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Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is calling on the Sunshine State’s military veterans to join Florida’s workforce as school teachers. But there are certain criteria that must be met. Still, illiterate members of the press seized on the opportunity to try to school DeSantis without carefully reading the veteran-friendly state’s specifications first. So, is Florida actually encouraging veterans without any background in teaching to serve as educators?
CLAIM : The Washington Post’s economics correspondence Abha Bhattarai blindly repeated a false claim verbatim in a tweet Wednesday that Florida is asking veterans “with no teaching background to enter classrooms,” while sharing her Ivy League-educated colleague’s reporting on the growing teacher-shortage crisis. WaPo education reporter Hannah Natanson, a Harvard University alumna, penned the initial claim in an article published in The Washington Post. In fact, the “no teaching background” line was in the lede graf.
FACTS: The assertion’s placement at the top of the story directly contradicts Natanson’s acknowledgment further down in the report that the state’s veterans do not need bachelor’s degrees BUT must have earned a minimum of 60 college credits while maintaining a grade-point average of at least 2.5 on an official transcript. As of Friday, no correction has been made at the bottom of Natanson’s piece to acknowledge the contradiction.
Bhattarai’s ratio’ed tweet was in almost a copy-paste format that other WaPo writers used with similar verbiage to circulate Natanson’s coverage, including the newspaper’s national political reporter Amy B. Wang and business reporter Hamza Shaban . Bloomberg national political reporter Emma Kinery and POLITICO education editor Delece Smith-Barrow also participated in the copypasta chain, quoting WaPo’s social media blurb .
The claim even made its way to CNN’s site and its “What Matters” newsletter . “Here’s a good example in The Washington Post , which looked at…a plan to bring […]
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