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‘He feels empowered’: DeSantis kicks off takeover of second liberal Florida school
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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I still don't really get how this works, and I have a PhD in education. I get the idea, and can totally see K-12 having a skew since that can be a few steps removed from primary sources, but any school conducting research will ultimately end up "liberal" because, on average, objective approaches point towards approaches adapted by liberals and leftists (plus genuine discourse usually leads to left out center conclusions because logic points there.).
My dept was full of people with very conservative beliefs (and even a bit racist) but their work still pointed to shit like basic income and socialist reforms being the solution to most education gaps. Advisor proudly displaying The Bell Curve on his shelf while simultaneously getting millions for experiments with giving families thousands of dollars of no strings attached money because evidence simply suggested it's a very effective solution!
So what is DeSantis doing to make it more conservative? Just focus more on majors without methodology? Avoid research funding and focus on instruction only? Add a whites only application pool? It's not like you can get published in a serious journal without an objective methodology. It's about as nonsensical as renaming the Gulf of Mexico, you have to get a global consensus for it to stick.
You're thinking too much reality-based. They are not trying to be factually correct. They are trying to win. If they say the schools have a liberal bias, and install authoritarian dopes who will "correct" the bias, that helps them win. Whether what they say is actually true, or whether the research is accurate that was being generated under these "liberal" models before they got involved, is simply of no consequence.
It's just, much of university funding comes from research which requires peer review and recognition, so you can't hide behind falsities. You can probably do a few things to appease, but at the end of the day you can only ever get so far without adhering to reality. Mind you, this is only true of universities with research programs; you can censor all you want at Junior colleges and (ironically named) liberal arts colleges.
Check out what they're doing with the university of austin. (Edit: This is a link to an article written by a conservative for conservatives. This is to show the ideology they're working toward. This is not a reality based analysis of whats actually happening. ) This is probably the model they'll start to adopt. Will it work out, is another question.
If you control the programming, you control the people.