Florida parents upset by Michelangelo’s ‘David’ force out principal

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/24/florida-principal-michelangelo-david-parents/

by mirthlessend • 3 years ago

36 61 3 years ago

What do these parents think their 6th graders are doing out in the world? Even with no internet in the house and on a phone, I would have certainly seen pictures of genitals by the 6th grade.

And I went to a very conservative school, and am typing from Florida. I know how things are here.

vkou2• 3 years ago

A sculpture of the biblical David is obviously completely inappropriate in a proper bible-reading, god-fearing community.

saboot• 3 years ago

What would make this statue inappropriate versus the bible itself?

avs733• 3 years ago

which makes me feel it is even more likely to be necessary for their children and enabling them to have the chance to escape from the developmental and educational favors foisted upon them by their parents.

dekhn2• 3 years ago

The sculpture really represents Florence's attitude towards Rome, and would have been a powerful form of propaganda for the state.

MomoXenosaga• 3 years ago

Insane religious parents is precisely why schools have to give sex education to kids.

sharemywin6• 3 years ago

2 of the 3 parents were upset they weren't informed.

ben7799• 3 years ago

The overly pious seem to forget that all people have genitals.

starkparker• 3 years ago

Cannot stress enough that moves like this have little to nothing to do with the content, or the kids. Local school bullshit like this is always parents with another axe to grind taking advantage of every possible tool at their disposal. Doesn't matter if it's a Latin-teaching classical Christian conservative school in Florida or an autonomous Montessori in Berkeley run by nudists - if a parent gets offended by an administrator, blood's in the water.

The principal wasn't politically left of the parents. She's an evangelical Christian whose previous job was at Christ Classical, which "integrates all subjects to develop a biblical worldview for every area of life" and follows a similar curriculum. At this school she'd been promoted into the role that she quit; it's 'advised by Hillsdale College, which has raised money by pushing back on what the institution describes as “leftist” academics teaching a “biased and distorted” view of U.S. history'.

Everybody knows exactly what they're doing here, and it has nothing to do with students seeing a statue's cock and balls, or parental consent, or much of anything at all. One or more parents didn't like the principal for <insert any reason, valid or stupid, here>, they found the first thing they could use to punt her, and they wrapped their hands around its length and girth as tight as they could and then swung it at her until she left.

brucethemoose22• 3 years ago

Right... I forgot about all that pettiness, and I have definitelty seen teachers booted out for less over some personal feud.

didgetmaster2• 3 years ago

The principal said she was not given a reason she was asked to resign, but believes complaints the school board received from parents over the lesson on the Michelangelo statue played a role in what happened.

So, did she do everything else right and was fired for just a single controversial lesson? Or was this complaint just one of dozens of other things that parents were complaining about and it just 'played a role'?

We never seem to get the whole story when it comes to sensationalized articles like this one.

jjulius• 3 years ago

Psst, scroll down to the second paragraph after that...

Barney Bishop III, the chair of the school board and a lobbyist, confirmed to The Post that he gave Carrasquilla an ultimatum following complaints from three parents who believed the material on “David” was “controversial” and not age-appropriate for their children. Bishop, who did not give a reason he asked for Carrasquilla to resign on the advice of the school’s lawyers, told The Post that there were several issues with the principal, including not notifying parents ahead of time that their children would be shown the Renaissance art.
“She wasn’t let go because of the artistic nude pictures. We show it every year to our students,” Bishop said, adding that Carrasquilla “voluntarily resigned.” “The problem with this particular issue was the lack of follow-through on the process.”

falcolas6• 3 years ago

“voluntarily resigned.”

Huh. what I read was it was the choice between resigning or be fired. Doesn't seem very voluntary, but it does give everyone a fig leaf to cover the questionable bits with.

ok_dad• 3 years ago

We never seem to get the whole story when it comes to sensationalized articles like this one.

So what is it? We don't have the whole story, or the article is sensationalized? You can't have both at once, you need to first show some shred of evidence that there's anything more to the story than, "teacher is fired for showing art that had a penis to schoolchildren."

didgetmaster2• 3 years ago

“She wasn’t let go because of the artistic nude pictures. We show it every year to our students,” Bishop said, adding that Carrasquilla “voluntarily resigned.” “The problem with this particular issue was the lack of follow-through on the process.”

