BY DAVID WIPPMAN AND GLENN C. ALTSCHULER, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS
When Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed House Bill 7, “The Stop WOKE Act,” in April, he declared that the legislation would provide public school students and their parents “freedom from having oppressive ideologies imposed upon you without your consent.”
The Stop Woke Act blocks workplace trainings and classroom instruction in public schools, colleges and universities that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” belief in “divisive concepts.” The law is just one among a rapidly proliferating number of “educational gag orders” recently imposed by conservative state legislators to restrict the teaching of critical race theory (which highlights systemic racism in the United States) and other race and gender-identity related “critiques of U.S. society and history.”
