As Paul Harvey would say, "And now, the rest of the story."
The Florida DOE has released a couple of examples of what it considers objectionable material in these texts. The first is an exercise that says:
"What? Me? Racist? More than 2 million people have tested their racial prejudice using an online version of the Implicit Association Test. Most groups' average scores fall between 'slight' and 'moderate' bias, but the difference between groups, by age and by political identification, are intriguing. In this Exercise, you will be working with models that measure bias:
S = 0.3x3 - 2.8x2 + 6.7x + 30
S = -0.03x3 + 0.2x2 + 2.3x + 24
In each model, S represents the score on the Implicit Association Test. In the first model, x represents age group. In the second model, x represents political affiliation."
The text then presents a couple of bar charts breaking down relative levels of bias by age and political affiliation. If you're thinking that textbooks when you grew up didn't talk about ways to measure implied racism, you'd be correct. If you're thinking that the level of math sophistication in this problem is beyond what most high school students would learn, that's also correct. I didn't learn about concepts like this until my college statistics class. And it turns out that this does NOT come from any high school text. Instead, it comes from a book entitled "Thinking Mathematically," which is a 1000-page textbook for a Mathematics for College Liberal Arts class. The quoted material takes up part of one page in the text. And this text would only have been available to high school students to read on their own, on-line, not part of any standard curriculum.
The only other example of "objectionable" material that I could find that the DOE provided was a lesson plan for a math course, apparently for first graders (they were supposed to identify the numbers 1 to 5 in sequence from smallest to largest). One of the course objectives was "students build proficiency with social awareness as they practice empathizing with classmates." Translated into elementary school language, it means helping out a classmate who's having trouble.
But wait, there's still more. There is the rest of the rest of the story.
The issue isn't the texts that were rejected, but, rather those that passed muster.
Tallahassee Democrat 4/19/22 wrote:[T]he only publisher approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education for K-5 mathematics is Accelerate Learning, a company out of Houston, Texas. “In the subject area as large as mathematics for grades K through five, it is unusual for there only to be one publisher to choose from," said Billy Epting, assistant superintendent for academic services for Leon County Schools.
The Florida DOE rejected more than 50 mathematics textbooks — about 40% of those submitted — for failing to meet Florida’s new learning standards or because they “contained prohibited topics” that included references to critical race theory. For regular math classes, Accelerate Learning's STEMscopes Florida Math books are the only option for school districts.
The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm, acquired Accelerate Learning on Dec. 20, 2018, according to the firm's website. During that time, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was the co-CEO of the firm. After 25 years with the company, Youngkin resigned in 2020 to run for office in Virginia. The first thing Youngkin did as governor of Virginia was sign an executive order to "end the use of inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory, and restoring excellence in K-12 public education in the commonwealth," a measure that's comparable to DeSantis' "Stop WOKE Act."
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/ ... 357965001/
So, as a result of the DOE action, the only company whose texts are approved for standard math classes in the entire state is owned by The Carlyle Group, an investment firm where Glenn Youngkin worked for 25 years and was CEO before he ran for governor. Nothing suspicious here. Just one Republican hand scratching the other and pocketing some big bucks while useful idiots like Flock drool all over sticking it to the liberals once again.