Restricting Education in Florida: The Limitation Effect
“I want to leave. I hate almost everything about “teaching” because we are restricted on every
level and because we fail to do what is right for children.”
Elementary-middle school teacher, Florida
“Many parents are not truly informed about what is going on in terms of the restrictions placed on librarians and teachers and their children’s access to literature.”
Middle school librarian, Florida
“The current climate makes it nearly impossible to focus on teaching and the well being of students.”
K-8 parent, Florida
“Florida is becoming too hateful to want to stay in a public school job.”
Experienced US History teacher, Florida
“It’s hard to teach or feel safe from crazy threats of punishment.” K-8 librarian, Florida
“We believe that the opportunities shown restricted in this study should worry any American across political lines.” The Limitation Effect
These are all quotes from a recent report entitled “The Limitation Effect.” Researchers from NYU and U.C. San Diego interviewed individuals impacted by Florida’s recent restrictive education policies and asked the question “What happens to public education when state policy seeks to restrict learning and talking about some American communities, experiences, and topics?” They coined the term “Limitation Effect” to describe “a cascade of state-driven pressure processes reaching from state policy through K12 systems down to educators’ daily interactions with students.” They described how the limitation effect “results in K12 system actors constraining basic curriculum, instruction, student support, and professional development.”
This image demonstrates The Limitation Effect, how “state policy amplifies pressure to restrict education, reducing opportunties for all”:
This is a report worth reading.
In June of 2023, following Florida’s passage of several bills restricting the use of pronouns, limiting sex education and the discussion of gender or sexuality and expanding book challenges to include any book portraying “sexual conduct,” I had a conversation with Paul Burns, Senior Chancellor at the Florida Department of Education. He was on a “listening tour” but assured our audience that teachers would be okay if they simply stuck to the standards. My questions for him were more philosophical. What are education standards? Are they a floor (the minimum a child should learn) or a ceiling, which restricts all other topics, because more and more it seems to me that Florida’s standards are becoming a ceiling. (He had no answers because, as he told us, he was there to listen…)
Recent culture war laws, passed in Florida over the past 3-5 years, have resulted in librarians refraining from purchasing books mentioning LGBTQ experiences, limits on discussions of Black experiences, denial of access to AP African American Studies and AP Psychology, limits on professional development to support students with disabilities, and teachers ceasing use of literature not approved by the state.
There is ample evidence that Florida’s recent education policy changes are already harming our children and their futures.
Last fall I met a woman who had participated in meetings of the Johns Hopkins’ Admissions Committee. There, staff had been debating whether or not they should EVEN CONSIDER undergraduate applications from Florida.
Mind you, at that time Florida had “only” fought with College Board over AP African American History and AP Psychology and re-written history in its K-12 African American history standards. Now we are restricting education on Climate Change and adding Prager U propaganda to our classrooms.
Will Florida’s students become pariahs when applying to our nation’s top institutions? The impacts of The Limitation Effect may be far reaching.
Many Thanks to The Florida Phoenix for alerting me to the Limitation Effect report. Their article is quoted here:
“Drawing widespread discussion is 2023’s HB 1069, which allows members of the community to object to course materials and library books that could be deemed inappropriate. That law faces a lawsuit from major book publishers alleging it is over-broad in defining “pornographic” and “sexual conduct.”
Those laws have driven librarians and teachers to act from fear of punishment, electing to remove books even before anyone raises an objection or declining to purchase risky books, the researchers concluded. They classified this as a “climate of compliance, fear, and stress.”
“The asks to remove are coming from a very small portion of the population. And then, now we’re at the point where [Florida law] is so broad and so vague and so punitive that the districts are just removing the books in advance of the objections,” one elementary parent said, as shown in the study’s anonymous data.”
“The researchers wrote that the state “frames its restrictions as protection of students from presumed-pervasive ‘woke’ ideology.” Supporters cite “education freedom,” but the study concluded the laws are “limiting access.”
“Our data showed how in a cascade of pressure processes reaching down to educators’ daily interactions with students — what we call the limitation effect — state policy played a key role in K-12 system actors constraining basic opportunity that could support young people, limiting access to both targeted topics, viewpoints, and supports and even more broadly to wide swaths of learning opportunity for everyone,” the researchers wrote.
“Interviewees described further how state policy emboldened restriction demands from a vocal minority of restriction-oriented parents and residents, triggering education restriction through educator fear of punishment including job loss,” the study says.
“Almost no one [among the respondents] focused on their district leaders as the primary driver of restrictions in isolation from the state.” Instead, they explicitly “implicate the state policy context” when allotting blame.
“What was striking was how directly they analyzed the state’s role in education restriction,” the study says.
“Put together, Florida has all of the nation’s types of recent restriction efforts in place, covering all domains of educational practice, openly threatening both districts and individual educators for infraction, and pressuring local execution of restrictions — and educators seem quite aware of this,” researchers wrote.
https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/10/09/the-limitation-effect-nyu-study-examines-effect-of-censorship-in-schools/?emci=82bb6a74-ce85-ef11-8474-6045bda8aae9&emdi=e86227d0-3186-ef11-8474-6045bda8aae9&ceid=401032
The Limitation Report concludes:
“Florida policies put a cage of restriction, threat, and intimidation around the educational triad of curriculum, instruction, and student-teacher relationship, to align educators’ daily work and students’ daily opportunities to the most restriction-oriented Floridians’ ideological preferences. We call the concrete reduction of education opportunity and improvement education restriction – and a form of collective harm applied both to subgroups and a public education system.”
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/2024-09/NYULimitationEffect_A%20White%20Paper.pdf
My experience is similar to the middle school librarian quoted at the begining of this piece. “Many parents are not truly informed about what is going on in terms of the restrictions placed on librarians and teachers and their children’s access to literature.” What can we do to make parents aware and reverse these trends so our children can have the high quality education promised to them by the Florida Constitution? Reading and sharing “The Limitation Effect” is a good start.