Library books, or controversial teaching materials?
As of 2014, the state of Florida ranked among the bottom 10 of the 50 states for spending per student on public schools. This summer, instead of working to improve funding for public education, the state legislature and Governor Rick Scott took a new tack by approving House Bill 989. The bill, now law, allows any Florida resident to formally complain about teaching materials at public schools—and requires school districts to respond. Included in the category of “teaching materials”: any book on a summer reading list, any item in the school library, any textbook covering any subject, any DVD a teacher might show in class.
Florida Citizens’ Alliance (FLCA) is a 501(c)(3) organization that helped draft the legislation, found sponsorship for it among Florida legislators, and takes credit for its passage. In affidavits filed in support of the bill and collected by FLCA, climate change and evolution are specifically referenced as problematic topics for Florida schoolchildren.
“Florida is moving towards the bottom of the list when it comes to quality of education,” says former Floridian Nicole Hernandez Hammer, climate science and community advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists—and parent of a school-aged child. “This law risks putting Florida behind when it comes to the rest of the world.”
Complaints don’t have to come from parents with children in Florida public schools, or even from parents at all. Literally any Florida resident can fill out an online form to challenge the validity and appropriateness of educational materials being used in their local public schools. Complaints must be heard by an “unbiased and qualified hearing officer” who is not “an employee or agent of the school district.” The law is fuzzy on who might provide this service, though it tasks school boards with figuring this out themselves, and establishing a policy for hearing complaints.
The language of the law is similarly open to interpretation, extending an invitation to Floridians to challenge a text, worksheet, DVD, or other material if it:
. . . contains content that is pornographic or prohibited under s.847.012 [a statute regulating education materials], is not suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented, or is inappropriate for the grade level and age group for which the material is used.
Deputy director Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education says there are already specific statutes in place to keep pornography and age-inappropriate material from Florida’s public schoolchildren. And, he says, “It's just a matter of common sense—and confirmed by survey research—that, when it comes to socially contentious areas of science, teachers tend to adjust what they teach and how they teach it to balance their sense of the attitudes prevalent in their communities.”
While Florida has perhaps enjoyed the most success in pushing anti-science education legislation, it is not the only state to enact unnecessary measures relating to the instruction of so-called controversial topics. Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming have each passed laws, resolutions, and statements of support for “academic freedom”—that is, the right for teachers to present multiple arguments and viewpoints on established science such as global warming and evolution. Following the links above leads to a rabbit hole of suspiciously similar language allowing teachers leeway in teaching “the chemical origins of human life” and “human cloning,” two topics not generally covered in depth in public school science classes.
“This specific quartet of biological evolution, origins of life, global warming, and human cloning as supposedly controversial topics in science for which science teachers need ‘academic freedom’—free of any supervision or guidance from state and local educational administrators—traces back to a school board policy adopted in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, in 2006,” says Branch. These policies have “metastasized,” he says, since then to school districts and states around the country.
Hernandez Hammer is taken aback by the ease with which any climate change denier in Florida can now agitate for perfectly legitimate science to be removed from the curriculum—in a state already experiencing profound and damaging consequences of climate change such as extreme heat and sea level rise–induced flooding.
“If we don’t teach our kids at that level, then how can we expect them to move forward? That’s my opinion as a parent,” she says. “And as a scientist, I think that taking away young people’s right to learn about an issue they are particularly vulnerable to is quite irresponsible, and exposes them to great risk.”