Florida’s feuding over education laws is in national spotlight; GOP seizes moment
Amanda Silvestri, a mother of two elementary school children, traveled from Palm Beach County to Tallahassee in January to tell state lawmakers she was concerned about what her kids were being taught in school.
“Some of the books we have come across are deeply concerning, and if we can’t fix it, we are going to have to do something or my children are out of here,” said Silvestri, who is running for the Palm Beach County
School Board and testified in support of a bill that adds more requirements for schools as they select books.
But Silvestri’s testimony was a world away from the education concerns of Dawn Marshall, a Hillsborough County parent whose child, alongside fellow high school classmates, was asked by Gov. Ron DeSantis in early March to take off his mask, equating it to “COVID theater.”
“He pretty much said, ‘Take off your mask, it’s stupid,’ and, ‘Take off your mask, your parents don’t matter, even though I’m telling you parents matter,’ ” Marshall told a local TV station after the widely publicized episode.
Silvestri and Marshall represent both sides of a widening partisan spectrum among parents when it comes to education policies. But in a state run by the GOP with a growing Republican base, pandemic-related policies such as masking, discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity and teaching about race and racism have all been linchpins for parents who’ve become angered with public education — and Republicans are seizing the opportunity.
From curriculum fights to school board term limits — and fresh off the high of a legislative victory — Florida Republicans are leaning on education as a wedge issue during the midterm elections, hoping it will mobilize their base and appeal to independent voters as they consider candidates for legislative and statewide offices all the way down to local school board races.
Florida’s school board elections have been nonpartisan since voters approved the switch in 1998. In South Florida, school board races garnered a lot of interest from voters in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in 2018. It led Lori Alhadeff, whose 14year-old daughter was killed, and Debbi Hixon, who lost her husband in the shooting, to run successfully for the Broward County School Board and advocate for changes.
But this year, countylevel races have inspired new candidates like Silvestri
and others who have emerged with platforms against critical race theory and COVID mandates, praised DeSantis’ record on education and promoted to voters their alignment to the governor’s thinking. A well-known right-wing activist was recently appointed to the state’s Board of Education and was endorsed on Twitter by the Florida GOP. Esther Byrd, the wife of Neptune Beach Republican Rep. Cord Byrd, has previously made posts on social media that align with fringe and extreme ideologies and groups, like defending Jan. 6 insurrectionists or alluding to “coming civil wars.” She was also pictured on a boat that was flying the QAnon flag.
An attempt to speak to Byrd before the story’s publication was unsuccessful. After publication, Byrd denied to the Herald that she supported QAnon conspiracies and described her political ideology as a “constitutional conservative.” She said that her now-deleted posts
‘‘ I THINK YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE A HUGE AMOUNT OF VOTER INTEREST IN THESE AUGUST AND THEN NOVEMBER ELECTIONS FOR THE SCHOOL BOARDS IN SOME OF THESE COUNTIES.
that referenced a civil war were “hyperbole,” and compared it to comments made by TV personalities on Fox News.
Last week, DeSantis pledged to get involved in school board races, encouraging parents to “throw the bums out.”
“I think you’re going to have a huge amount of voter interest in these August and then November elections for the school boards in some of these counties,” DeSantis predicted at a press conference in Daytona Beach. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been involved in school races before, but we’ll be involved this year, we’re going to help people, we’re going to help our kids.”
Florida Republicans’ interest in education is not new. Former Gov. Jeb Bush made education a signature issue, ushering in more school choice, charter schools and launching the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national advocate for education reform.
For years, the GOP has centered on education
Gov. Ron DeSantis
‘‘ MY WIFE AND I HAVE MADE IT A POINT TO RAISE OUR DAUGHTERS IN A MULTICULTURAL AND MULTILINGUAL AREA. AS A PARENT, I WORRY SCHOOL WILL NO LONGER BE A PLACE WHERE THESE [TOPICS] WOULD BE ADDRESSED.
during legislative sessions, increasingly expanding school choice, mandating prayer in public schools and other issues that are popular with its base. But this time is different: The pandemic shift to online learning gave parents closer insight into their children’s schooling. And after Glenn Youngkin won his bid to become governor of Virginia on a parental rights platform, Republicans in Florida were emboldened.
