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Florida Bans Math Propaganda Textbooks
The Left is relentless in pushing its agenda, particularly on our children, who are vulnerable and naïve about the effects of propaganda in the schools. Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to hold the Left and its cohorts accountable for their actions and agenda, and they continue to misrepresent what they are doing.
The latest salvo from the Florida Department of Education and the legislature has been the rejection of math books being offered to the state. Propaganda in math books, you ask? How is that possible? The political Left has found a way. They cloak their teaching in the framework of critical race theory, by offering euphemisms for that term. Worse yet, they have taken a subject that was probably relatively harmless in its original form—Social and Emotional Learning Theory—and have redefined it through the racist content of the class. Before I explain how this manipulation of our education has evolved, I’d like to explain the actions that the FL Dept. of Education took just over a week ago:
Last Friday, the FLDOE announced in a press release that it is rejecting 54 of the 132 new math textbooks submitted for approval this year—the highest number of banned textbooks in the state’s history. The press release was titled ‘Florida rejects publishers’ attempts to indoctrinate students.’
According to the FLDOE, what made them reject all these books were references to Critical Race Theory, inclusions of Common Core, and ‘the unsolicited addition of’ Social Emotional Learning. Some books simply didn’t match Florida’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, a set of standards set by the state.
The publishers that were affected were Accelerate Learning, Bedford Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, Big Ideas Learning LLC, Cengage Learning, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Math Nation, McGraw Hill LLC, and Savvas Learning Company LLC.
Gov. DeSantis has made his protest against these books eminently clear:
On Monday, DeSantis tweeted: ‘Math is about getting the right answer, not about feelings or ideologies. In Florida, we will be educating our children, not indoctrinating them.’
Works for me.
The FLDOE gives several examples on its website, but this is one of the most blatant:
Under an exercise supposed to be teaching students about polynomials, a kind of mathematical expression, the first few words introducing the teaching instructions are highlighted as guilty of mentioning the FLDOE’s ‘prohibited topics.’
‘What? Me? Racist?,’ read the instructions, before mentioning that the students will be working with a mathematical model measuring bias that has been used by over two million people to test their racial prejudice through the Implicit Association Test.
Once the State of Florida realized that, in spite of the Left’s protests to the contrary, the FLDOE saw that CRT (without using the term) was appearing under the guise of Social and Emotional Learning. The proponents of SEL state that teaching this curriculum is helpful to children:
Social-emotional learning (SEL) describes the mindsets, skills, attitudes, and feelings that help students succeed in school, career, and life, such as growth mindset, grit, and sense of belonging at school. Educators use many names for these skills, such as ‘non-cognitive skills,’ ‘soft skills,’ ‘21st century skills,’ ‘character strengths,’ and ‘whole child.’ Social-emotional learning is an important part of a well-rounded education. Research shows that SEL is an important lever for boosting academic achievement. Positive social-emotional skills are also correlated with improved attendance and reduced disciplinary incidents.
It sounds pretty harmless, doesn’t it? The description leaves out the latest infiltration of the focus on racism:
Our mission at Empowering Education is to enable learning through social and emotional learning. That includes helping children wrestle with the racism and injustice of the world, learn to appreciate differences, and develop the skills to resolve conflicts. We need SEL more than ever so that our children grow up in a world where they feel valued, respected, and heard no matter their skin color.
Fortunately for the citizens of Florida, Gov. DeSantis and his Department of Education are well aware of the insidious nature of the Left’s education curriculum.
They are adamant about forcing their agenda on all of us.
We all need to keep a watchful eye on the Left’s efforts to brainwash our children.
Published in Education
It’s possible because of outside pressures that the FLDOE will release more information to the public; they will probably have to provide the information to the publishers anyway. I’ll try to watch to see if they do.
Please do.
As Libs of Tik Tok has demonstrated, the left is giving away the rope with which it may be (figuratively speaking) hanged. Our job is to make sure that everyone knows about it… and, on occasion, to help tie the knots.
This reminds me of a skit I wrote about 15 years ago. It was about a student who took a math test after having not studied for one second and she answered every problem verbally instead of numerically (ex. 4+4=racism, 1/2 x 3/16 = class oppression, etc.). The teacher couldn’t in good conscience give the student a failing grade so she instead gave her a grade of “happiness”. Of course nobody aside from morons in a Democrat-run city would hire her after she got her engineering degree. When a bridge that she designed collapsed killing dozens, it was blamed on racism and class oppression and she was given a raise.
