New civics training for Florida teachers promotes inaccurate ideas about the separation of church and state, teachers told The Washington Post.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education announced that they will host 10 regional 3-day civics education professional training sessions for 2,500 teachers this summer to take over 2,500 teachers in the summer of 2022. Training comes with a stipend from $700.
The FDOE said instruction “will be aligned with revised civic and government standards,” but some teachers have expressed concerns about the instruction.
During a press conference Thursday, DeSantis said the new civics education is pushing back against the “woke indoctrination” of children and said children in the state are learning “real history.”
“We unashamedly promote civil society and history that is accurate and that doesn’t try to push an ideological agenda,” he said.
According to the Post, the training included the phrase that it is a “misconception” that “the Founders wanted a strict separation of church and state.”
“My takeaway from the training is that civics in the state of Florida right now is geared toward pushing some particular points of view,” Broward County teacher Richard Judd told the Post. “The thesis they were running with is that there is no real separation of church and state.
Judd told the Post trainers that teachers are told, “This is the way you have to think.”
DeSantis recently pushed legislation that would limit what students can learn or discuss about history, race, gender and sexuality.
Presentation slides from the training, which were obtained by The Miami Herald through a public records request, include graphics that illustrate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were against slavery, while neglecting to mention that they owned slaves.
Barbara Segal, a public 12th-grade teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School, told the Tampa Bay Times that the learning is “very skewed.”
“There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way of analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was alarming,” Segal said.
Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union, told the Post that some teachers who attended told her they were told to present only “one side” of the story.
“Then they kind of slipped some of the Christian values, ignoring the fact that this country is made up of so many different cultures and religions,” Fusco said.
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