Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-5-2025
Abstract
The abstract below summarizes a white paper report we released in fall 2024, The Limitation Effect: Experiences of State Policy-Driven Education Restriction in Florida’s Public Schools (Pollock & Yoshikawa, et al.,). We hope readers will read our report in full. It links to an archive of background information and full interview highlights, as well.
At this writing, the nation has experienced over four years of a divisive networked campaign to restrict how educators can support students in public schools. This campaign has promoted both state law and nationally networked local agitation demanding that public schools limit access to specific realms of ideas, perspectives, information, support, and belonging activities related to the nation’s inequality and diversity. Fueled by conservative/right-wing organizations, politicians, and media characterizing and caricaturing educators’ work as “woke,” “radical left” “indoctrination” “infecting” public schools and harming children, this “conflict campaign” (Pollock et al., Citation2022) has inflamed differences of opinion into demands to “ban,” riling up some Americans to demand that public school educators limit K12 exposure to perspectives, information, and supports related to race, racism, racial inequality, sex, gender/gender identity, and LGBTQ+ existence (in addition to any content deemed “sexual”). Loud voices in this movement have caricatured, imagined, and targeted public schools as flawed institutions supposedly forcing “wokeness,” harming “whites” through diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, forcing LGBTQ inclusion, even “sexualizing” children, and abridging “parental rights,” and sought to restrict education through two predominant mechanisms: state policy and nationally networked local agitation.
Florida is now the test case for policy mechanisms that leaders in—and tapped for—the Trump administration have also advocated and appear to want implemented and pressured nationwide. Florida offers the nation’s most “advanced” example of how mechanisms of state policy threat are being used to limit K12 learning, teaching, and student support efforts related to the nation’s diversity and inequality and to align schooling for all with restrictive ideologies. While many states have implemented education restriction policies since the 2020–2021 school year, Florida has passed the most such policies in the nation in this time frame and combines the most restriction mechanisms in one place. As such, we view Florida as a national warning sign. In The Limitation Effect, we analyze educator, parent, and student experiences of these state policies in Florida, focusing specifically on policies directly trying to restrict K12 teaching and learning. The key findings and implications of the study are summarized in the abstract below.
Our study shows how policymakers pushing review and “bans” of disliked and imagined K12 efforts to support students can end up hurting everyone.
Recommended Citation
Pollock, M., Yoshikawa, H., Diaz, J., Richburg, A., Cox, B., Matschiner, A., … Mohammed Issa, A. R. (2025). The Limitation Effect: Florida restrictions as a national warning sign. Equity & Excellence in Education, 58(1), 4–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2025.2465117
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
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Comments
This article was originally published in Equity & Excellence in Education, volume 58, issue 1, in 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2025.2465117