Maths publishers under fire
Mathematics textbooks in Florida have caught the attention of a firebrand Governor. What's really behind Ron DeSantis's claims publishers are "indoctrinating" students?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is the kind of man who will cross a road to start a fight.
For example, in late March 2022, DeSantis signed into law the Parental Rights in Education – otherwise known as “Don’t Say Gay” – bill. It forbids teaching of sexual orientation or gender identity issues from KG to Grade 3, with a loosely worded caveat around teaching higher up in the curriculum being “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” that opens routes to parents suing schools.
Disney – a company with a less-than-perfect record on these things and Florida’s largest employer – was silent on the issue until employee pressure forced the entertainment behemoth’s hand. Shortly before DeSantis signed the bill into law, Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek picked up the phone to try to convince the Governor to change his mind.
Given the lack of impact, you might think that Chapek’s late-stage intervention fell on deaf ears, but DeSantis was listening alright. At a rally a few days later he denounced Disney as falling for “phony hysteria”. Then, in a move widely seen as retribution for Chapek’s intervention, DeSantis stripped Disney of its special tax status in Orlando.
And so we have the curious situation of a Republican – the party of small government, big business and free-market neoliberalism – rescinding a significant tax cut from his state’s biggest business.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise to us, then, that when Florida rejected 41% of Mathematics textbooks submitted for state approval DeSantis came out swinging. Under the frothy headline of a Florida Department of Education press release (“Florida rejects publishers’ attempts to indoctrinate students”), the Governor weighed in:
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.
So, what’s DeSantis’s beef with Common Core? Are elementary school textbooks full of race essentialism? Or is there something else going on here?
What is the offending content?
Florida’s Benchmark for Excellent Student Thinking (BEST) standards were published in February 2020 a year and a month after DeSantis came into office. The BEST standards set out the content to be covered in for courses commencing in the 2022-23 academic year. In June 2021, sensing that by specifying what needs to be in the curriculum it had missed a trick, the Florida Department of Education issued an addendum to publishers identifying two “unsolicited strategies” that must be excluded.
Come 2022 and announcing its rejection of 54 submissions, the Department highlighted three prohibited areas.
Firstly, there’s Critical Race Theory (CRT). A bogeyman for the conservative right, fear of CRT has been whipping up a fervour of book banning in school boards nationwide. (The latest absurd extension in this drama is a Republican Senator blaming CRT for the school shooting in Uvalde that left 19 children and 2 teachers dead, whilst arguing that increased firearm regulation isn’t the answer.)
The prominence DeSantis gives “indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism” might lead you to think this was the primary issue in the rejected books. But Fox 4 (yes, Fox, I know) tracked down the source of the examples provided by the Department of CRT in the maths books - a member of Moms for Liberty. Moms for Liberty, an organisation “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government”, has been prominent and active in the recent surge in book banning through school boards.
Secondly, there’s Common Core. In his first month in office, DeSantis issued an Executive Order to “put Florida on the path to eliminate Common Core”. The Common Core for Mathematics and English language Arts was introduced in 2010 to try to align the curriculum for two core subjects across the States.
Writing in 2012 about the Common Core, University Distinguished Professor William Schmidt (a co-author of the Common Core and co-developer of TIMSS) declared:
The new Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM) represent a major change in the way U.S. schools teach mathematics. Rather than a fragmented system in which content is “a mile wide and an inch deep,” the new common standards offer the kind of mathematics instruction we see in the top-achieving nations, where students learn to master a few topics each year before moving on to more advanced mathematics.
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On paper, the Common Core Math Standards could make a real difference in U.S. education, both because it has the potential to improve average scores, but also because as commonstandards students won't be learning totally different material just because they happen to live in different communities. […] The Common Core is a golden opportunity to do something about these inequalities, if it's properly implemented.
Common Core was conceived before Obama’s Democratic administration, but was implemented under his watch. DeSantis is a firebrand Republican who uses Executive Orders to overturn Obama-era policies. Who does he remind me of…?
Thirdly, there’s social emotional learning (SEL). SEL seeks “to improve pupils’ decision-making skills, interaction with others and their self-management of emotions, rather than focusing directly on the academic or cognitive elements of learning”. When embedded in textbooks, it tends to result some fairly anodyne aims and objectives.
I say anodyne because SEL doesn’t have the culture-wars appeal of CRT or the anti-technocratic allure of a protest against Common Core. Yet, SEL clearly gets DeSantis hot under the collar.
He set out his position when defending the number of books rejected: “It doesn't matter how you feel about the math problem. It matters whether you can solve the math problem.”
Does DeSantis have a point about SEL?
The UK’s Education Endowment Foundation suggests SEL has a positive impact on education outcomes for minimal cost, but based on weak evidence. It is also an intervention that targets an identified gap for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
SEL is cheap and equitable. It may or may not work, but what’s not to like? Well…
Criticism in the UK there has tended to focus on the way SEL puts teachers in the role of counsellor, for which they have often received no training, support, or additional pay.