“All that Virginia showed, or one of the things that it showed is, yes, parents of all parties care about what’s being taught in the schools,” said David Custin, a Florida consultant and pollster who works with Republicans. “It’s already a national focal point . ... It is a post-COVID phenomenon. And they [Republicans] are responding.”
DeSantis’ embrace of a controversial education bill that regulates lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools is the latest example of how Florida Republicans are basking in the national spotlight. The measure has led to highprofile feuds with Hollywood, the White House and Disney, with DeSantis insisting that he is on the side of parents and not “woke” ideologies.
VYING FOR INFLUENCE
The effect has led groups, old and new, to push for more influence in state politics. Recent polls nationwide show that voters have waning trust in Democrats when it comes to education. And the percentage of Republicans that trust K-12 principals to act in the public’s best interest dropped significantly through the pandemic when compared to that of Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center survey from December.
Miami-Dade County voters got a taste of what political influence could look like in a school board race this past January, when a Spanish-language ad for a superintendent candidate with close ties to DeSantis aired in Miami. Superintendent searches are nonpartisan and closed to voters, but that didn’t sway Marcell Felipe, a Cuban entrepreneur and chairman of the Inspire America Foundation.
“One of the issues that we care about, that we bring to the table in the Cuban community in our districts, is making sure that we teach our kids that, irrespective of where they are on the political spectrum of the democratic spectrum in America, communism is the enemy,” Felipe told the Herald in January after the ad aired.
“We will likely at least make sure that voters are educated as to the importance of these seats. … Education is the building block for everything else. Those minds are there for us to fill them,” he added.
Felipe admitted that his group was unlikely to get involved unless he perceived local school board candidates are unwilling to implement the Victims of Communism bill that just passed in the Legislature, and would require teachers to dedicate at least 45 minutes to teaching about the victims of communism and Communist leaders like Fidel Castro.
Education has always been a main concern or topic of interest for parents, but it’s “definitely moving up the ladder of focus,” said Eulalia Maria Jimenez-Hincapie, Miami chapter leader for Moms for Liberty, a parental rights organization founded in December 2020 that advocates for more parental involvement in schools and has backed conservative legislation.
Moms for Liberty claims its membership has grown to the tens of thousands around the country in less than two years. This year, the group held events outside of the state Capitol during the legislative session, took part in the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando and has become increasingly more involved in school board elections. (Groups such as Moms for Liberty, she said, should be involved in elections and could endorse candidates in upcoming elections.)
In Jimenez-Hincapie’s view, parents will likely “play a very large role” in moving education to the forefront. School board members’ willingness to involve or listen to parents could determine if they’re reelected this summer, she said. (Four MiamiDade board members are up for reelection in 2022.
Broward County has six seats up for grabs while Monroe has three.)
Despite her involvement in her children’s school PTA, Jimenez-Hincapie said she was “fairly oblivious to the deeply rooted political issues that stem from education. I trusted the system,” she said. But that changed at the onset of the pandemic.
She and other parents began “waking up to stuff they weren’t aware of,” she said, and they want to know what’s on the curriculum, what’s being taught and who their school board member is.
“It hadn’t been like that before. There’s been a huge awakening in the area of education,” she said.
The awakening is familiar to Alexandria Suarez, a lawyer, former school teacher from 6th to 10th grades and candidate for school board in Monroe County’s District 5. Suarez, who ran as a Republican for the state House in 2020, was motivated to run because she said she observed a shift in the way teachers impart lessons and wants to “extract any nonsense that doesn’t belong in schools,” she said.
“I watched how some textbooks, especially in civics, American government and history were changing. They were putting things in there that do not belong in there,” Suarez said, referring generally to teachings on the history of slavery and lessons on privilege that she says are creating division.
“We should not be adding to that curriculum or changing it. When I was a teacher, not a single student knew my political party,” Suarez said. “I feel very strongly there’s no place in the classroom for partisan politics. That is the place where they can expand their knowledge, where they can … and they should be able to express how they feel about something.”
