Stop W.O.K.E. Act and the AP African American Studies fight

Florida's Individual Freedom Act of 2022 ('Stop W.O.K.E. Act') restricted K-12 and public-university instruction on race and racism by prohibiting teaching that an individual 'must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress' because of past actions by members of the same race or sex. In January 2023 Florida rejected the College Board's pilot AP African American Studies course, citing the Act and listing specific objections to topics including Black Lives Matter, reparations, intersectionality, and queer Black studies.

The College Board released a revised AP framework in February 2023 that removed several of the contested topics from required content, drawing public objection from over two hundred Black-studies scholars. PEN America's ``America's Censored Classrooms`` (2024) catalogs forty-four state legislative restrictions on race and gender instruction enacted between 2021 and 2024, affecting an estimated 35 million students.

Eddie Glaude Jr., in ``Begin Again``, situates the post-2020 'CRT panic' inside the longer cycle Carol Anderson identifies: specific civic gains in Black political and cultural representation (2008 election, 2014 Ferguson protests, 2020 racial reckoning) have repeatedly been followed by state-level policy backlash framed as restoring neutrality.

The Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, commonly referred to as the Stop WOKE Act and formally designated as Florida HB 7 (2022), is the principal state legislative effort to restrict instruction on race-related topics in K-12 public schools, public colleges and universities, and certain employer-provided diversity training. The statute prohibits instruction or training that promotes specified concepts including the proposition that members of one race or sex are inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, that members of one race or sex should feel guilt or anguish for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex, and that any individual should be made to feel discomfort on account of his or her race or sex.

The implementing regulations issued by the Florida Department of Education have produced substantial curriculum-review activity, including the documented rejection or modification of approximately forty mathematics textbooks in 2022 on social-emotional-learning-related grounds and the documented modification of African-American-studies curricula across multiple districts. The statute's higher-education provisions extend the framework to the Florida public-university system; the implementing regulations have produced substantial curriculum-review activity in the system's diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The AP African American Studies course, developed by the College Board across the 2021-2023 development period, was the subject of substantial public controversy in early 2023 when the Florida Department of Education declined to approve the course for AP credit in Florida public schools. The Department's rejection letter identified specific course content that the Department considered inconsistent with the Stop WOKE Act, including content addressing intersectionality, the prison-industrial-complex literature, and the reparations literature. The College Board subsequently revised the course's framework and the revised framework was subsequently approved.

The federal litigation challenging the Stop WOKE Act has produced substantial outcomes. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida issued preliminary injunctions in 2022 in Pernell v. Lamb and Honeyfund.com v. DeSantis blocking enforcement of the statute's higher-education and employer-training provisions on First Amendment grounds. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the preliminary injunction in the Honeyfund case in 2024. The statute's K-12 provisions have been subject to less successful litigation.

The broader state-legislative pattern of similar enactments has been substantial across the past several years. Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Iowa, Indiana, Idaho, Texas, Arkansas, New Hampshire, and several additional states have enacted statutes addressing instruction on race-related topics in K-12 public schools, public colleges and universities, or both. The specific provisions vary substantially across the affected states, but the common structural pattern is the establishment of state-level review of curriculum content addressing race-related topics and the prohibition of specified frameworks of analysis. The platform's framing treats the Stop WOKE Act and the parallel state-legislative enactments as one of the principal contemporary statutory frameworks affecting the operational practice of race-related education in American public institutions.

The contemporary federal Department of Education enforcement activity addressing curriculum-restriction frameworks has been the subject of substantial subsequent guidance and rulemaking activity. The OCR has issued successive guidance documents addressing the intersection between state curriculum-restriction frameworks and Title VI's anti-discrimination requirements. The Department of Education's 2023 guidance on educational equity and the parallel subsequent guidance documents have established the federal-administrative framework for addressing the intersection. The OCR's enforcement activity addressing specific state-level curriculum-restriction frameworks continues to develop across multiple subsequent investigations.

The Supreme Court's pending and recent cases addressing First Amendment claims about state curriculum-restriction frameworks include the Mahmoud v. McKnight case (4th Cir. 2024, addressing parental opt-outs from LGBTQ+ curriculum content in Maryland), the parallel litigation about specific state curriculum-restriction frameworks, and the broader question of whether the First Amendment constrains state authority over K-12 public-school curriculum content. The principal recent academic engagement with the question includes Erwin Chemerinsky's 'Free Speech on Campus' (2017), Catherine Ross's 'Lessons in Censorship' (2015), and the successive subsequent law-review scholarship addressing the state-curriculum-restriction question. The platform's pathways pages cover the principal civil-society litigation and advocacy resources addressing the issue.