Internationally, elements of SEL translate poorly across borders because of the assumed universal socioeconomic model underpinning its theory.
In fact, it has been criticized that much of the psychological research in top journals is conducted with a particular sample population yet draws conclusions as if a particular psychological process is a universal phenomenon. This criticism is widely known as a WEIRD problem, which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, suggesting that the field of psychology is strongly dominated by research with WEIRD samples. Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) reviewed work in various domains of psychology and compared the work on WEIRD samples with that on other populations, concluding that samples from WEIRD societies are not representative of all human beings. It is worthwhile to note, however, that some psychological processes, such as theory of mind, are found to be strikingly similar across populations (Henrich et al., 2010).
‘Cultural translation of SEL to Japanese educational contexts: Teachers’ perspectives on cultivating SEL competencies’ Hanako Suzuki and Mami Kanzaki, published in NISSEM Global Briefs Vol III
Meanwhile, Yong Zhao summarises some of the American arguments against SEL:
For all its success, the SEL movement has faced a wave of attacks over the last few years, and those attacks don’t seem to be letting up. Critics have derided SEL as, for example, a “nonacademic common core” (Gorman, 2016); “the latest big education fad” (Robbins, 2016); a terrifying experiment in social engineering (Eden, 2019), and an “Orwellian idea” (Effrem, 2017). Writing in Education Week, Chester Finn (2017) equated SEL to the “self-esteem” movement, calling it a hoax, with roots in “faux psychology.” In a recent white paper, the Pioneer Institute urged policy makers to block SEL-related programs, warning that they could lead to the psychological manipulation of students, threats to their data privacy, “indoctrination,” and an “erosion of freedom of conscience via government-established SEL norms for the attitudes, values, and beliefs of freeborn American citizens” (Effrem & Robbins, 2019, p. 32).
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In its white paper, the Pioneer Institute more directly challenges the NCSEAD’s reasoning about SEL’s freedom from ideology. First, the authors attack the claim that SEL is based on science by challenging SEL advocates’ research base. Second, they argue that SEL has not been driven by local communities but has, in fact, been pushed by elite progressive educators with help from the federal government. As they see it, the SEL movement has been closely linked to the Common Core State Standards, which were heavily promoted by the Obama administration: “SEL goes well beyond encouraging students to do their best and believe in themselves; instead, it constructs a government- and corporate-controlled edifice to measure, assess, and draw predictions from students’ most fundamental private and personal characteristics” (Effrem & Robbins, 2019, p. 7).
“Elite progressive educators” sounds a little QAnon-esque and so tempting to dismiss, but there’s some truth in this. There is a concerted effort to mainstream SEL around the world.
The OECD runs a Survey on Social and Emotional Skills, the results of which are intended to be used by policy makers to improve SEL. The survey’s philosophy “builds on the premise that a holistic approach – promoting both cognitive and non-cognitive development – is best suited to enable children to fulfil their potential.” Regular readers may remember the influence of the OECD in Japan’s new approach to teaching and learning and that the OECD’s influential policies may be increasing the size of books worldwide.
Meanwhile, Unesco’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) is advocating heavily for the embedding of SEL as critical to achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal 4.
The international education community may be acting with best intentions, but it’s triggering the spidey-sense of those predisposed to tin-foil hats.
What lies ahead?
The battle of Mathematics may be over, but the war on woke continues.
In the weeks following the rejection, publishers made edits and resubmitted. The Department’s website proudly declared “publishers are aligning their instructional materials to State standards and removing woke content allowing the Department to add 40 more books to the State adoption list over the past 35 days”.
When DeSantis complains that SEL is indoctrinating children, I suspect he’s thinking about some of the descriptions of competence outlined in the CASEL Framework, such as “identifying diverse social norms, including unjust ones”. The Department issued new guidance to publishers planning to submit Social Studies textbooks.
Critical Race Theory, Social Justice, Culturally Responsive Teaching, Social and Emotional Learning, and any other unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination are prohibited.
Social Studies submissions are due by 10 June, so expect another round of bombast and outrage over the summer when these latest textbooks transpire to be full of leftist propaganda.
But before this all kicks off again, perhaps we should ask ourselves what DeSantis has to gain from his combative approach to publishers?
Culture wars play well to the Republican base and can be fought with a fraction of the cost of actual policy. Hitching his wagon to an anti-establishment cause - because if there’s one thing a true-red libertarian distrusts more than the government, it’s shady elites - that’s gaining grass-roots traction could turn DeSantis into a figurehead.
And there’s the small matter of the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential campaign. There’s a tendency to talk about Trump ‘24 as an inevitability, but after the candidate he endorsed for the Nebraska primaries was beaten his hold over the Republican party may be slipping. As of 27 May, Trump still leads the PredictIt betting odds for nomination, but it’s a two-horse race.
The rival closing in on Trump’s lead? Ron DeSantis.