But the parental rights calculus could be a risky one for voters in less conservative parts of the state. Some parents have watched with concern as DeSantis has sparred with administrators over COVID-19 safety policies, especially masking, and pushed bans on classroom instruction of certain topics, a step that advocates argue could further marginalize LGBTQ , Black and Latino students.
For Ryan Pontier, an assistant professor of bilingual education and TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) at Florida International University, the recent push to politicize school board elections is concerning. The result could lead to issues that affect students being politicized, which “could preclude any real critical thinking for all of our students.”
“My wife and I have made it a point to raise our daughters in a multicultural and multilingual area. As a parent, I worry school will no longer be a place where these [topics] would be addressed,” Pontier told the Herald recently.
Pontier said the politicization of education in the name of parental rights has also been “disappointing and frustrating.” He said parents have always had a right to be involved in their child’s education, such as speaking to teachers, school leaders or district officials about any concerns, which he’s done before.
Florida Democratic Party Chair Manny Diaz, the former Miami mayor, said Democrats have long pushed to make parental involvement a focus in the education system and much of what Republicans are doing with education today is “fear mongering.”
“It is very easy to be negative, and it is very easy to be hair-on-fire over something than to talk about things that are really important to everyday people, living everyday lives,” Diaz said.
But Democrats are painfully aware that the party has a messaging problem, including on education issues.
Diaz said one way they are helping local candidates run on education is through voter registration drives, and training them on how to run a campaign and raise money. He said the party also likes to “bring in real experts to talk to them about educational issues that are substantive.”
Nikki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner and a Democrat running to challenge DeSantis, said that despite Republicans’ messaging on education, the state still trails most of the nation in public school funding and teacher pay.
“The fact that Republicans are utilizing our vulnerable children as a political wedge is shameful and instead we should be working together to lift up our children and to make sure that they have an education that’s going to make them successful in life,” Fried said Monday in Miami.
Throughout the pandemic, DeSantis criticized school board members for enacting strict masking rules and signed an executive order banning districts from imposing mandates this school year.
Last week, he took another step and signed a bill that limits school board terms to 12 years, despite saying he wished the Legislature had gone further to propose eightyear terms.
While opponents of the measure worry institutional knowledge could be lost, the issue of term limits is popular among conservatives. So much so that Sen. Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, has faced pushback from his own party for being the one to change the bill to 12-year term limits.
“They are calling me a RINO [Republican In Name Only],” Gruters said in an interview early in March.
State Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., a Miami Republican who has been a strong proponent of charter school expansion across the state, and whose political committee — Better Florida Education — has backed “like-minded” school board candidates in the past, says he believes today’s education politics are a product of years of work.
While he says parental involvement has been mostly “organic,” he admits the enthusiasm this year regarding the curriculum has been fairly unprecedented.
“I do think it’s a wedge issue and I think that for a long time, Republicans have been at the forefront of [education] policies,” said Diaz, who has no relation to the state Democratic Party chair. “I go back to the whole Virginia story. That resonated there and I think it’s going to resonate in Florida and in other parts of the country.”
Diaz Jr. is among the people who have been mentioned as possible candidates to be the next Florida commissioner of education.
For Miami-Dade School Board Vice Chair Steve Gallon III, this year’s push for term limits and to make school board elections partisan further highlights the “continuation of efforts [by the state] to degrade and undermine local authority and decisions relative to [the power] given to the school board.”
The “resurrection” of these ideas, particularly term limits, was almost expected following the contentious exchanges between some school districts and the state the last two years regarding the implementation of pandemic safety measures, he recently told the Herald.
Historically, in Miami, at least, political partisanship has played no role in education, but the recent effort to make education a partisan issue will exacerbate the divide around education and “debunk, degrade and destroy something that has always brought this country together,” he said.
“Clearly, there’s an agenda being played, and that agenda began at the onset of the pandemic, when partisan politics began to rise,” he said.
“Every parent is an advocate for their child, but unfortunately, I think individuals in certain sectors [across the country and state] have leveraged parental commitment and passion and engagement for political purposes along party lines.”
Ryan Pontier, FIU assistant professor
Bianca Padró Ocasio: 305-376-2649, @BiancaJoanie