I’ve recently had the honor and the pleasure to serve on the Workgroup assembled by the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) to help draft Florida’s new K-12 History of Communism standards. I shouldn’t say anything about the draft standards in detail, since they haven’t yet been published, but my fellow workgroup members and the members of the FLDOE did an excellent job. Florida citizens should be happy when they see the final result. They’ll help make sure that Florida students learn the full and unvarnished truth about Communism’s terrible history.
Florida’s policymakers were absolutely correct in deciding that Florida’s schools need to follow the History of Communism standards. Throughout Florida and all of America, K-12 teachers do not teach enough about the history of Communism—the genocides and democides committed in its name, its characteristic abrogations of liberty, and the way it has informed the radicalism that has infiltrated too much of America.
Some teachers are committed radicals who wish to soft-pedal Communist atrocities because they themselves favor quasi-Communist policies. Far more have simply been miseducated by earlier generations of radicals and are not aware of how much they don’t know, and do not teach, about Communism and its history. Virtually all public K-12 teachers are constrained by state social studies standards, and if those standards do not include explicit instruction in the history of Communism, teachers generally will skim over that history, simply because they don’t think it’s part of their job.
American students don’t get taught about the 100+ million killed by Communist democide in the last 100 years. They don’t learn how Communists sought and to a horrifying extent succeeded in the deliberate destruction of private property, organized religion, the rule of law, and the family, and broke their promises to achieve equality and prosperity as they created new regimes of privileged apparatchiks and general misery. They don’t know that Communist China continues to oppress the Uyghurs, Tibet, and Hong Kong, that it controls its people by a totalitarian “social credit system,” or that it uses Confucius Institutes and Confucius Schools as a massive influence operation in America’s educational system. They don’t learn how neo-Marxist ideology infects Americans’ beliefs and actions right now, via works such as Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and movements such as Critical Race Theory.
[RELATED: History of Communism]
They don’t learn about the heroes who resisted Communism—about Winston Churchill, who coined the phrase “the Iron Curtain,” about the heroic dissidence of Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, or the firmly anti-Communist career of Ronald Reagan, who started as a union leader who ejected Communists from the Screen Actors Guild, and ended up as the American president who broke the revolutionary confidence of the Soviet Union.
Florida shows us that there is a solution to the misteaching of the history of Communism in our public schools—if state policymakers take the initiative. That’s why the National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance have drafted a model History of Communism Task Force Act. The Act creates a mechanism to add History of Communism standards to state K-12 social studies standards. We largely modeled the bill on Florida Senate Bill 1264 (2024), now statute, which has begun the process of creating K-12 History of Communism standards for Florida, parallel to Florida’s Holocaust Education standards. Our Act, however, makes explicit reference to the Civics Alliance’s Model History of Communism Standards (2024)—standards which have informed Oklahoma’s Draft Social Studies Standards (2024).
The Act will create History of Communism standards that should improve K-12 instruction directly. They also will inform revision of curriculum frameworks, teacher education, textbook creation, and every other aspect of K-12 education.
Our Model Act is meant to complement our Model American Birthright Taskforce Act, which would create a parallel mechanism to reform K-12 state social studies standards as a whole.
State policy reform can work to improve state K-12 education and make sure our children learn the true and terrible history of Communism. It’s succeeded in Florida, and it can succeed in every state in the union. And any state policymaker can build swiftly on our Act to craft education reform legislation tailored to their own state’s public schools.
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Cover designed by Jared Gould using image of the Turlington Building, headquarters of the Florida Department of Education on Wikimedia Commons & screenshot of SB 1264 with highlight element by Tartila on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 500384620
One other thing for folks in higher education:
K-12 education is controlled by state law, and states either adopt textbooks for state-wide use (and then distribute them to the local school districts) or they let the local districts obtain the books themselves from whomever they chose — and there is only about a half dozen publishers at this point, although they do offer different books.
Here is a state by state list: https://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/01/09/23/10923.pdf
1: Florida is a textbook adoption state — the state approves all textbooks which are used in K-12 and hence you need to have specific language in your bill to (a) allow it to be included in textbooks and (b) specify what the content will be. You need to be specific because anything you don’t mention won’t be in the books.
This is IMPORTANT!!! Assume that the bureaucrats who approve textbooks won’t be supportive of your goals, and will weaken them any way they can.
2: You need to specify an academic requirement for persons studying to become teachers, e.g. “a 3 credit course that includes [(b) above]. Require that somebody in the Florida DOE approve it. Assume that the Deans at the various colleges won’t be supportive of your goals (a fair assumption) and hence be damn specific as to what the course must cover to be accepted.
3: You then need to specify what qualifications a person must have to teach such a course. Place the burden on the college, i.e. they get a specific course approved if a specific person is teaching it, and ONLY if that person is teaching it. For anyone else, they need to get it approved again — and they can get it approved with multiple instructors, not all of whom have to actually be teaching it in any given offering.
4: Then figure out how you are going to teach it to the existing teachers — you can include the above courses if Florida has a CTE requirement similar to Maine, where teachers are required to take a few actual college courses in order to periodically renew their licenses. If FL has a CEU requirement like Massachusetts, where the unions get to teach the courses, you will have more difficulty.
5: Establish (and support with state funds) a group of speakers with personal knowledge of the Cold War and Communism — and not just Cuba. If it doesn’t cost the local district anything, this likely would be considered acceptable if FL-DOE supports it because it is a “day off” for them.
6: Then, if you have the political ability, get a mandate that all students graduating from public universities and colleges in Florida have taken a class in history of communism. This is done either via state law or via Board of Trustee mandate, and things like this have been done in other states (I came across it in my doctoral research).
7: This then includes getting involved in who gets hired to teach these courses, and you need the right people.