While Florida Republicans falsely proclaim that Florida is a free state, the legislature and governor are hard at work to limit freedoms they dislike. One costly example of this is a potential $15.6 million contract with Maryland based Trinity Education Group to create a centralized system for reviewing and objecting to instructional materials and books in Florida’s public schools. In higher education, where I work, the state is engaged in an ongoing review of course syllabi and books to ensure conformity with the official ideology and indoctrination goals set by the legislature.

As of this writing, Florida has redistributed $3 million in taxpayer money to Trinity. Given that Florida’s teacher pay is last in the United States, a strong case could be made that the money should have gone to Florida teachers rather than to enrich a Maryland CEO. Florida schools, like most American schools, are also chronically underfunded and if the goal is to improve education, then it would make more sense to spend the money addressing this issue. Given these facts, it might be wondered what Florida is supposed to get in return for these millions and why this is so critical that it must be funded at the expense of educating children.

As might be guessed, this spending is part of Florida’s war on critical race theory, DEI, and woke. There are two reasons being presented as to why this system is necessary. The first is the claim by Sydney Booker that, “The Department firmly believes that parents have the fundamental right to know what materials their child is accessing at school.”  This view is eminently reasonable, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone would object to such a right. But the obvious question is why the state would need to enrich a Maryland CEO for parents to know what school materials their kid is accessing. While it would take a tiny bit of effort, a parent could ask their kid what they are accessing, they can look at the syllabi, they can talk to teachers, and they could take a few minutes to look through the catalog of the school library. That is, there are free and easy ways for a parent to quickly find out what material their kid is accessing. So why is this system needed? This takes us to the second reason.

According to the state, this multimillion-dollar system will ensure the public can access the same information, since “districts are currently making the materials accessible in various formats and platforms.” While this is superficially appealing, a moment’s reflection destroys this justification. Unless a parent has numerous children spread over several school districts, they will only need information from one school district. As such, they only need to be concerned with the one format and one platform used by that district. This reasoning is like justifying spending millions on a statewide database listing what classes each student is taking so that parents can check to see what classes their kids are taking. This would be absurd, as is the wasteful plan for the central system of course materials. This leads to the question of the system’s actual purpose.

As noted above, its first purpose is to fulfil a central goal of Republican education strategy: redistribute public education funds into CEO compensation and private profit.  The second goal, which is obvious from the “justification” given for a centralized system, is to provide a centralized system to enable a few actors to challenge books across the state. Without a centralized system, a person interested in censoring school material would need to put in more effort to determine what every school might be offering as opposed to a parent’s legitimate concern with what their kid’s school is offering. This system is clearly designed to facilitate people like Friedman (a man responsible over 30% of Florida’s book challenges) who have the goal of banningbooks that do match their value system. The state is thus sending up to $15.6 million to a Maryland corporation to make it easier for a few people in Florida to ban books and course material. Whatever one’s political ideology, this should seem like a terrible waste of taxpayer money.

If you are wondering how this got approved, the answer seems to be duplicity. The department told an administrative law judge that the rules implementing the school library statute wouldn’t have regulatory costs. The state then entered the contract with Trinity, which would seem to prove that there were regulatory costs. In response to questions about this, the department replied with a clever bit of sophism: “A statute that results in costs to either the district or to the state is not synonymous with regulatory costs of a rule.” This is like someone getting you to go to a restaurant by saying “it’s free to go with me” and then being hit with a huge bill that is defended by the person saying, “it being free to go with me is not synonymous with getting a free lunch.” You would be right in thinking they had misled you.

In closing, this system sems to serve three awful purposes. The first is to deplete education funding. The second is to redistribute public funds to a Maryland CEO. It is not even enriching one of our own Florida CEOs.  The third is to create a system to make censorship easier for a very few people. But all this lines up with the Republican approach to education and it is working as intended.