Just the facts ma’am
The NY Times tries to figure out what’s so wrong with some math textbooks that Florida officialdom didn’t want:
After the Florida Department of Education rejected dozens of math textbooks last week, the big question was, Why?
The department said some of the books “contained prohibited topics” from social-emotional learning or critical race theory — but it has released only four specific textbook pages showing content to which it objects.
That’s a bizarre pairing – social-emotional learning or critical race theory. Really? Both of those? Were they in combination? If so, how? Color me skeptical.
The Times looked at some publishers’ samples to try to get a sense of the reasons, while saying that it’s necessarily guesswork because Florida is being secretive.
In most of the books, there was little that touched on race, never mind an academic framework like critical race theory.
Imagine my surprise. I guess the state officials just threw the race thing in there to…well, to invoke racism in aid of a different objection altogether. That’s nice.
But many of the textbooks included social-emotional learning content, a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mind-sets that can support academic success.
Well we can’t have that. If they don’t already have the mind-set when they get to school then they can just drown, so there.
The bugbear appears to be something called “social-emotional learning.” Ed schools can be squishy, I’ve gathered from various sources, but that doesn’t mean school children should be treated like information-intake devices.
But right-wing activists like Chris Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, have sought to tie social-emotional learning to the broader debate over the teaching of race, gender and sexuality in classrooms.
That’s a broader debate all right, or to put it another way, it’s a completely different debate.
In a March interview conducted over email, Mr. Rufo stated that while social-emotional learning sounds “positive and uncontroversial” in theory, “in practice, SEL serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism.”
Really? In practice, that sounds as if he’s bullshitting.
“The intention of SEL,” he continued, “is to soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of ‘repression,’ ‘whiteness,’ or ‘internalized racism,’ and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left-wing ideology.”
That’s even less convincing. What “normative behavior”?
Mr. Rufo also raised concerns that social-emotional learning requires teachers “to serve as psychologists, which they are not equipped to do.”
Wait. We’re talking about schoolchildren here, not adults, not even young adults. You can expect college students to know how to be students, but with children it’s just not that simple. Schoolteachers can’t be just information-output devices any more than their students can be intake devices. Teachers need to have some sense of how to get kids interested, how to keep them from getting discouraged, how to prevent them from tormenting each other, and so on. My wild guess is that they do need to know something about child psychology.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has spoken more generally about social-emotional learning as a distraction, in his view, from math itself. “Math is about getting the right answer,” he said at a Monday news conference, adding, “It’s not about how you feel about the problem.”
Yes, but, if learning math is making a kid or several or many kids feel like shit then maybe it would be a good idea to fix that.
The new law in Florida appears strongly related to a similar move in Virginia, and both appear to be a sneaky way to single-source the textbooks from a Texas company, Accelerate Learning. That company was acquired by Carlyle Group a few years ago, and the Carlyle CEO was Glenn Youngkin. He resigned to run successfully for governor of Virginia, and one of his first acts was to order “objectionable” textbooks removed. Guess which one company is deemed acceptable.
https://bluevirginia.us/2022/04/the-one-math-textbook-company-deemed-acceptable-in-ron-desantis-florida-accelerate-learning-was-acquired-by-youngkins-carlyle-group-in-2018
Wo!!
Well, no, not just that. It’s about how you get the answer you get. In high school math (and science), it was drilled into us to “show your work,” so our teachers could see the processes we were using. A bald answer, however correct, can’t reveal the chain of reasoning and logic. You could get partial marks for getting most of the way to the end, even if you fell at the final hurdle, so long as you were clear about how you got there. If you announce a conclusion without argument and justification, then it’s possible you might have reached it without argument and justification. I think Republicans are afraid of critical thinking in general, because it makes people less inclined to accept bullshit. The events of January 6, 2021 are partly a consequence of the actions of people all too willing to accept (and spread) bullshit.
Kevin Drum posted about one of the Florida examples. It is an exercise in understanding a graph, and the graph shows racial prejudice correlated with political affiliation. He thinks that it’s reasonable to question having such a graph in a math text book; why not show smog levels or something? I see his point, but disagree. If the textbook were chock full of examples that show Republicans in a bad light, that would be a problem, but I doubt it is. One graph isn’t an issue. Political graphs and graphs dealing with surveys are common and should provide a good source of content for math classes. Kids are going to come across graphs that show information that may be uncomfortable to contemplate, may as well give them an example or two in math class.
But I suspect the fussing about the content is a smokescreen, anyway, as noted earlier.
I’m guessing that Republicans are not as worried that this correlation is true as they are about it becoming more widely known. After all, everyone knows that pointing out racism is so much worse than racism itself.
That’s one way to phrase it, sure. I’d probably say that they don’t want any information presented that shows Republicans in a bad light. It’s hard enough in their eyes when such information is presented in history classes or government classes, but in a random graph exercise in math class, that’s getting out of hand. I can partially see the point, if there were a ton of examples of a political nature, but the mere existence of a political graph is not sufficient. I can easily see a good set of questions coming out of this exercise regarding how political surveys are done.
Also, kids need to learn that graphs present results of some kind, they don’t dictate what’s true. If it were a graph showing boys are better at X, or white people are better at Y, then those are results, and the exercise is to understand what the claims are, not to accept those claims as true just because it’s sitting here in an example in a math text. They are going to encounter a lot of results they don’t agree with, and the first step is to understand what those results are actually saying, not to discard them out of hand because they seem insulting.
@Sackbut #4:
There’s an element of “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”. If it became established that picking examples to suit left-wing politics were acceptable, then before long most of the examples will suit left-wing politics.
Yes, teaching maths with real-world examples is good, but there should be a clear distinction between teaching maths and promoting political views.
As the page you link to suggests, how about if the examples chosen were rates of violent crime broken down by race, or mean SAT scores of people admitted to Harvard, broken down by race? I bet you’d instantly have a whole different set of people objecting.
The example given is about the “implicit association test”. There’s a whole literature these days discussing whether IAT results are at all meaningful in the real world (the answer is likely “not very much”). It’s really not a good example to pick for a politically neutral lesson in mathematics.
There’s a time and place for discussing politics, and a time and place for not being political. Maths lessons are the latter.
(By the way, I also object to the use of this sort of graph where the y-axis doesn’t go to zero! If gives a false visual impression.)
By the way, re the example quoted in #4, the graph showing racial prejudice (from an implicit association test) correlated with political affiliation, I’ve tried Googling to find the source of the data or something similar (would I trust them on that? No I wouldn’t).
I didn’t find the data. I did find (Pew Research 2015 work; link):
“When party identification was added to the analysis, it proved not to be statistically significant: Democrats and Republicans were found to have roughly similar levels of racial bias in both versions of the IAT, all other factors held constant.”
I also found (Calvert et al, 2022, Behav Sci (Basel). 2022 Jan; 12(1): 17; “Race, Gender, and the U.S. Presidency: A Comparison of Implicit and Explicit Biases in the Electorate”):
“Overall, our findings build upon the conclusions of Friese et al. [9] by presenting evidence, for both race and gender, and with respect to three different measures of political preference—ideology, party identity, and voting—that implicit measures are not statistically significant, or are, at most, very weak predictors.”