The Florida Department of Education announced on Friday that 41% of the proposed mathematic textbooks for grades K-12 were being rejected over their failure to meet state academic standards for allegedly including controversial ideological concepts that many would argue have little if nothing at all to do with math.
Florida’s Republican-majority government has been tackling some of the most hotly contested educational issues head-on this year, banning a litany of practices in schools from COVID-19 masking to sexuality instruction for younger grades to critical race theory, and the purported rejection of math textbooks over their inclusion of these concepts indicates they are not stopping anytime soon.
“Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” the state agency said in a statement.
In his own statement, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, easily the most influential GOP leader currently in office who has spearheaded the state and the party’s attack on indoctrination in public schools, explained that “It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students.”
The Daily Wire noted that, in 2020, DeSantis announced new academic standards for the state which took aim at Common Core with new state standards and in 2021, critical race theory was banned from Florida schools.
“We’re going to ensure that Florida has the highest-quality instructional materials aligned to our nationally-recognized standards,” Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran said in a statement when announcing the rejection of the math books.
“When it comes to education, other states continue to follow Florida’s lead as we continue to reinforce parents’ rights by focusing on providing their children with a world-class education without the fear of indoctrination or exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts in our classrooms,” he said.
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