The Florida Department of Education announced its new list of approved public school Math Curriculum books Friday that, for numerous reasons, does not include 41 percent of proposed texts.
Some of those reasons pertained to inclusion of political subject matter or ideologies that the FLA-DOE deemed incompatible with standards adopted by Governor Ron DeSantis – and this has numerous leftists, and at least one mainstream “news” publisher, up in arms.
Though in their URL, the editors at MSN labelled it “news,” and its original source, The Washington Post (WaPo) engaged in the same dusty technique of pushing propaganda under the guise of an “Answer Sheet – Analysis,” the Saturday WaPo story on this is so one-sided and so cognitively shallow as to make one wonder if the paper is employing petulant children as “reporters.”
It took two assumptive adults -- Valerie Strauss, and Lindsay Bever – to open with:
In its latest attempt to be the nation’s leader in restricting what happens in public school classrooms, Florida said it has rejected a pile of math textbooks submitted by publishers in part because they ‘contained prohibited subjects,’ including critical race theory.
Because that’s not burdened by the ball-and-chain of rancorous assertion. And it’s certainly not an example of the typical myopia that many people display when arguing about public schools.
It’s “analysis,” the WaPo claims. And it’s something to which we will return, in a moment.
Strauss and Bever tell readers that outgoing Commissioner of Education, Richard Corcoran, rejected this 41 percent of proposed Mathematics material, and that he offered the news Friday in a public announcement. Then, they add:
Some were said not to be aligned with Florida’s content standards, called the Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, or BEST. But others, the department said, were rejected for the subject matter. ‘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,’ it said in an announcement on the department’s website.
Then, they offer what appears to be a valid point…
Although the department described the textbook review process as ‘transparent,’ it did not mention which textbooks had been rejected or cite examples from the offending passages.
But, of course, their implied sense of unfairness and hypocrisy in the government move misses the larger point – which, again, we will discuss in a moment.
Quoting Governor DeSantis (R) evidently to set up an attempt to undercut the strength of his argument, the authors offer:
’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,’ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was quoted as saying in the announcement.
And then, they proceed to undercut their own argument, and talk down to the reader:
Critical race theory is an academic concept centered around the idea that racism is not simply individual prejudice but it is systemic, woven into our legal systems. One example of this is when government officials in the 1930s deemed certain areas — often inhabited by Black people — as bad financial investments, making it hard for them to get mortgage loans and buy their own homes, according to Education Week.
But, let’s assume that the blame for banks not lending to “black people” (many leftists have started capitalizing the “B”) in the 1930s was systemic government racism and not the fact that the people attempting to get loans might not have qualified to meet the mortgage requirements. Anyone familiar with the 2008 economic crash likely knows that, for years, numerous race-pandering US administrations pushed banks to do the opposite – to target racial groups FOR mortgages specifically for the sake of their faux “racial justice” narrative. I wrote about that for MRCTV last year, in August, and in even more detail on April 5, just two weeks ago.
No mention of that from the WaPo. Instead, one gets oxymoronic statements like this regarding the CRT pedagogy:
Although critical race theory is not being directly taught in K-12 schools — only used as a foundation for lessons — the move has been highly controversial…
“Not being directly taught…”
If something is a foundation for lessons, it is a part of the lessons. In fact, the authors acknowledge it as fundamental to the lessons. One cannot say that a pedagogy based on a theory does not push it on students – that’s just foolishly contradictory, like a restaurant saying, “Veganism is the foundation for our dishes, but we actually serve meat.”
And, as if that inconsistency weren’t enough, the authors soon repeat their impossibly two-faced claim. Having already stated that CRT is a foundation for lessons, they soon write:
Conservatives have accused K-12 public schools of using it — even though they don’t.
Oh, man.
One could go on… But, even if the WaPo auteurs had not contradicted themselves, the multiple whistleblowers, parental confrontations over CRT in curricula, and even teachers caught on video conference calls trying to figure out ways to CONTINUE teaching CRT, stand as towering refutations to their childish nonsense.
And the big lesson is that the very concept of “Critical Race Theory” itself exposes these WaPo writers' inconsistency about exploitation and systemic injustice.
They note:
Critical race theory is an academic framework taught largely in law schools that sets a framework for examining systemic racism.
According to the theory, this is racism that weaved its way into government to stop banks giving loans to minorities generations ago, and saw other policies harm and exploit individuals for the sake of the “establishment,” bringing generational displacement that has to be "fixed" by government engaging in new forms of preferential policies, harming new generations of innocents from other “minority groups.” Thus, taxpaying supporters of CRT claim that arguing against CRT curricula is unfair to them as taxpayers and unfair to minorities.
Other taxpayers see recent decades filled with race-based quotas and preferential policies and think that the racial division is best kept out of tax-funded schools.
In both cases, both sides claim to be victims of systemic violence.
And they are.
CRT supporters might not admit it, but they will make victims of others by forcing them to pay for CRT to be taught, and its opponents might not admit that they, too, are making victims out of others. Because both support tax-funded education.
The very “systemic” attacks the CRT crowd despise will not stop unless they challenge the system of public education they try to make others fund.
It’s a moral issue about legalized theft used to create school agendas, and all the multi-pronged dissent about how the filthy lucre is used -- about those school agendas -- misses the root of the problem.
Math is about getting the right answer, not about feelings or ideologies.
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) April 18, 2022
In Florida, we will be educating our children, not indoctrinating them. pic.twitter.com/BmhBXEljYM
Related: Teacher Brags On Video About Skirting State Prohibition Against Teaching CRT | MRCTV