So why wasn't this in the first paragraph? I thought the article was sensationalized because of what it lead with, while leaving any counter-arguments toward the bottom.

sharemywin6• 3 years ago

The principle was supposed to send a letter to the parents which didn't happen. I believe the law in florida is about notify parents so, there might be some potential legal problems for the school.

I wish democrats would engage in this issue. I believe parents do have rights regarding what types of things they're children are exposed to and/or not exposed to based on age. (don't get me started on the hap hazard parental controls for the internet)

Even just knowing what was cover so you can help your kid with their homework. usually, I can figure stuff out if I have access to it, but once sentence usually isn't enough.

falcolas6• 3 years ago

I wish democrats would engage in this issue.

It's a private school, and their charter points more specifically at "Christian Private School", so you're not going to find a lot of left-leaning voters who will legitimately have any say in what the school does.

thwayunion5• 3 years ago

I wish democrats would engage in this issue

But teacher and admin time isn't free. People with high political media engagement have lost their damn minds and are now offended about everything. Including thousand year old statues, apparently.

No one gives a shit if your pull your kid out of a class, but everyone -- including LOTS of clued-in conservatives -- are sick of teachers/admins/boards spending too much time holding the hands of parents who spend too much time reading political news and not enough time working on their emotional regulation skills.

If you want to control what your kid sees, YOU need to do more work. If you want more information, YOU need to review your kid's materials. If you want access to more than every other parent is provided, then YOU need to do the work of getting that material and deciding what your kid will see. It's called parenting.

If you want to curate your kid's educational experience, then put in the fucking work and stop demanding use of my tax dollars and my kid's instructional time to satiate your neuroses.

(Also: your innocent little middle school angel is definitely talking about boobies and balls recess.... because, y'know, they're middle schoolers and that is what middle schoolers do. But we'll pretend they don't as long as you stop stealing time and money from us.)

don't get me started on the hap hazard parental controls for the internet

You can buy all sorts of software, but no amount of law or regulation is going to solve the problem of the internet being the internet.

raymondh• 3 years ago

IIRC, there was an episode of The Simpsons that addressed exactly this scenario.

falcolas6• 3 years ago

They covered it, literally, with pants some 30 years ago.

Life imitating art.

programmarchy• 3 years ago

“Parental rights are supreme.”

I’ve been sympathetic to this in the past, but I didn’t realize just how stupid some parents are.

pfortuny• 3 years ago

That is not right at all. Parental rights are above other people’s but not the children’s. In fact, they are subordinate to the children’s right to education. This is nuanced but for instance, a parent not educating his child is not above anything.

r00fus2• 3 years ago

It’s also myopic. Florida legislature proposed a law allowing state to take kids kids from parents. So no they aren’t supreme at all.

https://www.businessinsider.com/florida-anti-trans-bill-cour...

jmclnx2• 3 years ago

I have said things like this before and will say it again. I love Florida, why ? Because that state is doing all it can to ensure their children do not get a good education, it insures the kids in my State will have a leg up in getting well paying jobs.

That is because it seems they are ensuring FL children are taught and live "My way or the Highway"

So, thank you Florida and other Red US States to help ensure the Children where I live will get the better jobs and know more about life.

stcroixx• 3 years ago

Does your state teach special rules for how capitalization is used? I haven't seen anything like that before.

ChainOfFools2• 3 years ago

Google voice typing, which is likely what OP may be using to dictate his post, has lately begun inserting Capitalizations in Strange Places that you have to manually edit out. The UX of Google Voice typing makes this extraordinarily cumbersome and inconvenient to do, especially if your other hand is not free.

DontchaKnowit2• 3 years ago

First off this is a griss and unempathetic take.

Second off- it has nothing ti do with florida being red. I grew up in a very democrat town that had a disgustingly corrupt school board. Bad education top to bottom. The main issues that lead to a bad school : 1) shitty parenting. Goes hand in hand with poverty. Creates awful learning environment 2) general incompetence/administrative malice : schools do not seem to be design explicitly for the pyrpose of benefitting students- this goal is abandoned in order to meet a variety of tertiary goals. 3) corruption. If the money is gettung spent on nepotism and emvezzlement, it aint getting spent on kids.

Now, every single one of those points applies to communities in both red and blue states.

