Curriculum Chaos Bill in Florida

The Florida legislature is considering an Academic Freedom bill. This one has been done to death, and you can find a great deal of information about it on the Florida Citizens for Science Blog, with the most recent update here. I’ll let you get the details via the many posts there.

I want to add a point about this bill, however. It’s simply very stupid legislating. Now we are not at all shocked to see stupidity in the Florida legislature, or anywhere else, for that matter. As my wife commented when I mentioned this to her: “Why should Florida be different?” It’s not merely that this is creation vs. evolution, an issue on which I have some pretty strong convictions. The bill itself is wrong. It misunderstands academic freedom and it leaves almost everything open to interpretation, inviting litigation. In fact, it’s pretty much the sort of bill you write when you know you can’t get what you want, but you want to create some legislative language that will tangle the issue and let you try for it.

The fundamental problem is that the legislature is choosing to write legislation on one portion of a subject through a specific bill. They had a framer’s committee to write the curriculum standards, they have a Board of Education to check those standards politically, but what they want to do is tinker with them by passing a bill.

In most areas, we’d recognize this for what it is–bad micromanagement. If you think your management system for the state’s education system is that badly off, then you need to look at a better fix than this. But of course these legislators know that the experts are going to come to the same conclusion as they did before, and so they’re going to make political points at the expense of the children of Florida.

This is bad legislation, badly written, hopelessly misguided, and there is no good outcome that would result from its passage. There is simply no excuse for it. The legislature should reject it.