With objecting - if you go to a school board meeting objecting. If you have a kid in school, okay. But if you're somebody who doesn't have a kid in school and you're gonna object to 100 books? No, I don't think that's appropriate. So I think the legislature is interested in limiting what the number of challenges you can do, and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not. We just want to make sure we're not trying to incentivize frivolous objections or any type of games being played.
The Florida anti-reading statutes are vague and punitive and crafted to exert maximum chilling effect, which as Billy Townsend points out was always going to be a problem.
But if you think DeSantis has seen any kind of light, I recommend you look more closely at his comments. Because he has some thoughts about the "types of games being played."
His press conference opened with a video pastiche of Naughty Books, specifically the most extreme and egregious examples, because whatever else follows, he wants you to understand that the basic idea of banning some books from schools was and is a sound one.
Then he goes on to address some of the issues that have come up. For instance, people who "banned" perfectly good classics and other things that "are not in any way a violation of any type of Florida law." Like that Roberto Clemente book that got pulled? Totally not a violation, says DeSantis. The Bible. Dictionaries! The teacher who covered up all her books.! Crazy stuff, says Ron.
So what does he conclude about all this? Does he declare that the law was too vague and punitive, so schools went way out of their way to stay out of trouble? Does he acknowledge that requiring every single book to be pre-screened by a media specialist might have created issues?
No. Not at all.
All of these whacky examples of districts and teachers trying to avoid trouble with poorly crafted, deliberately vague laws? Those were just deliberate attempts to make him look bad. Or as he puts it"
This is fraudulent. But what it is, is it's trying to obscure the reason why parents have been concerned with the things that people saw which are clearly not appropriate. And they're basically just trying to confuse the issues to act like somehow that classic works are somehow not welcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. We want to insure that students have a very rigorous and robust education. So no, what we've seen is you have seen activists that will just go and challenge almost anything. That's not appropriate to be happening.
Hijacking this process is not something that we want to encourage in any way. And it's been from different motivations-- you have some people that just thinks these--some people honestly think that a lot of these books are bad, even though they're classics. There's others that are doing it just to try to create a narrative, to try to act like "Oh my gosh these books are under review" and then the media will take that and run with it and try to act like there's some debate on whether Florida law requires this or not, which there's not. So this is all theater. This is all performative. And it has no place in our school system.
That's all one rambly quote. I just broke it into two paragraphs to help you out.
So if you've been seeing the headlines and thinking that Ron DeSantis has learned a lesson of some sort, the answer is that no, no he has not. The laws are fine and necessary, but those damn lefties and the media have teamed up to make it look as if the laws are a repressive, chilling, silly mess. "Fraud" and "hoax" still turn up a lot in his speech. He describes the "random people" who don't have kids in the school system as coming in "just to try to gum up the works" and "throw sand in the gears," aka people "who are just trying to hijack this process to advance a political or ideological agenda."
Also, they're not banning anything, because you can still get the books on Amazon. You know who's banning books! Those people on the left, who are trying to get Amazon not to sell certain books, including the Biden administration.
And there's more complaining. And then he brings on Tina Descovich, Moms For Liberty honcho, who says "enough," praises the state's two leaders, and then works to shift the emphasis to educational quality. She leads with the statistic that the literacy rate in Florida is 40%, which is about 40% off (it's 80%). I think she means to say that the proficiency rate on the NAEP is 40%, and at this point anyone who says NAEP proficiency is "at grade level" is just not trying to get it right (NAEP proficiency is A or B level). But her point is that there is a public education crisis in America.
Then she wags her fingers at the "media in the back of the room" and says "All you can do is be obsessed with book bans that are not happening." She tells the tale of being interviewed about the book bans and how they then show the books and that shuts folks up. They did a whole 60 Minutes thing, and it hasn't been shown yet. Where is it?
But mostly her point is that "we the parents" have had enough, and when is the media going to start covering the literacy crisis. So if you’re looking for the new talking point angle on the naughty books issue, there it is.
Another woman speaks about a book that her child was exposed to.
The DeSantis wades into the Q&A which really highlights how unclear he is on how this could work. Objections ought to be limited to parents of children in the district, except, no, he thinks that taxpayers have a stake in this to, but maybe limit how many objections they can bring.
He also wades into one of the underlying huge problems, noting that if somebody objects to "like a To Kill a Mockingbird or a Hank Aaron, that obviously it is frivolous." It's reading restriction dilemma-- what I object to is obviously bad and what I don't object to is obviously okay, so let's just have a law based on my personal obvious perspective. DeSantis spitballs "maybe after one or two frivolous objections you have to pay a fine" and I certainly look forward to seeing which court gets to decide which books count as frivolous objections.
Also, maybe laws that punish teachers for making political waves, like that teacher who papered over all her books saying she couldn't show them. DeSantis says that was a lie; I'd say that was a way to comply with the actual law saying that a book can't go in front of a student until a media specialist looks at it. But DeSantis wants punishment for "performative nonsense," and again, looking forward to seeing which court gets to rule on how performative nonsense is judged so that "professional responsibility that's imposed" can become a thing.
To his credit, he does acknowledge that there are books about which reasonable people could disagree. So there's that. And Manny Diaz stepped up to say that there is no permission slip required for required instruction, and Black History Month is required instruction, so that flap is solved and maybe that law doesn't mean what people think it means?
But mostly, it sure sounds like DeSantis is going to try to remedy the problems created by broad, vague rules by adding some more vague and unenforceable rules on top. Who knows what form this will all take, but I'm not convinced that things are looking up now that the governor is done with his electoral vacation.
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