New Stop WOKE bill targets teacher training programs. But can lawmakers police speech among adults?

It’s the middle of the school year, and Florida is short at least 4,000 teachers, according to data from the Florida Education Association (FEA) released in January. In the report, FEA President Andrew Spar says teachers are “being forced out of the state or the profession entirely due to low pay and untenable working conditions because of bad policy.” 

But this hasn’t stopped the Florida legislature from introducing another bill targeting teachers, this time during teacher preparation courses. 

Related: Florida will throw trans people in jail if they try to update the gender on their driver’s licenses

“They want to humiliate, harass, and use policy to eliminate transgender people from public life.”

Florida’s HB 1291 applies the restrictions on speech from 2022’s “Stop WOKE Act” to teacher training programs, leading Equality Florida to call HB 1291 the “Stop WOKE Teacher Training bill.” Its sponsors gave it the far more banal title, “An act related to educator preparation programs,” which Kara Gross, Legislative Director and Senior Policy Counsel at the ACLU of Florida, argues is “designed to make it harder for the public to track what’s happening.” 

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HB 1291 would ban the Florida Department of Education from approving teacher preparation courses that “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum or instruction that teaches identity politics,” break the rules created by the Stop WOKE Act, or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

When asked if there was any way to know what qualifies as “distorting” an event, or even what counts as a “significant historical event” under HB 1291, the ACLU’s Kara Gross laughed. 

“I’m laughing because that is the exact problem with the bill and the language,” Gross told LGBTQ Nation. “It is impossible to know what speech will and will not fall within the restricted language within the bill. The language of HB 1291 and SB 1372 [an identical bill in the Florida senate] are overly broad and vague and suffer from the same infirmities that we saw in the Stop WOKE Act.”

The bill relies heavily on definitions in the Stop WOKE Act, portions of which are currently blocked by court order. Those orders come from Pernell v Lamb, an ongoing lawsuit filed by a multi-racial group of educators and a college student. They argue the law violates their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights due to its vague restrictions on free speech and that it violates the Equal Protection Clause because it was “enacted with the intent to discriminate against Black educators and students,” as stated in a press release.

The focus of HB 1291 is a significant development, said Gross, who is the Legislative Director and Senior Policy Counsel of the ACLU of Florida. “What we’ve seen in prior bills is this touting of ‘The children, the children!’ We always knew that that was not the real reason that they were pushing any of these bills. What’s notable about this bill is that it is infringing on the speech of adults communicating with other adults.” That concept has so far been a harder sell for Florida’s courts – the Stop WOKE Act still applies to K-12 schools but was blocked in the context of universities and workplaces, where it would have largely impacted adults communicating with other adults.

State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D) of Orange County told LGBTQ Nation in a statement that “[HB 1291] does nothing to improve the educational environment or address real-life challenges Floridians are facing like the rising cost of property insurance. When it comes to education, we should be focused on teacher recruitment and retention, not once more making it harder to be a teacher in the Sunshine State.” State Rep. John Snyder (R) and State Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R), the legislators who introduced the bill, have not responded to a request for comment.

“Floridians – and the rest of the country – have had enough of the Governor’s extremist anti-woke agenda,” Gross says. “This bill, like several other unconstitutional bills, infringes on free speech and the First Amendment. The desire is to keep Floridians uneducated and in the dark. And Floridians won’t let that happen.”

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