By Todd Lassa
Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis (above), is trying to grab the title of chief culture warrior from his Mar-A-Lago neighbor.
It began with Florida’s Education Department announcing it has rejected 54 mathematics text books out of 132 submitted for use in the state’s K-12 public schools. According to the Education Department’s press release, 28 math books (21%) are rejected because they “incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including critical race theory (CRT).” Twelve more (9%) got the boot because they do not meet Florida’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (BEST), and the remaining 14 (11%) “do not properly align to BEST standards and (emphasis added) incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT.”
Few details have emerged about the state school board’s objections with the mathematics text books (though R.J. Caster offers some color on that in his column, on the right).
DeSantis did offer this criticism: “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. I’m grateful that (Education Commissioner Richard) Corcoran and his team at the Department have conducted such a thorough vetting of these textbooks to ensure they comply with the law.”
This would seem to be a good opportunity to remind readers what CRT is and is not: https://thehustings.news/critical-race-theory-facts-dont-matter.
We can be sure that CRT has not to this point been taught below the college level. If it has since seeped into, say, high school text books–and about math–we’d like to see those math problems.
Before anyone had much time to delve into a math textbook report, DeSantis extended the Florida legislature’s special session to give Republicans a chance to introduce Senate Bill 4-C, which the Florida House of Representatives then quickly passed and the governor promptly signed, removing The Walt Disney Company’s Reedy Creek Improvement District, giving it virtual governmental autonomy over roughly 25,000 acres in Central Florida and established by the state’s Republican governor in 1967. This allowed the company to build Disney World largely unfettered by state and local regulations. It runs its own water district and fire departments, for example.
Four other districts also were stripped of their special tax status and will revert to regular governmental control this July 1, and potentially increase property taxes for Orange and Osceola counties by 20%-25%.
Like Trump with his administration’s pro-tariff policies, DeSantis is defying the Republican Party’s antipathy for government controls. The source of this animus is DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education bill passed by the state legislature–better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which The Disney Company’s leadership has avowed to get revoked.
DeSantis’ proposal to strip Disney of its special status has prompted never-Trumper conservative Charlie Sykes to call him “Florida’s ‘Authoritarian Socialist’ governor” in The Bulwark.
All this leaves us with a couple of big questions; Does the current high level of animus between Republicans and Democrats have more to do with the GOP’s social conservatism than its traditional free market conservatism? And what could possibly be in those math books?