Starting this fall, every middle and high school student in Florida’s public school system will be required to take an annual Anti-Communism class on the “evils of communism.”
Florida’s Authoritarian Government
We just published a story by Truthout.org about Florida making topics in the Sociology 101 college course illegal. The Florida Board of Governors won’t allow professors to teach college students about the inequality of the ‘gender pay gap’ and other data-driven findings of Sociologists, as they force teachers to promote propaganda to their young impressionable students.
The curriculum — developed with input from the Heritage Foundation, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and the right-wing National Association of Scholars — spans 30 pages and more than 100 standards.
It presents Joseph McCarthy as a champion of anti-communism, claims that communists infiltrated the civil rights movement, and teaches students about the dangers of “pro-communist propaganda in entertainment and media industries.”
It does not mention that McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate. It does not mention that people lost their jobs, their reputations, and their livelihoods because of his accusations. And it does not mention that many of those accusations were later found to be, in the words of the Senate’s own biography of McCarthy, “a fraud and a hoax.”
This is not education. This is a political project dressed up as a lesson plan.
How We Got Here
The curriculum is rooted in legislation signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2024 — Senate Bill 1264, which requires Florida public schools to teach about the “atrocities” committed under communist regimes. The State Board of Education, all seven members of whom were appointed by DeSantis, unanimously approved the new standards in November 2025.
At the same meeting, the board made Florida the first state to adopt the Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix Declaration: An American Vision for Education,” a framework that pledges to foster “a love of country” and teach children to “seek the good, true and beautiful.”
Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas — who grew up in Miami as the grandchild of Cuban exiles who fled the Castro regime — described the move as establishing an official “affiliation” with the Heritage Foundation and said it supports what the board promotes rather than what it opposes.
The word “communism” has become “a catch phrase for any ideas that the right does not like.”
What the board opposes, by its own admission, includes instruction on sexual orientation, gender identity, racial inequality, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Phoenix Declaration restricts all of these topics. Florida is the only state to have signed it.
The new curriculum doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It builds on the state’s 2022 creation of Victims of Communism Day, held every November 7 to mark the start of the Russian Revolution. Schools are already required to provide at least 45 minutes of instruction each year on what the state calls “the horrors of communism” and “the destructiveness of Marxism-Leninism.”
The new standards dramatically expand that mandate into a year-round, grade-by-grade program beginning in sixth grade and continuing through high school.
What Students Will Be Taught
The curriculum covers a sprawling range of topics, from Plato’s Republic and the history of utopian societies to the Russian Revolution, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, and the Tiananmen Square protests. At first glance, it might sound like a thorough survey of 20th-century history.
But the framing tells a different story. The standards instruct students that communist espionage “undermined U.S. national security and continues to pose a threat.” They describe Cuba as a key “exporter of revolutionary internationalism” — presented entirely in negative terms.
They denounce collective ownership and celebrate private property and the accumulation of individual wealth. They include instruction on how the Communist Party of America spread its influence by recruiting “prominent individuals to spread propaganda,” specifically naming actress Jane Fonda.
The curriculum is roughly three times the length of Florida’s standards for American History and Civics and Government combined.
Students are expected to compare the Communist Manifesto with the Bill of Rights and learn about “methods of communist indoctrination.”
Perhaps most telling is what the curriculum says about its own motivation. The Civics Alliance, a spinoff of the National Association of Scholars that endorsed the standards, was explicit about why the course exists. In its rationale, the group cited the election of socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson in 2025, along with the growing number of democratic socialists holding elected office across the country — now roughly 250 in 40 states.
The Alliance argued that young Americans’ support for socialism is the result of never having been properly taught about the failures of communism.
In other words, the curriculum exists not because students lack historical knowledge, but because they are reaching political conclusions that Florida’s leadership finds unacceptable.
What Historians and Educators Are Saying
The reaction from historians and teachers has been sharp.
Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian and leading scholar of authoritarian regimes, criticized the curriculum on his Substack for oversimplifying the United States as an unquestioned beacon of freedom and democracy — “regardless of what Americans or their legislators actually do.”
He argued that the standards derail meaningful examination of history and limit students’ ability to think critically about how to preserve and expand liberty.
Ellen Schrecker, a historian of McCarthyism, was more blunt. She told Truthout that the curriculum presents a version of a communist threat “that did not, and does not, exist.”
She noted that the standards portray the country as led by “great, white, male, Christian leaders” who are “perfect in most ways” but endangered by outside forces — with no acknowledgment of people who have been oppressed within the United States itself.
David Oshinsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at NYU and McCarthy expert, called the standards “disturbing” and said they incorrectly portray McCarthy as a responsible anti-communist leader.
John White, a professor at the University of North Florida, pointed out a core contradiction at the heart of the project.
“The right wing says that teachers should not indoctrinate students,” he said, “but they have put forward a curriculum that indoctrinates students with a particular viewpoint.”
He added that the standards conflate communism and socialism as though they are a single ideology, and that the word “communism” has become “a catch phrase for any ideas that the right does not like.”
Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, told Truthout that teachers already feel constrained. If they want to add a supplemental reading or film, those materials must first be approved by their district.
Under the state’s code of ethics, educators are required to teach whatever the state mandates — even if they believe it’s intellectually dishonest.
“A democratic society demands that students learn how to think, not what to think,” Spar said. “It’s concerning that the right wing says that it wants to take politics out of education, but this requirement does the exact opposite.”
A Cold War Revival
Florida’s leadership isn’t hiding the historical precedent they’re drawing from. The new curriculum is modeled explicitly on a course called “Americanism vs. Communism” that was mandatory for Florida students between 1962 and 1983.
That course was created in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion and was designed, in its own stated purpose, to teach students about “the dangers of communism, the ways to fight communism, the evils of communism, the fallacies of communism and the false doctrines of communism.”
Linda Camarasana, a retired English professor who took the original course in 1976 at a high school in North Miami Beach, told Truthout that her teachers were liberal enough to offer a balanced perspective.
She learned about the conditions that led to the Russian Revolution and why people rose up. Despite the course’s intent, she got a well-rounded education that encouraged independent thinking.
That’s precisely the kind of flexibility the DeSantis administration is working to eliminate this time around. Commissioner Kamoutsas has made it clear that the new standards are designed to leave no room for teachers to debate systems of governance or present alternative viewpoints.
He has called stopping “the resurgence of communist ideologies across the United States and throughout the world” a Florida educational priority — and predicted that other states will follow.
The Bigger Picture
This curriculum doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of a broader campaign to reshape what students are permitted to learn in Florida’s public schools. The state has already banned introductory sociology textbooks, restricted instruction on race and gender, and imposed rules that make it difficult for teachers to bring outside perspectives into their classrooms.
And it comes at a moment when the Heritage Foundation — the same organization that produced Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the Trump administration — is explicitly framing education as a battleground.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has said it’s time to “go on offense” against what he calls “the radical Left’s latest ideological assault” on schools.
What’s happening in Florida is not a defense of academic rigor. It’s the use of public schools as a delivery system for a political ideology — one that treats any challenge to unfettered capitalism as a threat to national security, rehabilitates McCarthyism, erases the history of domestic oppression, and punishes teachers for encouraging their students to think critically.
The students who will sit in these classrooms this fall deserve better. They deserve history that trusts them with complexity, not a curriculum that tells them what to conclude before they’ve even opened the textbook.