So please, lets not make this partisan.

jmclnx2• 3 years ago

First off this is a griss and unempathetic take

Yes it is and I am hoping people in FL sees this that way. Then maybe they will do something. Instead they are electing people to ensure the kids miss out on education that others will get.

2 or 3 parents can force who maybe a good teacher to leave and no one fights back. What FL will end up with are teachers who work just for a pay check instead of people who care for the kids. How many teachers in FL and other states are leaving ? I remember hearing there was a big teacher shortage in OK, TX and I think Kansas due to these issues. Maybe the same is true in FL.

This is a good example of what FL is doing to itself:

https://www.hampshire.edu/admissions/apply-hampshire/transfe...

debacle• 3 years ago

The anti-Florida propaganda coming out of the MSM is crazy right now. Most of these stories are blatantly untrue at best and completely fabricated at worst.

There was a story from the NEA this morning that Moms For Liberty is "well funded" because they have 700k on the books for 2022. Meanwhile the NEA and AFT spend more than that just on printing each year.

vkou2• 3 years ago

There'd be a lot less anti-florida propaganda if it didn't write itself, given that the state's governor's whole political shtick is loudly waging a culture war against the libs.

It's not his administrative or speech-writing, or coalition-building skills that are expected to carry him to the republican nomination.

r00fus2• 3 years ago

“X Derangement syndrome” aka X doing crazy stuff isn’t the problem, it’s everyone complaining about X.

snozolli• 3 years ago

How much would it take for you to consider them well funded?

Personally, I don't think it takes nearly as much to spread propaganda in order to work parents into a frenzy as it does to support teachers across the country.

falcolas6• 3 years ago

Always worth noting - the self-reported mission of the school is:

“to train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.”

Though, I get the feeling that some of those words are dog whistles. Don't read the following if you think this is a spurious accusation.

I feel that "classical education" is code for "rich white kids", while "principles of moral character and civic virtue" is shorthand for a Christian nationalist curriculum.

xp842• 3 years ago

Oh, 100% this is actually a school that's being run specifically to appeal to those segments you named. The curriculum is designed by a Christian college. This part actually makes this story much, much more ironic/entertaining. They're eating their own in this case.

This would be like some kind of a "Social Justice school" firing its principal for allowing one book by a white person to be read in class.

The important difference is, the thing I just made up is fictional and this article is apparently not.

thwayunion5• 3 years ago

The issue with "Parental rights are supreme" is that there are tons of parents whose demands will make it impossible for your kid to learn much of anything.

In our district, we had to put AP CS on hold because apparently RNGs are too close to gambling and gambling is sinful. You can't even get through the Java standard library without angering the religious right these days.

They threw a huge fit about Common Core Math as well (as a working mathematician -- and one with some amount of passing experience in teaching mathematics at that -- I could never get those parents to articulate what the actual problem was... AFAICT some TV pundit told them to be angry about math).

I wonder if these parents realize that about half of the middle schoolers in Florida not only have seen a penis, but have one of their very own!

BTW, the possibility that this was about inter-personal feuds rather than David just strengthens the point. Giving every parent potential veto power over anything that happens in school is a good way of making sure that nothing will happen in school.

Some teacher makes a valid criticism of your child's classmate during a parent-teacher conference, the parent takes it personally, the spat escalates, the course is derailed. By the time you find out WTF is even happening, your kid is already half a grade level behind in every subject. Rinse and repeat the next school year.

arthurcolle• 3 years ago

Have these people heard of dice? Or coins? Just wow

thwayunion5• 3 years ago

dice? Or coins?

The labs were about these things (and cards), and therefore gambling. We had to do purely abstract labs instead. The issue is that probability is hard to teach even with visceral physical examples of sampling from distributions.

ChainOfFools2• 3 years ago

A couple of years ago I attended an introductory course on scheme. about halfway through the second or third lesson one of the students objected on religious grounds to the example presented by the instructor, which simulated some basic statistical operations involving a deck of cards. This guy proceeded to file a complaint with some review board and the course had to be modified to avoid mentioning anything to do with hands or sets of playing cards. Not even games, just groupings of shuffled cards.

