From mentions of racial prejudice to teaching kids to empathize with their classmates — this is what gets a math textbook banned in Florida.
Racial prejudice and emotional learning are just two of the many"prohibited topics" cited as"impermissible" by the Florida Department of Education , which has announced why it banned 41 percent of new math textbooks.for examples of the"problematic elements" that led the FLDOE to ban all those math textbooks, the department issued a list of examples that"presented no conflict" in being shared with the public.
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.
Another example provided by the FLDOE mentions the Implicit Association Test again, this time showing two graphs providing the results for racial prejudice by age and by political identification. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is seen in attendance during the UFC 273 event at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena on April 09, 2022 in Jacksonville, Florida. DeSantis said that math should not be"about feelings or ideologies.