Florida’s ‘anti-communism’ curriculum criticized as ‘propaganda’ by experts
Orlando Sentinel | By Steven Walker |
Florida could soon be teaching students about the “dangers and evils of communism” under proposed new academic standards that some argue amount to “propaganda” and wrongly aim to rehabilitate the reputation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who pushed the “Red Scare” communist panic in the 1950s.
The new standards for middle-and-high-school social studies classes stem from legislation (SB 1264) Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in 2024. The law mandates instruction on the “consequences of communism” and aims to prepare students to “withstand indoctrination on Communism at colleges and universities.”
The Florida Department of Education drafted the proposed standards and released them publicly last week. The State Board of Education is to vote on them Nov. 13.
The proposed standards cover 30 pages and more than 100 standards — benchmarks for what should be covered in class — including the death toll from communist regimes, how communist policies worsened people’s quality of living and the “dangers of pro-communist propaganda in entertainment and media industries.”
But some experts worry about the state’s treatment of McCarthy, who in the standards is listed alongside then-Congressman and Senator Richard Nixon and President Harry Truman as examples of “anti-communist politicians.” The House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated allegations of disloyalty and subversion, often in heavy-handed fashion, is described in the same way.
McCarthy, a senator from 1947 to 1957, and the committee were later found to have falsely accused people and to have violated Americans’ First Amendment rights. McCarthy’s biography on the U.S. Senate website notes some of his accusations were deemed “a fraud and a hoax” and that he was censured by the Senate.
David Oshinsky, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian at New York University and a McCarthy expert, called Florida’s anti-communism standards disturbing.
A self-described “anti-communist,” Oshinsky said the standards overstate the impact McCarthy and the House committee had on combatting communism in the U.S.
They held “one-sided” and “corrupt” investigations and “failed miserably as anti-communist organizations.” More than anything, they hurt responsible anti-communism efforts, said Oshinsky, author of “A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.”
He said the House committee and McCarthy were a “joke” and “the bottom of the barrel” in terms of honest investigations.
But the standards suggest a different conclusion: that critics of McCarthy and the House committee overreached and undermined the fight against communism. Students will be required to learn that “McCarthyism” was unfairly used as “an insult and shorthand for all anti-communism” and that anti-communists were slandered through the use of terms like red-baiter and Red Scare.
That worries Oshinsky. “If McCarthyism isn’t a pejorative, what exactly is it? What are we talking about here? Are we going to have people in the classroom saying that he was right?” he said.
From 1961 to 1991, Florida law required 30 hours of instruction on the evils of communism and ways to fight it. The curriculum was later repealed by the Legislature, but it could now make a comeback in Florida classrooms.
DeSantis signed the bill in Hialeah Gardens at a museum honoring veterans from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
“We will not allow our students to live in ignorance, nor be indoctrinated by Communist apologists in schools,” he said in a statement released later. “To the contrary, we will ensure students in Florida are taught the truth about the evils and dangers of Communism.”
The education department did not respond to a request for comment about the standards or to questions about who helped write them.
Then Sen. Jay Collins, now Florida’s lieutenant governor, sponsored the legislation and explained his reasoning in an Instagram post. “Communism ALWAYS leads to loss of life, pain, trauma, and the destruction of families. It’s time to teach our children the truth,” he wrote.
Robert Cassanello, a history professor at the University of Central Florida and president of the United Faculty of Florida, said the new standards are a “rewriting” of U.S. history and of McCarthy’s impact.
Florida’s 2023 revision of its social studies standards also prompted controversy when it updated African American History to include a suggestion that slavery benefited some enslaved people and, in critics’ views, downplayed the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
Cassanello, a social historian who writes about Jim Crow America and the Civil Rights Movement, was critical of those rewrites, too.
The new proposal asks students to identify communist propaganda, but Cassanello said the standards themselves are propaganda.
“They don’t want young people to be critical thinkers and independent thinkers. They want young people to repeat the talking points of the right-wing lawmakers,” he said.
He said the state isn’t approaching communism in a neutral way but instead is taking a particular political lean. It also doesn’t delve into the consequences of right-wing authoritarian regimes.
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, voted no on the bill in 2024.
She said she empathized with those who have suffered under communist regimes, but found it disingenuous for Republicans to say they oppose “indoctrination” in schools and then require a specific political viewpoint to be pushed to students.
“Ironically, it was communist regimes that dictated what can and can’t be taught in schools; we should counter that — not mimic it,” she wrote in a statement following the vote.
Andrew Spar, the president of the Florida Education Association, said the union supports teaching students about communism but the length of the proposed curriculum worries him. There are only 180 days of school and adding hundreds of standards on communism means teachers will have to weigh what they can and cannot teach in an already “crowded curriculum.”
“There’s so many standards that we have to cover in a year that it just doesn’t seem possible to do so. We’re either rushing through standards, which sometimes teachers get concerned that our students are being shortchanged, or we’re not able to cover every standard,” Spar said.
The DeSantis administration declared Nov. 7 as “Victims of Communism Day” in 2022, requiring Florida schools to dedicate a day to teaching students about the dangers of communism.
The state is taking public comment on the standards ahead of its vote next month.