But similar examples featuring probabilities of outcomes in a relay race were deemed suitable despite the obvious nerfing of the model required to set the capabilities of all runners to be equal.

sharemywin6• 3 years ago

Common Core Math - They were upset because they couldn't understand it.

sharemywin6• 3 years ago

I do think parents should be able to review the stuff they're kids are getting thought and probably have the option to opt out. so they're kids can learn about it on youtube the way they're supposed.

sharemywin6• 3 years ago

what then OnlyFans. I think that's pushing it a little.

brobdingnagians2• 3 years ago

Have you ever met a kid who was excited about doing math the Common Core way?

One of the issues with Common Core Math is that it really teaches children to jump through the hoops of diagramming the way the book says to do it (and that way is cumbersome), not actually solve problems or understand concepts. People model ideas differently, Common Core requires one overly pedantic way of doing it, for the intelligent who figure out a better underlying representation, the Common Core Math Way(!) is drudgery. That just means more hatred for mathematics. It would be better to show examples and ideas, get interest and excitement, then formalize, but formalize in a way that is useful later on.

Mathematics _is_ exciting, it is a puzzle. Teaching should reflect that.

thwayunion5• 3 years ago

Common Core is just a set of standards. This is a bit like criticizing the API because one specific implementation of the API is garbage; you may be right, or wrong, but what you're criticizing is not relevant to the API design, at least at the first order.

Some publisher's course materials may fit your criticism. Lots of expensive garbage in K12.

The material I reviewed was quite the opposite. Instead of memorizing one way of performing an operation, you learn many different ones, discuss why one might be better than the other in certain contexts, and even think through why two different algorithms implement the same operation. The students I worked with/observed emerged from high school with a level of mathematical maturity that most students don't achieve until well after their university Calculus sequence, if ever.

Two other thoughts:

1. Everything you just described also describes how most schools implemented mathematics education prior to common core. If this is how someone taught with common core, it's almost 100% certain that this is also how they taught before common core, and that this is how they would teach mathematics regardless of what standards they were following. What you are describing is a bad mathematics educator, which is a serious problem in the USA but is orthogonal to choice of standards.

2. Most importantly, I never got even an articulation at this level of detail. People were angry because pundits told them to be angry. There were no articulated reasons. Just, "CC = bad".

mcphage• 3 years ago

One of the issues with Common Core Math is that it really teaches children to jump through the hoops of diagramming the way the book says to do it (and that way is cumbersome), not actually solve problems or understand concepts

That's actually the opposite of the Common Core content I've seen at schools—its emphasis is on having a variety of looking at a problem and solving it, based on he situation. Instead of just hammering in the standard algorithms. It's not perfect, but what I've seen, I've liked.

sacnoradhq• 3 years ago

The solution is to boot the kids (sorry kids) until their parents come back slightly saner or can afford private schools for flatearthers and creationists.

Education should not be a democracy where the loudest bully parents whine about critical race theory, evolution, or sex ed.

sharemywin6• 3 years ago

What I find amusing is I could see liberal parents being upset because it was reinforcing body image issues in children just as easily as conservative parents for other issues.

brewdad• 3 years ago

When you find that story please post it here. Until then, we'll discuss stories that actually happened rather than your fantasies.

MBCook• 3 years ago

If you’re interested in this you have to read this interview in Slate with the head of the school board.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/03/florida-principal-f...

It’s clear the board has lots of ‘problems’ with the principal. Given the chair’s answers in the interview it’s incredibly clear they have a very specific world view. I’m guessing the principal didn’t share it.

chiefalchemist• 3 years ago

In other words, his dismissal - at its root - isn't about Michelangelo’s ‘David’. It just happens to be the one that got the result. Like getting Al Capone on tax evasion, and not all his other shenanigans.

brobdingnagians2• 3 years ago

This should probably be flagged, if I'm not mistaken. It is as out of place here on hacker news as an article about drag queen story hour or the school children's book assignments with fellatio.

It is partisan and highly selective about the facts. Besides, the title appears to be clickbait.

It doesn't quote any parents saying their reasons for being upset, or even their lawyers, and the quotes it does have make it clear that the lessons will continue to be taught. It has all the hallmarks of someone taking a scrap of truth and then fabricating a story for partisan sensationalization.

There is a lot more going on here, and the article goes out of its way to avoid presenting the information and obscuring; but even the information they do present makes it clear that the title is clickbait.

Overtonwindow2• 3 years ago

This is ludicrous. Like the professor punished for showing artwork of Mohammed.

Florida parents upset by Michelangelo’s ‘David’ force out principal

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