Florida’s education department has rejected 54 math textbooks from next year’s curriculum, citing alleged references to critical racial theory among a number of arguments for some of the rejections, officials said.
The department said in a news release Friday that some of the books were rejected for non-compliance with state content standards. [Best]but that 21% of books have been banned, “because they include banned topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRTs.”
An additional 11 books were not approved by department staff “because they do not meet the best standards and do not include prohibited topics or undesirable strategies, including CRT.”
Critical racial theory is an academic practice that examines the ways in which racism operates in US law and society.
The publication does not list the titles of the books or provide any excerpts to suggest the reasons why the books were removed. The announcement follows a series of hardline measures by Republicans in the state to change school teaching, while conservatives raise the issue of critical racial theory in the country’s ongoing wars for political culture.
In June last year, the Florida Board of Education decided to ban the teaching of critical racial theory in public schools. This included teaching the Pulitzer Prize-winning series The New York Times Project 1619, which reviews American history in the context of slavery and its aftermath.
In a statement, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis welcomed the education department’s announcement and accused some textbook publishers of “indoctrinating” children with “concepts such as racial essentialism, especially, oddly enough, for elementary school students.”
Florida Democrats criticized the message. State Democrat spokesman Carlos G Smith said on Twitter that DeSantis had “turned our classrooms into political battlefields and this is just the beginning”.
Some Republican-controlled states in the United States have adopted measures aimed at banning the teaching of critical racial theory, which is likely to be an important conservative topic for discussion in this year’s midterm elections.
Many of these bills and orders are vaguely worded, leading to fears of censorship in schools and colleges across the country.
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