Florida education policies targeting classroom discussion and materials related to sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and ethnic studies are being felt by educators and parents, a New York University study found.
The study, “The Limitation Effect: Experiences of State Policy-Driven Education Restriction in Florida’s Public Schools,” was conducted in the fall and winter of 2023-2024 by professors at NYU and the University of California San Diego.
Researchers found among the survey’s 76 respondents and interviewees that education laws passed in Florida since 2021 have “played a key role in pressuring education restriction.”
“Versus expanding opportunity for all, time use, energy, and money in K-12 systems were becoming organized around restricting access to ideas, information, and supports students could access in public schools,” researchers wrote.
The 69-page report and 299 pages of data summarize opinions of those surveyed and interviewed, a majority of whom were educators (48); the remaining 28 were primarily parents.
“K-12 system actors were constraining and withdrawing core elements across an education system that could benefit students,” the researchers concluded. Such elements include books, discussions of ideas in curricula, and courses and messaging regarding support for LGBTQ students, gender-sexuality alliance clubs, and professional development.
The results have included librarians refraining from purchasing books mentioning LGBTQ experiences, limits on discussions of Black experiences, denial of access to AP African American Studies and AP Psychology, limits on professional development to support students with disabilities, and teachers ceasing use of literature not approved by the state.
The policies that NYU studied have been passed in the last three years, some of which face court challenges.
The state has argued that its authority is sweeping enough to dictate whether a college professor can criticize the governor in the classroom. The policy the state was arguing for, the Stop WOKE Act, was passed to prevent schools and businesses from offering viewpoints on topics related to race, color, national origin, or sex.
“We have attempted in this report to shine light on a current, crucial, and complicated phenomenon with serious consequences for children,” researchers wrote. “This is our first effort. We offer this analysis in the spirit of sparking inquiry and action, and we welcome input on aspects of the phenomenon that are not well understood.”
Drawing widespread discussion is 2023’s HB 1069, which allows members of the community to object to course materials and library books that could be deemed inappropriate. That law faces a lawsuit from major book publishers alleging it is over-broad in defining “pornographic” and “sexual conduct.”
Those laws have driven librarians and teachers to act from fear of punishment, electing to remove books even before anyone raises an objection or declining to purchase risky books, the researchers concluded. They classified this as a “climate of compliance, fear, and stress.”
“The asks to remove are coming from a very small portion of the population. And then, now we’re at the point where [Florida law] is so broad and so vague and so punitive that the districts are just removing the books in advance of the objections,” one elementary parent said, as shown in the study’s anonymous data.
The law was amended in 2024 to limit objections to material by nonparents within a district to one per month.
The hunt for freedom
The researchers wrote that the state “frames its restrictions as protection of students from presumed-pervasive ‘woke’ ideology.” Supporters cite “education freedom,” but the study concluded the laws are “limiting access.”
“Our data showed how in a cascade of pressure processes reaching down to educators’ daily interactions with students — what we call the limitation effect — state policy played a key role in K-12 system actors constraining basic opportunity that could support young people, limiting access to both targeted topics, viewpoints, and supports and even more broadly to wide swaths of learning opportunity for everyone,” the researchers wrote.
“Interviewees described further how state policy emboldened restriction demands from a vocal minority of restriction-oriented parents and residents, triggering education restriction through educator fear of punishment including job loss,” the study says.
“Almost no one [among the respondents] focused on their district leaders as the primary driver of restrictions in isolation from the state.” Instead, they explicitly “implicate the state policy context” when allotting blame.
“What was striking was how directly they analyzed the state’s role in education restriction,” the study says.
“Put together, Florida has all of the nation’s types of recent restriction efforts in place, covering all domains of educational practice, openly threatening both districts and individual educators for infraction, and pressuring local execution of restrictions — and educators seem quite aware of this,” researchers wrote.
Neither Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office nor the Department of Education responded to questions from the Phoenix about this story.
“Our study offers troubling examples to spark further inquiry, and it sounds the alarm about how K-12 system actors pressured by state restriction policy can reduce education opportunity, both to sub-groups of students and in education systems writ large,” said Mica Pollock, a researcher from UC San Diego. “We believe that the opportunities shown restricted in this study should worry any American across political lines.”