talk about race with students. The Stop WOKE Act bars instructions that say members of one race are inherently racist or should feel guilt for past actions committed by others of the same race, among other things….
DeSantis addressed the controversy during a news conference at a Jacksonville charter school.
“In the state of Florida, our education standards not only don’t prevent but they require teaching Black history, all the important things that’s part of our core curriculum,” DeSantis said Monday. “This was a separate course on top of that for Advanced Placement credit. And the issue is we have guidelines and standards in Florida. We want education, not indoctrination. If you fall on the side of indoctrination, we’re going to decline, if it’s education, then we will do. So when I heard it didn’t meet the standards, I figured, yeah, they may be doing [inaudible] it’s way more than that. This course on Black history, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now, who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids. And so when you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that’s a political agenda. And so, that’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards. We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them. When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.””