Florida leaders keep saying they are taking politics out of the classroom, yet they have spent the last few years reshaping civics instruction around a narrow ideological framework. It shows up in the new social studies standards, the PragerU Kids videos the state approved for classrooms, and the Phoenix Declaration they recently adopted as the guiding vision for public education. Indoctrination was never the real issue. It was the fear they pushed to justify rebuilding the curriculum around their own agenda.
Florida has created an entire civics ecosystem that looks neutral on the surface. There are new standards, scripted lessons, mandatory trainings, and bonuses for teachers who complete the state’s preferred program. At a glance it seems harmless. But once you look inside, it becomes clear this project is not about strengthening civic knowledge. It is about shaping what students believe and narrowing what they are allowed to question.
For years, state leaders used the word indoctrination to scare parents about problems that were not happening. They warned about classrooms changing children’s identities, as if a child could walk into school one way and come home another because of a lesson. That fear was deliberate. It directed attention away from what the state itself was planning and created a distraction while the real changes were put in place. And now those changes are here.
That shift became official when the Department of Education and the State Board of Education adopted the Phoenix Declaration as the guiding blueprint for public schools. It uses words like truth, goodness, character and citizenship, but the vision underneath is rooted in one ideology. It presents its preferred version of American history as the only legitimate one and discourages honest engagement with the parts of our past that involve injustice, conflict, and inequality. Once the state embraced that declaration, it became clear that the danger was never indoctrination from classrooms. The real attempt at indoctrination is coming from the people who wrote the declaration and reshaped the curriculum to match it.
In 2021, the state launched the Civic Literacy Excellence Initiative, directing more than $100 million into civics and offering $3,000 bonuses to teachers who complete a long state-controlled training. Teachers need support. What concerns me is the content they are required to absorb. Many were left with an impossible choice. Do they turn down $3,000 they need for rent or groceries, or do they attend a training built on claims they know are misleading or incomplete? The state also requires teachers to earn and pay for college credits or in service points every five years to renew their certification, and the state does not cover those costs. The pressure is obvious and the support is not.
Reporting from major Florida outlets has shown that teacher trainings promoted claims that the founders did not support separation of church and state and used selective quotes to reframe Washington and Jefferson as reluctant opponents of slavery. The new standards include language suggesting enslaved people benefited from enslavement, and the new communism and Cold War benchmarks revive ideas historians have rejected for decades. The approval of PragerU Kids pushed this even further, giving political media the same standing as classroom resources.
There is a pattern here, and it is not random but entirely by design. The destruction of public schools is the end game. If you reshape curriculum, undermine trust in public schools, and promote outside ideological content as truth, you make it easier to weaken the entire public education system.
Meanwhile, parents are told they have rights everywhere except where it actually matters. I get a permission slip for a PG movie, a survey, or a short health lesson. But I cannot opt my child out of a state mandated civics curriculum that presents one political worldview as fact.
A real civics education teaches students to evaluate claims, understand context, question power, and engage with the full story of our country. Floridas new curriculum discourages all of that. It does exactly what its architects accuse everyone else of doing.
In the end, this is state-imposed ideology, and it limits the rights of the vast majority of Florida parents who simply want the truth taught in classrooms.
Anne Watts Tressler is a St. Johns County public-school parent, civil rights advocate, and public school defender.
