[Gov. Ron DeSantis’s culture warmongering has helped produce the
highest teacher vacancy rates in the country.]
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WHO WANTS TO TEACH IN FLORIDA?  
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Luca GoldMansour
February 23, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ Gov. Ron DeSantis’s culture warmongering has helped produce the
highest teacher vacancy rates in the country. _

Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis visits Pio Hot Bagels in Staten
Island, New York on February 20, 2023., Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto via AP

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis wants Florida’s K-12 educators to do as they’re
told. On top of low pay, difficulties in securing long-term contracts,
the stress of high-stakes testing, and increases in student mental
health issues, public school teachers must stick to the governor’s
conservative script or risk being fired. That script includes the
Parental Rights in Education Act, colloquially known as the “Don’t
Say Gay” law, the Stop WOKE Act, and the recent statewide ban on
College Board’s Advanced Placement African American studies
curriculum.

These developments have contributed to the highest teacher vacancy
rate in the country by creating a climate of paranoia that has
exasperated many teachers, chased others out of the profession
entirely, and deterred aspiring educators. Culture-war turmoil
combined with the pandemic era’s tight labor market means that
Florida and most Deep South states have struggled
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far-right Republican became governor in 2019, there were 2,217 vacant
teacher positions in Florida. As of early January, there were about
5,300 openings statewide, with an additional 4,631 support staff
openings (excluding Miami-Dade County), the Florida Education
Association told the_ Prospect_.

In 2022, Florida allocated
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an additional $250 million over the previous fiscal year to increase
teacher salaries. While the funding boosted the base salary for new
teachers to $47,500, the pay increase for experienced teachers did not
even cover cost-of-living increases
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Overall, the pay raise bumped the state up from 49th to 48th in
average teacher pay nationwide, according to the National Education
Association [[link removed]]. DeSantis has
proposed
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$200 million in more funding for teacher pay in his fiscal 2023-2024
budget, which according to the FEA, will hardly move the needle.
“Pay in the third-largest state can and should rank in the top 10
nationally,” FEA President Andrew Spar said in a statement
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Florida’s vacancy issue has its roots in the state’s decades-long
role as a laboratory for the right’s assault on public education,
with its Republican governors playing key parts. Former Gov. Jeb Bush
made school choice and high-stakes standardized testing his signature
issues in the 2000s, before his brother President George W. Bush took
“reforms” like the No Child Left Behind Act to the White House.
DeSantis’s predecessor, Rick Scott, now the state’s junior
senator, also expanded charter schools and voucher programs while
chipping away at long-term contracts for teachers. But DeSantis has
not only built on his predecessors’ devotion to privatization and
exploitative salaries, he has also squelched teaching, learning, and
productive dialogues on American history, race, and gender.

The teacher shortages exhaust the remaining educators, and buttress
DeSantis’ conservative takeover of public-school curriculums by
whittling down institutional resistance to his culture-war inspired
edicts. Educators are “frustrated to the point where they don't have
a sense of hope anymore,” said Steve Frazier, Executive Director of
the Florida League of Middle Schools, who worked as a teacher and
principal in Broward County for over three decades. “It’s like
anything, you keep getting beat down, eventually you just wave the
white flag and say I can't do it anymore.”

Tawanda Carter, a literacy coach in Broward County for 23 years, took
a classroom position this year because of the shortages. To support
her students in the long run, Carter realized that she must pick and
choose her battles to avoid burnout, especially when a parent objects
to certain topics like learning about the experiences of other racial
and ethnic groups. “At the end of the day, I recognize in myself and
others that you just do what you can do,” she says.

Teacher vacancies also give DeSantis and Florida state lawmakers an
opportunity to seed schools with instructors whom they believe would
be more amenable to far-right positions. Under Florida’s Military
Veterans Certification Pathway program, which came into effect on July
1 of last year, veterans with at least four years of service, an
honorable or medical discharge, 60 college credits, and a minimum 2.5
GPA can apply for a temporary teaching certificate after passing a
subject-area exam of their choice.

Florida teachers should have the leeway to design appropriate lesson
plans for their students and not be shackled to politically imposed
curriculums.

New teachers hired under the program are assigned a mentor teacher for
at least two years, and will have five years to fulfill the
requirements for permanent certification, including obtaining a
bachelor’s degree. Many experienced educators worry that the program
will not help fill vacancies but instead lower the standards for
people entering the profession. DeSantis has also proposed offering
bonuses to veterans and retired first responders who agree to teach
full-time for at least two years. Such recruitment drives are a
disservice to veterans and first responders seeking second careers, as
well as to current students and teachers. The state has processed
hundreds of applications, but only twelve veterans have been hired so
far, the Florida Department of Education told the _Prospect_.

Herman Bennett, a historian of the African diaspora at the City
University of New York, helped the College Board draft the African
American Studies AP curriculum. He says the Florida moves remind him
that fifty years ago a teacher’s credentials were irrelevant for
some schools. “It's reminiscent of what history teaching once was in
my generation, there was the idea that the historian could be the
football coach,” he says. “Because it really didn't matter. You
could have a knucklehead who was responsible for the civics course.”

For Bennett, DeSantis’s rejection of the College Board’s African
American studies course signals the debasing of teaching and learning
loud and clear. “If the AP course was simply Black names, dates and
facts, DeSantis wouldn’t have a concern about it because that would
just produce an inert and passive citizen.” Bennett said.
“Afro-American studies demonstrate that there are histories of
struggle, and if you don’t have those understandings, then you see
the possibility of change as limited.”

With the College Board caving into DeSantis’s demands, the state’s
educators can only do so much to get around these obstacles. By
removing African American and other racial, ethnic, and gender studies
topics from public school curriculums, and diluting discussions of
contemporary issues like Black Lives Matter, another Republican
governor is once again trying to export new limitations on learning
across the country. Florida teachers should have the leeway to design
appropriate lesson plans for their students and not be shackled to
politically imposed curriculums. Stifling creativity in classroom
instruction ultimately means that teachers can only teach exactly what
they are told to teach and nothing more—if they decide to stay in
the profession at all.

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Luca GoldMansour is an editorial intern at the Prospect.

* Florida; Governor DeSantis; Education in Florida;
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