Sometimes RW Life Imitates Satire - not Art
You may recall that Ron DeSantis and his fascist fantasists in the Florida legislature drafted and then passed bills banning the teaching of CRT in Florida schools — which is a thing that does not happen.
As a follow-on to this brave defense of the purity and grand intention of all the right races they took the step of rejecting a large number of mathematics textbooks. For Grades K through 5. Purportedly because they were made too impure with CRT elements scattered throughout the tomes.
When this happened I joked that they must be driven by a severe aversion to the mind-bending demands of calculus, which constantly demands we conduct integration, or impose differentiation (which sounds like it must have something to do with separating people based on appearance, sex, even the clothes they wear). It was a joke. It was not meant to reflect their thought patterns as snark.
I should have written it up there and then as a piece of snark — but instead I waited, life got in the way and the dog ate my non-existent homework.
Too bad Simple Simon! Snooze you lose first rights to the concept. The good news though is that very idea was the backdrop to a recent column by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post.
But then I opened the 2020 edition of one of the banned textbooks, Cengage’s “Precalculus With Limits” — and was horrified by the “indoctrinating concepts” I saw. If this is Precalculus With Limits, I’d hate to see the kind without limits.
Dana takes the time to find and understand the causes of their angst.
Right now, all Floridians should be fighting the radical socialists, but “Precalculus With Limits” is inviting children to find the “simplest form of a radical equation,” or even to take a perfectly normal equation and “rewrite with a radical.” Which radical? Saul Alinsky?
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The textbook sneaks critical race theory into the curriculum in insidious ways. It teaches children about “classifying by discriminant,” and its author appears to be obsessed with the far-left concept of addressing inequality: “solving linear inequalities” (p. 40), “how to solve a polynomial inequality” (p. 184), “solving a system of inequalities” (p. 512). The book blatantly and repeatedly commands students to “solve the inequality” even though they did not cause it and are not responsible for it.
Now, I think he really missed not using the integration / differentiation jibe. But he does provide us with a great many more examples.
Now, in case you are all thinking that his and my jests on what prompted the FL-GOP to perform a book banning by exclusion are over the top, fear not, the non-parody version is decidedly less funny and more stupid — a two for one!
The article linked in the tweet lays out the different criteria (I use the term loosely, as do the book banners, fair is fair) cited as causes for rejecting the textbooks.
Amongst which are those that contain dangerous and divisive concepts.
Functions Modeling Change contains 10 mentions of "race" but all are related to running and biking. There is no discussion of racism and no math problems that deal with racial issues. There is also no discussion of emotions, teamwork, conflict resolution, or anything else associated with SEL. Instead, it is full of quadratic functions, trigonometry, and parametric equations. Another rejected precalculus book, Precalculus with Limits, has very similar content. So why were these textbooks rejected?
It is impossible to know for sure absent an explanation from the Florida Department of Education, but the initial press release delineated three categories of "prohibited" topics: CRT, SEL, and Common Core. DeSantis has made a priority of "eliminating" Common Core from the curriculum. Common Core is a set of national standards championed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (R) and many other Republicans. Since Common Core was also embraced by former President Obama (D), it has become a target for DeSantis.
So, what is a likely actual cause fitting the criterion?
Popular Information, however, has obtained 8 of the 26 math textbooks rejected by Florida for “prohibited topics,” including textbooks for elementary, middle, and high school students. We then scrutinized these textbooks for any mention of race, emotion, or related topics. What we found bears no resemblance to the alarming assertions of Florida officials.
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According to the Florida Department of Education, “the highest number of books rejected were for grade levels K-5, where an alarming 71 percent were not appropriately aligned with Florida standards or included prohibited topics and unsolicited strategies.” Popular Information obtained three of the K-5 books that were rejected for “prohibited topics.”
There was no discussion of race, racism, or anything that could be construed as related to CRT in any of the textbooks. While the vast majority of the textbooks focused on basic math skills, they also encouraged students to reflect on how they learn and work with their classmates. In general, the textbooks encouraged young students to be nice to each other and themselves.