Except of course the actual opposing side would never be convinced that something they want, is bad. What you really need are examples to show the parents etc.
What the heck is going on here at Ricochet? I’m on my notepad and each time I try to “like” a comment (such as the one above) the only reaction from the system is to display some header information and leave the number of likes unchanged.
Did the weekend server support crew make a change?
Sad. Well, unless it’s a K – 6 school library in which case that might be a good idea.
I know of an Arizona charter school that did just that; grabbed up the oldest books they could find in quantity and used them to teach from. They’re doing great btw.
As I hope I’ve made clear the countless other times I’ve mentioned it, we are always talking to the audience.
When I say “engage the opposing side,” I mean engage their positions and arguments. There is essentially never a value in having an argument with a progressive unless there is an audience of normal people able to witness the exchange.
Considering the publish-on-demand industry it is surprising that more people aren’t doing this. Particularly as a lot of old stuff is probably out of copyright.
Bring back the one-room schoolhouses!
There’s long been too much emphasis on whatever the latest theory is supposed to be, and the newest, most “sophisticated” textbooks too. And not only because someone wants to get paid for new stuff, whereas old stuff might not get anyone paid at all, especially if they’re long dead.
Yes. Working on a fix.
Maybe like with textbooks, they just need to go back to what they had before. :-)
Thanks. Reminds me of my working days, coming in on Monday mornings after the Network crew made a change, and finding our servers unreachable.
That’s always the problem with poorly tested changes…
You’d think the network crew would be responsible for making sure everything worked afterward.
Yeah, but sometimes it happens. Sometimes changes work in the test bed and then go to h%&$ when they hit production.
But that’s what I meant. After putting it on the production system, THEN they should check to make sure everything still works. On the production system.
Ideally, that’s what is supposed to happen. I’m not necessarily taking the side of the suport team but sometimes s%^# happens. After 42 years in IT, I can assure you it happens.
The REAL test is how fast the problem is fixed. If Ricochet is still hosed up tomorrow then there’s a BIG problem.
Perhaps because I’m a software guy, I feel compelled to speak out in defense of software guys (and software gals, though there are only a few of those).
The iron triangle applies to software as to most everything else — fast, cheap, good: pick any two. Ricochet is a small business, software is a complicated and expensive product, and Ricochet would go out of business if it paid for the methodologies that lead to flawless code. And we’d be a long time waiting for that code.
I think Ricochet generally handles the technology fairly well.
It’s formatting like crap on safari right now. I can live with it.
They don’t bother to replicate the evidence they base their changes on, so it’s serial change with no actual attention to improvement.
Sounds real, actually.
Maybe something similar happened with that Florida building collapse, I don’t seem to have heard much about that for some time.
It could have been salt in rising groundwater weakened the concrete foundation. There was evidence of a lot of above-ground corrosion too, so there might have been multiple factors. The building had been sinking since the 1990s.
Maybe it’s the cause of the Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse though.
That bridge was constructed and pretensioned before being deployed. It started cracking almost immediately. The engineers saw that, but thought that it wouldn’t be a safety issue and could be repaired later.
Another engineer that got a “happiness” grade in math?
It appears that it was a novel design. Florida International University has – or perhaps had – a reputation for bridge design.
Henry Petroski’s very readable book, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, provides an interesting perspective on collapsing bridges, lethal software bugs, and other spectacular engineering failures. One comes away from it with an appreciation for the value of, and the risk inherent in, trying new things.
I write very reliable software. I’m not particularly fast, I’m certainly not flashy, and I sometimes don’t understand the customer’s requirements perfectly. But the software I write tends to do exactly what I wanted it to do, and to do it day in and day out for years at a time, without surprises. I am a very meat-and-potatoes programmer, but I’m really good at meat and potatoes.
But guys like me don’t move the world ahead. We just make things work. I have a lot of respect for people who push the boundaries in ways I don’t, even if it sometimes goes sideways, and even if, occasionally, people suffer for it.
Although I know nothing about software programming, I can relate to how you work, Hank. Reliable. Meat and potatoes.