Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to travel to Florida on Friday to deliver critical remarks in response to the state Board of Education’s approval of new standards for how black history will be taught in schools.
The vice president’s trip to Jacksonville will highlight efforts to «protect fundamental liberties, specifically, the freedom to learn and teach the full and true history of the United States,» a White House official said in an announcement first shared with NBC News.
Harris, whose mother was a civil rights activist, will also meet with parents, educators, civil rights leaders and elected officials, the official said.
In comments On Thursday, Harris criticized efforts in some states to ban the books and «push forward revisionist history.»
“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided that high school students would be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” he told a convention of the traditionally black sorority Delta Sigma Theta Inc. “They insult us in an attempt to deceive us, and we will not stand for it.”
The Florida Board of Education on Wednesday approved new standards for how public schools must approach black history, including teaching students that some black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills that could be used for «personal gain.»
The changes to the curriculum were required by a 2022 law known as the «Stop Wrongs To Our Kids and Employees Act» or «Stop WOKE Act.» NBC South Florida informed.
The new framework has been sharply criticized by the Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers’ union representing some 150,000 teachers, as a «step backwards.»